The design process is all about making design decisions. Whether the outcome is good or bad, the faster you can validate these decisions, the better your design becomes because you are iterating and learning. My new favorite tool to iterate is our laser cutting machine. I must admit that before joining StarFish, laser cutting was […]
Coming from a high volume and high precision electronics manufacturing background, I lived in a world where every design required a tolerance study. Entering the low volume world of biomedical entrepreneurship, I’ve been surprised by clients telling me that tolerance studies are too expensive and that they are happy to proceed without them. This led […]
I would like to take us all back to high school Biology for a moment to remember the concept of emergent properties. These properties only come out when individual parts start interacting with each other in any given system. Take common salt for example. The fact that it tastes salty does not mean that the sodium and chlorine which make up salt also taste salty. Saltiness […]
When I finished my third year of Industrial Design studies at Carleton University, I felt like I had a good grasp of the whole thing. I had finished a good number of design projects, worked out my own design process, and learned what worked for me and what didn’t. While it was still lots of […]
I once observed simulated combat first responder training for military medics. I asked the leader (who was a retired army colonel and physician) if their students were making what seemed like basic mistakes to me because they know it isn’t real and therefore aren’t performing at their best. He responded he had seen many times […]
Computer games and medical device design both begin conceptually in a somewhat similar space – a point where reality and science fiction meet. From there the directions they take are infinitely different but the processes are virtually identical. I recently spoke on a panel at our local Global Game Jam (the world’s largest game jam […]
Branding is storytelling – even in medical device branding. Every product has a story, and like most good stories it is a summary of not how it grew, but how it overcame failure. Good Industrial Design tells the story of both the company and the product as one.
I am a strong believer in optimizing medical device design. Innovation (the act of developing or introducing something new) and value (merit or utility) are best when paired hand in hand. If you generate value without innovation (ex. marginal improvement in glucose monitoring technologies), you are creating an incremental change that doesn’t address the root […]