Design

Advice for product innovation, design ,and development
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Non-Finito Prototyping: A New Technique for Digital-Physical Product Design
In art, an unfinished work remains unfinished. In design, an unfinished work opens up possibilities for the user.
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Using Digital-Physical Workflows to Master Integrated Product Design
For many years, digital products were designed separately from analog or physical devices, and the user experience was largely defined by screen size. That’s no longer the case.
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How Does ‘Hick’s Law’ Apply to Product Design?
Regardless of what you're designing, the options you present to users should be simple and straightforward.
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7 Principles for Designing Great Digital-Physical Products
Adding a sensor or touchscreen to just about any product has become cheap and straightforward. But it doesn't always make things better for the user.
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Ingenious Engineering: Ballpoint Pens
The ballpoint pen eliminated the need for messy fountain pens and all the problems that came with them. This breakthrough invention forever changed the way we write.
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3 UX Trends Reshaping Medical Product Design
The acceleration of tech, and especially the mobile revolution, has deeply affected both the consumer and medical device industries.
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How Design for Misuse Creates Safer Products
Design for misuse is less about modifying users' behavior and more about allowing a tool to continue to be functional, given the likelihood of certain behavior.
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Design Lessons from 4 Early Wearables That Didn’t Quite Hit the Mark
These early attempts at wearable technology were innovative but flawed—and paved the way for the more advanced devices we have today.
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7 Interaction Design Principles for IoT Product Designers
Interaction designers have spent decades figuring out the best way to build an interface from scratch. A lot of what we know translates well to smart products.
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Designing an IoT Medical Device? Four Factors To Consider
Good product design considers how a product will be used, in what setting, and what the regulations affecting such usage might be.
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How to Use High-Fidelity Prototyping for Soft Goods
You’ve vetted your MVP design through low and medium-fidelity prototypes. Now use high-fidelity prototypes to amplify your MVP into a truly compelling offering.
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What Taylor Swift Can Teach Product Designers About Experiential Brand Language
I just spent six months researching experiential brand language for a client. Here's what it is, how to create it, and examples of great EBLs from Apple, Airbnb, REI, and, as the title promises, Taylor Swift.
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How to Use Low- and Mid-Fidelity Prototyping for Soft Goods
It’s important to prototype and test soft materials at various stages in the product development process.
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How Will AI Impact Medical Devices?
Fresh from our webinar, AI & Medical Device Development, we'd like to share a few takeaways from the discussion.
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Touchscreens Become Tactile
Touchscreens are now tactile. This may have big implications for medical devices and vehicle infotainment systems, where safety and error-reduction are paramount.
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When to Use Soft Goods in Product Design
To develop the best version of your product, have you considered leveraging softer materials?
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Why Multidisciplinary Teams Design Better Products
A multidisciplinary team has the edge in creating innovative, well-rounded solutions that meet the needs of all stakeholders.
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19 Uses for AI in Product Development
The Delve team explores AI’s place in our product development process.
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7 Ways To Design Better Products for Women
How do you design better products for women? Our female researchers, designers and engineers compiled seven principles for individuals and companies to consider.
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How to Design a Medical Device as Safe as an MRI and as Intuitive as a Nest
Medical device manufacturers need to design for a new kind of user. This has big implications not just for the devices they design but also for how they do business.
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3 Surprising Findings from Our Latest MedTech Industry Survey
While reviewing the early data from our ongoing research on trends in the medical device industry, three unexpected findings caught our eye.
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How the Consumerization of Healthcare is Transforming Medical Device Design
Patients are becoming empowered consumers of healthcare. They bring to medical devices the high expectations formed from their experiences with highly intuitive consumer products—as well as greater risk.
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If You Could Redesign Anything, What Would It Be?
Not every product design is a home run. Here are 15 products we think could use some design help.
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A Better Way to Develop A Medical Device with Digital and Physical Elements (Part 2 of 2)
We’ve been experimenting with a new methodology for designing medical devices with hardware/software interactions. Here’s what a new, holistic development process might look like.
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A Better Way to Develop a Medical Device with Digital and Physical Elements (Part 1 of 2)
Next-generation medical devices with hardware/software interactions need a new, holistic development methodology.
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Biggest Innovations in 2022 That Influenced Product Design
A coffee pod system without a plastic pod. Headphones that read your mind. A touch-sensitive prosthetic hand. Check out the biggest innovations to influence product design in 2022.
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Design That Clicks: The Art and Science of Tactile Feedback
A click is a universally recognized cue that an action is complete. Seeing is believing, but feeling is knowing. Here's how to get the right sound and feel.
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3 Product Design Best Practices to Follow
How to create a successful product – whether you're designing a product that's physical, digital, or somewhere in between.
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15 Biggest Innovations of 2021 to Influence Product Design
We asked our staff to nominate the biggest innovations of the past 12 months that will have an influence on product design.
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2021's Top 10 Innovation and Product Design Posts
In 2021 you devoured blogs about looking at old problems in new ways, unlocking your professional potential, and creating products that change the world for the better.
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Four Steps To the “Right” Color in Product Design
We developed a color selection methodology that applies user-first design thinking to finding the right color in product design.
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Four Ways to Win the Future of MedTech Wearables
Soaring demand for wearables has created a market saturated with the things—prompting an 18.1 percent year-over-year growth worldwide, according to Gartner.
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How to design for positive, humanity-scale impact
A simple open-sourced design had a massive social impact—40 million face shields were produced for front-line workers fast and without expensive tooling investments.
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The Role of Human Factors in Product Design
A primer on what, how and when the discipline of human factors is used in the design and development of products.
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Ingenious Engineering: How Staples Are Made
It’s not easy keeping it together under pressure. Yet these little marvels do it every day tens of thousands of times over. Do you know how staples are made?
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Use ‘Jobs, Outcomes, and Constraints’ To Exploit the Pause Between Research and Ideation
The 'Jobs, Outcomes, and Constraints' method lets you move into ideation knowing that you're working from something more than a hunch.
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Design for Manufacturing: 7 Things Every Designer Should Know
Designers and engineers share responsibility for design for manufacturing (DFM), or designing products for optimized manufacturing ease and cost.
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Five tips for moderating remote usability studies
We've been doing remote research since before COVID-19, but the pandemic gave given us a great opportunity to hone our craft.
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Affordable PPE for the developing world
The Badger Shield has shown that a distributed supply chain can create massive quantities of effective and cost-effective personal protective equipment (PPE) in a short time. Can this model translate to the developing world if COVID-19 cases start to rise in African, SE Asian and Latin American urban centers?
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Face shield designs to fill the gap
We are all feeling a little helpless in the face of COVID-19. We are looking for ways to help. Face shield shortages are putting health workers at risk.
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How you can help design succeed
Over the years, there have been designers still young in their careers that have come to me looking for advice and ideas of what to do next. They’ve all told me their tales of woe about how design is just not respected or understood where they work. And this, of course, coincides with their (and design’s) struggle to find a solid footing within the organization.
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From Digital to Digital-Physical Product Design
Teach yourself to become a multilingual digital-physical product design practitioner using five simple strategies.
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CES 2020: Day two
Our team spent the second day of CES at Tech West, home base for health, wellness, home, wearable and fitness technology. It's also the hub for Eureka Park, where the scrappy startups vie for attention of venture capitalists and potential partners.
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CES 2020: Day one
We have a team roaming the massive Las Vegas Convention Center today at the Consumer Electronics Show, better known as CES. We'll be adding to this blog post throughout the day as we find cool stuff to share.
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Making something awesome
I’d like to take the time and opportunity to reflect on our experiences at the Madison Mini Maker Faire and talk about each of the wonderful projects our team at Delve has been able to put together to share with the public, while hopefully inspiring young minds to be open and grow.
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Cybertruck, schmeibertruck…
I, for one, am pretty excited that Elon Musk is bringing his 1980s sci-fi movie dreams to life.
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Will it recycle?
Have you ever considered what happens to the materials you put into the recycling bin after they are picked up from your curb?
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How Anthropomorphic Form Shapes Product Design
Humans are drawn to anthropomorphic form in product design. Here's how industrial and interaction designers can use this as a tool.
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7 tips for creating compelling presentations
At Delve, we think of the full Product Development Process. That means we support our clients not just through Strategy, Design and Engineering, but also the ‘intangibles’ along the way.
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How Does Product Design Enable the Circular Economy?
For the circular economy to work, we need system-wide innovation, and that will require rethinking and redefining our products and services.
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Goodbye Industrial, Hello Design
I’d prefer to never say words Industrial Designer again.
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Designing Military-Grade Products: The What, Why, and How
With the growing demand for rugged design across sectors, product developers need help figuring out when to accommodate military specifications.
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How to Use Mapping to Determine the Design of Your Controls
Good mapping makes products easier and more intuitive to use. Done well, it can create a powerful connection between a product and its users.
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Reducing Medical Device Risk with Usability Testing: The Why, the How, and the Who
Medical devices are commonly recalled due to usability issues that can be prevented with proper usability testing during the development lifecycle.
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What Does 'Hierarchy of Needs' Mean To Product Designers?
How can product designers apply Maslow's theory of human motivation to their work? A design won't succeed if it doesn't meet users' most basic needs.
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What’s a ‘Nudge’ in Product Design?
Nudge is a concept rooted in behavioral science that describes how minor changes in product design can markedly affect individual behavior.
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2018 Year in Review
The beginning of a new year is a great time for reflection – and what better to reflect on than the last year in design and innovation?
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What’s your story?
Talking about yourself can be difficult.
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VR: From “Dactyl” to practical
I had my first virtual reality (VR) experience at an arcade called Aladin’s Castle located in the Brookfield Square Mall in suburban Milwaukee in 1991.
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Intern Q&A: How to make PIE
Alec Hill, a biomedical engineering grad student from UW-Madison, and Alex Upadhyaya, an Industrial Designer from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, were half of the 2018 summer intern team at Delve.
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Is this on brand?
The San Francisco team has been enthusiastically involved in the design of our new space
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Four ways to work more collaboratively with interaction designers
Designing appliances increasingly involves and interaction design component. How do you integrate this skill into your development process effectively?
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The Why, How, and When of Co-Creation During the Product Development Process
Co-creation in the design world might take several forms, but most often it's in the form of a moderated co-workshop that brings together designers, users, and client stakeholders.
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The foreign language of sewing
One of the special skill sets I love being able to utilize at Design Concepts and for projects at home is sewing.
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Life cycle considerations in the age of software-enabled products
Increasingly, physical products leverage software to enable interesting features and deliver compelling differentiation.
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Human-centered design ... but even more human.
Now more than ever, society is hungry for simplicity and human connection.
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User Experience Research at LinkedIn
Julie Norvaisas, who is my sister (learn more about sisters in research in this blog), co-founder of Design Strategy and Research at Design Concepts, and now Director of User Experience Research (UER) at LinkedIn, joined us recently to share her perspective on how she approaches user experience research at LinkedIn.
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Industrial Design’s Past, Present, & Future: The Evolution of a Profession
Vice President of Design Mathieu Turpault reflects on major changes in industrial design in the last 25 years and predicts where it's headed.
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Poetry in motion
A huge part of a designer’s job is to translate abstract qualities into defining physical attributes and product feature sets.
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Is your company in control of its user experience?
I recently had an experience that left me thinking about the way in which technology and social media have eroded and blurred the boundaries surrounding our interactions with a company’s products and services.
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Just one touch and I knew ...
I have this distinct memory from my childhood: I’m lying on my stomach, propped up on my elbows, cozied up in yellow and orange-ish shag carpet. Dust floats lazily through a sunbeam that peeks through the heavy velour curtains. A clock ticks steadily but softly from the other side of the room. My right hand is rotating the large machined aluminum tuning knob on my grandfather’s hi-fi tuner – back and forth, back and forth.
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Understanding and using emerging aesthetic design trends
While there are many different types of trends you can and should reference throughout the new product design and development process including macro, consumer and industry, aesthetic design trends may be some of the harder nuts to crack.
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The Good Enough Design of the Nintendo Switch
The Nintendo Switch has a lot of great features, but the modular design leads to some clunky compromises. Ultimately, does it matter?
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How to give Design a seat at the Lean Startup table
My colleague Roshelle Ritzenthaler and I recently presented at South by Southwest on “How to Give Design a Seat at the Lean Startup Table.” There was a line around the corner for our talk, which tells me this is a topic on a lot of designers' minds.
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Your brand deserves a language
How do we know the difference between a designer handbag and a knockoff?
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Designing for healthcare part 2: Mapping the way to seamless integration
Mapping user experiences and systems can help you create more delightful healthcare experiences.
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How Design for Accessibility Drives Innovation for All
Accessible, also called assistive, designs that consider the needs of the disabled are often adopted more widely as others find new uses for them.
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#sideproject: United We Stand (Updated)
I thought 2016's divisiveness seems like a good reason to revisit my "United We Stand" state flags project, tweak some, and make them available to download.
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Service Experience Jam: Designing cool service sh*$!
Last weekend, we gathered as a multidisciplinary team and headed to Chicago to attend the second annual Service Experience Jam.
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The role of user experience in product design
User Experience (UX) design in its most encompassing definition involves all aspects of the end-user interaction with a company, its products and services.
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Favorite Things: Diptyque Philosykos Solid Perfume
As product designers, Design Concepts staff are always looking at the things that surround them with an eye for the exceptional.
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Design approach selected for adjustable hand cycle
We recently met with the adaptive sports experts at No Limits Kids Fitness to choose one of several design approaches for our hand cycle.
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Can Interaction Design Save the Internet of Things?
There was a lot of talk about the Internet of Things this year at SXSW Interactive 2015. And yes, there were a lot of cool Internet-things.
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Man and machine
The recent tragedies of workers killed at factories in Germany and India may seem like new phenomena to some because robotic arms were involved, but they’re not.
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Suck up ... tear down
A neighbor of mine left this stunning post-war (~1950) Electrolux XXX at their curb. I snatched it, immediately hoping to convert it to a table lamp. I was blown away by the industrial design and the workmanship.
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AmpStrip Design Wins Spark Award
Design Concepts recently won a Gold Spark Product Award for our industrial design of the Fitlinxx Ampstrip.
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Interaction design beyond the screen
Connected devices blur some of the boundaries between hardware and software.
Designing a Family Internet of Things (FIoT)
I recently attended the O’Reilly Solid Conference in San Francisco, a fascinating few days examining hardware, software and the Internet of Things (IoT).
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Designing Handheld Devices That Don’t Hurt
What's behind the lack of useful thumb-reach and hand-grip data for designers of handheld devices, and how can designers gather their own?
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When better isn’t good enough
I’ve spent the week breaking in a spiffy new Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone. Meh. It’s … fine.
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How to draw out a group's creativity
One of my favorite skills acquired while working at Delve is Graphic Recording and Facilitation.
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I’ve played squash since I was a teenager.
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The Internet of (Disconnected) Things
Want to experience connected Zen? Grab a Lyft, the ride sharing service fueled by digital transactions.
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Deconstructing fidelity
Fidelity is the degree of exactness to which a model reproduces the real thing.
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Innovation? It's on the bag
Hmmm… am I more hungry than unwilling to get cold?
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What does Spiderman have to do with user experience design?
I was recently at the Interaction15 conference put on by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in San Francisco with my colleagues Ken Soliva and Curt Irwin.
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Six things to consider as the Internet of Things intersects medical devices
We’re on the verge of a fascinating intersection—perhaps collision—as the world of Internet of Things (IoT) technology begins to deeply encroach into the world of medical device development.
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Wearables at CES 2015: Enough with the activity trackers!
CES 2015 (Consumer Electronics Show) wasn’t a year for big unveils and shifts in conversation. Everything was smart, everything had an app, and the Internet of Everything was still an overarching promise for the future.
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Game on: The best of the boards
What can I say; I’m a bit of nerd when it comes to board games.
Embracing the Old School
I love to BBQ! I’m not talking a Sunday afternoon burgers on the grill. I’m talking pork shoulder, ribs and brisket. The kind of food you have to cook low and slow for hours over smoke-infused fire.
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Details, details, details ...
Living in Wisconsin I find that I need to have a certain mindset to embrace the change of seasons and prepare for the inevitable cold and snow that will eventually blanket the Midwest. Typical annual rituals for me involve putting snow tires on the car, winterizing the lawn mower and digging the snow blower out of the shed.
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Experience design and healthcare: Wicked problem and inspiring challenge
Medical diagnostics is where the often unwieldy, slow-moving beast of healthcare collides with mind-blowing, quickly changing advances in technology. It is the behind-the-scenes intersection where healthcare workers interact with equipment, day in and day out, in hospitals, clinics, laboratories and universities. This is where fast and accurate results may mean the difference between someone getting the correct diagnosis and treatment in time and, well, not.
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Why Designers Are Not Artists
Making a difference and calling attention to important issues through design is more achievable once designers get over the fact that they're not artists.
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Working Toward Sustainable Medical Device Design
'Our healthcare system is unsustainable.' People who say this are usually speaking in terms of cost. But it’s also true in terms of medical device design.
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Leonardo da Vinci and UX: The Interview
How might Leonardo da Vinci operate as a UX designer in the year 2014? I sent him a time machine and asked him.
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How To Protect UI with Design Patents
User interface design patents are more important than ever. Here are tips for designers on how to make the UI patent process work for you.
Read our observations on product development and the latest industry trends in our product innovation blog.
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