Engineering

In art, an unfinished work remains unfinished. In design, an unfinished work opens up possibilities for the user.

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.

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.

The Pareto Principle is a great tool for project teams when they’re trying to decide where to focus their energy and efforts.

Convincing discerning consumers to buy a home robot isn't easy. To earn a spot in our homes and our lives, “home bots” (and those designing them) must answer four important questions.

The acceleration of tech, and especially the mobile revolution, has deeply affected both the consumer and medical device industries.

Design efforts to maximize battery run time typically focus on minimizing standby power, but an equal emphasis should be placed on designing for peak power.

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.

These four steps for repeatable technical innovation have proven trustworthy for us on project after project.

Creating product requirements can seem like a straightforward task, but it has plenty of potential pitfalls.

As product engineers, we use FEA simulations to develop, test, and refine designs. These best practices allow us to move quickly while keeping simulation results accurate, honest, and affordable.

Good product design considers how a product will be used, in what setting, and what the regulations affecting such usage might be.

More often than not, designing your cool new product relies on some new widget. You’re not sure if you should design your own or buy one from a supplier. What if there was a straightforward way to decide?

Often, users don’t know why they made a mistake, so the art of Root Cause Probing is digging deeper to uncover what went wrong. To do this, human factors researchers have some tried-and-true methods.

Successfully troubleshooting these problems prior to product launch is in everybody’s best interest, and can be the most rewarding part of a project for an engineer.

Have you ever tried to pull open a door, only to look down and see a sign that says “push”?

With the transformative potential of new AI tools like ChatGPT on everyone’s mind, it’s easy to forget that artificial intelligence has been used in product design and engineering for many years.

The “fuzzy front end” of product development can pose some unique challenges for engineers.

The Delve team explores AI’s place in our product development process.

Authentication is not appropriate for every product, but there are many applications where it's necessary for the manufacturer, end user, or both. Authenticating your consumables need not break the bank.

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.

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.

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.

Next-generation medical devices with hardware/software interactions need a new, holistic development methodology.

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.

Here are nine examples across different sectors of how data science and machine learning can help unlock the power of your data.

Advances in data science and machine learning are transforming healthcare and public safety. Countless lives will benefit. Here are five inspiring examples.

Home self-testing kits have played a crucial role in managing the spread of COVID-19 in the US, but a steep environmental price is hidden in the societal benefit.

Learn about the 5 important factors to consider when deciding between an off-the-shelf or custom embedded display for your digital interface.

We asked our staff to nominate the biggest innovations of the past 12 months that will have an influence on product design.

Having trouble deciphering the FDA waterfall diagram process for medical device design and development? You’re not the only one.

A primer on what, how and when the discipline of human factors is used in the design and development of products.

IoT data collection impacts data deployment, sensor selection, security, and more. It's at the core of every smart product's user experience — and success.

Learn design techniques to maximize device reliability for common sterilization processes — autoclave, ethylene oxide, and ionizing radiation.

The vehicle expo area of CES has been one of the most exciting parts of the trade show in recent years.

At CES in 2019, Verizon Chairman and CEO Hans Vestberg gave the opening keynote address about the upcoming advantages of 5G.

If your home is your castle, during the pandemic it’s also your office, classroom, coffee shop/restaurant/bar, gym, entertainment venue, spa, and, yeah, that place where you sleep.

The list of industries experiencing huge disruption fueled by “technology” is growing by the day.

Designers and engineers share responsibility for design for manufacturing (DFM), or designing products for optimized manufacturing ease and cost.

Badger Shield gave me the opportunity to collaborate with an amazing group of men and women this year – designers, suppliers, manufacturers, and customers. I expect to have built lifelong collaborators and friends through this trial by virus. (For background, read the article in Wired).

Download the hood design and supporting documentation The Badger Shield team has not rested since Lennon Rodgers, Director of the Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, requested help to make face shields for the UW Health System in mid-March. You can read about our effort here.

Days after receiving their first shipment of Badger Shields from Midwest Prototyping, the University of Wisconsin Hospital sent Lennon Rodgers of the UW-Madison Makerspace a list of their top 10 most critical needs to build up a supply of protective equipment ahead of the anticipated mid-April peak of COVID-19 cases in Dane County. Near the top of this list were Powered Air Purifying Respirators (PAPR) blowers and hoods.

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.

All right, who do I blame for this?

The Consumer Electronics Show always starts the new year off with a bang. It packs roughly 170,000 extra people from around the world into Las Vegas for a seizure-inducing week of stimulation.

Advanced Design is a nonprofit design organization founded in 2016. This group began as a small design sketching workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago for a handful of students who wanted to further develop their foundational skill set. These students, eager to bring the contagious energy of their workshops to the larger design community, wanted more.

Teach yourself to become a multilingual digital-physical product design practitioner using five simple strategies.

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.

We roamed the massive Las Vegas Convention Center the first day of the Consumer Electronics Show, better known as CES. Here are some additional fun things we saw.

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.

As 2019 winds to a close it’s time to make my annual appraisal of some of the more noteworthy products and events shaping world of design and Innovation. And the last year certainly saw its fair share of significant steps and missteps. So, let’s wade in with a few things I’ll remember that helped define 2019 for me.

Robots unleashed; the emergence of hearables; sustainable plastics and processes — we weigh in the biggest innovations of 2019 to influence product design.

A list of emerging, innovative technology being developed to reduce carbon, geoengineer the environment, and improve battery efficiency and cooling tech.

How does the new EU Medical Device Regulation relate to human factors and usability? It depends if your medical product is existing or new.

Have you ever considered what happens to the materials you put into the recycling bin after they are picked up from your curb?

VR is an extremely powerful storytelling tool and powerful stories are fueled by giving people a sense empathy. More empathy is better for everyone.

We weren't setting out to invent something radically different, but we wanted to prove to ourselves that we could make our own split-flap display.

The term design review can have a lot of different meanings depending on the context in which it is used.

With the growing demand for rugged design across sectors, product developers need help figuring out when to accommodate military specifications.

Here’s my list of “a few-of-the-mostly-best innovations from the last year or so.”

What happens when all the engineers from Delve's three offices gather in Madison? We buy stuff and tear it apart to understand how it is made. Our product of choice? The robotic vacuum.

Last night, I attended a pretty cool panel discussion at Stanford’s D-School on “Designing Machine Learning.”

What’s a bigger number, the total number of atoms in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s body or the total number of microprocessor clock cycles since the dawn of time?

I am fortunate to be working with a great client in the medical equipment industry within a very meaningful product category.

E-bikes, solutions for ocean-borne plastic, real-life Babel fish, 3-D printing metal, robot overlords, and more — we weigh in on 2018's biggest innovations.

Environment, ruggedization, location resolution, and update rate are the framing questions that lead to the right geolocation technology for an IoT device.

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.

As far as I can remember cycling has always been a part of my life in some form or another.

Though we work in the service industry for larger corporations on a day-to-day basis, some of my favorite opportunities come in the form of community work.

So I promised our marketing department I’d do a blog on our recent adoption of a telemedicine benefit for our employees.

“Wait. Is that it? Did the needle already go in? I can’t believe it!”

Engineering in the fun takes a willingness to say "yes" to a user-centered vision and mastering the mechanics.

Demand is growing for waterproof, rugged consumer and commercial electronic devices. Ingress Protection (IP), NEMA, and MIL-SPEC are the three main rating systems that indicate a product's level of sealing.

The only intellectual property Design Concepts “owns” are the brains of our team while they are working on sticky problems for our clients.

The world is changing ... are your design teams changing with the physical/digital times?

In the immediate aftermath of any newsworthy accident, we often hear the words "human error" or "user error".

The increasing sophistication, diversity, and affordability of sensor technology for autonomous cars has rippled into the sports world. Did we see the results in PyeongChang?

Increasingly, physical products leverage software to enable interesting features and deliver compelling differentiation.

Who needs eating utensils when you have perfectly working hands to rip and tear at the food on your plate and stuff it into your mouth?

Quality Management Systems (QMS) are used in businesses big and small to help insure that business processes are focused on meeting customer requirements and enhancing client satisfaction.

The end of a culturally and socially tumultuous 2017 and this year’s Consumer Electronics Show provides a great reason to take stock of the previous year in the world of design.

The PCA (perception, cognition, action) method recommended by the FDA helps researchers assess and understand why a use error has occurred.

What does it take to run a restaurant?

Now more than ever, society is hungry for simplicity and human connection.

One of the main focuses of the Health 2.0 conference in Santa Clara, CA this year was on data.

When I read the headline that the FDA announced a voluntary recall of 465,000 pacemakers over safety concerns related to security vulnerabilities and the possibility of a device being hacked my first thought was, “I wonder if my Dad's pacemaker is part of this recall?”

Putting the freeze on cream and sugar is what it’s all about at Dippin’ Dots.

Rapid invention and evolution in the state-of-the-art have made it difficult to stay versed in the ever-growing variety of components, devices, and technologies that could be used in the design of a product.

In a world where we can go from a CAD model to a 3D printed part well within a typical working day, it’s easy to get excited about just how fast one can iterate and explore design alternatives.

At Design Concepts, we have a pretty great mission statement: “We design cool stuff to drive business success and make life better.”

Listening to, observing, and truly empathizing with healthcare professionals is necessary to deliver new solutions that are user-responsive and empowering.

Sure you can make your product "smart." But have you really assessed the desirability of doing so for your users?

Making the complex simple, or ‘simplexity,’ requires diligence in both iteration (build, test, learn) and designing the system and the details equally well.

Engineering details, manufacturing processes, and material choices can all be used to inspire your own designs and decisions.

I’m a fan of frameworks or techniques that help people understand our complex environment and reduce risk.

Product design is an iterative process. Models are a critical part of that process.

Even the most simple items we use every day require an amazing amount of effort to produce. Take, for example, the humble toothbrush.

When you have to make a bunch of something or something where failure isn’t an option (a parachute, for instance), you better make sure that you’re making the right thing and that you’re sure it will work.

I was given a personal example of the power of a multidisciplinary approach to innovation a few weekends back when I found myself coincidentally working on very similar parts of cars built in two very different eras.

I recently attended the first Big Data Wisconsin conference, which was part of Madison’s larger Forward Festival.

Delve, formerly Design Concepts, has been named a winner in the 36th annual International Design Excellence Awards® (IDEA®) conducted by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA).

Recently, I was asked by the University of Wisconsin to share my thoughts on the future of engineering education as the keynote speaker at their 2016 Engineering Innovation Showcase.

Last weekend, we gathered as a multidisciplinary team and headed to Chicago to attend the second annual Service Experience Jam.

If you’re developing a product, you’ve probably come across the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach.

Smart startups spend on prototypes. Different levels offer different benefits along the process journey — here are six of the most important to make.

We recently met with the adaptive sports experts at No Limits Kids Fitness to choose one of several design approaches for our hand cycle.

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.

In late 2014, Delve worked with No Limits Kids Fitness to launch an Indiegogo campaign to help us build a prototype of an adjustable hand cycle that grows with kids with physical disabilities.

We did a thought experiment and traveled 50 years into the future to glimpse the future of healthcare and of the patient's user experience.

Design Concepts recently won a Gold Spark Product Award for our industrial design of the Fitlinxx Ampstrip.

The Solid Conference – Hardware, Software & the Internet of Things (solidcon.com), recently held in San Francisco, is touted as a revolutionary conference that goes beyond the Internet of Things.

I recently attended the O’Reilly Solid Conference in San Francisco, a fascinating few days examining hardware, software and the Internet of Things (IoT).

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?

I’ve spent the week breaking in a spiffy new Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone. Meh. It’s … fine.

I’ve played squash since I was a teenager.

A camera phone walks into a bar. The bartender says, “What is this, a joke?”

Light emitting diode (LED) technology has developed quickly over the last decade. Once only the familiar red dot indicating power was “on,” LEDs can now replace traditional incandescent and fluorescent lighting as our primary source of illumination.

Want to experience connected Zen? Grab a Lyft, the ride sharing service fueled by digital transactions.

I knew that South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive has long been a tech magnet, but I felt that connection firsthand when I went to book my flight to Austin from San Francisco.

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.

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.

We recently heard from a valued client of ours and learned some great news. Using the BioReactor we helped design and manufacture, Dr. Richard Hopkins and his team at Children's Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, have been able to reach a major milestone in their development of a process for replacing heart valves in children.

How might Leonardo da Vinci operate as a UX designer in the year 2014? I sent him a time machine and asked him.