Prototype Development

In the spring of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to work apart, Delve’s leadership launched an internal pitch competition.

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).

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.

Since we posted a blog post talking about how the Open Source Face Shield project had started to supply the University of Wisconsin hospitals with this critical personal protection equipment (PPE), our team has had little time to breathe.

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.

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.

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

One of the special skill sets I love being able to utilize at Design Concepts and for projects at home is sewing.

The construction dust is finally starting to settle.

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.

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

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.

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).

Late last year, our leadership team at Design Concepts announced the long-in-the-making decision to relocate our Madison workplace from our current suburban office park to the rapidly developing East Washington corridor of downtown Madison.

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.

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

Fidelity is the degree of exactness to which a model reproduces the real thing.

Here at Design Concepts, you’ll sometimes hear the term “co-creation” used on a project. Typically it’s used to refer to a kind of brainstorming activity we undertake with design research participants where we brainstorm together with them, our “users,” to co-create solutions for their needs.