Cristina Fletes-Boutte--The Tangents Interview

This summer, Cristina Fletes-Boutte brought her considerable talents in video production and photography to the service of Trig Innovation and its clients.  After completing her undergraduate degree in photography at Louisiana State University, Cristina moved to the Triangle area to take on a master’s degree in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

With successful stints at The Washington Post and NPR under her belt, Cristina arrived at Trig, eager to bring her perspectives from the worlds of art and journalism to what she sees as a collective of creatives searching for better solutions to express product attributes and brand connections.

We sat down with Cristina to capture her sense and sensibility for her work at Trig, and how her background, education, experience, and self-motivation inform her central role in the firm’s emerging service areas that shape products and markets for clients.

Tangents:  What drew you to photography/video production?

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  As a child, I loved poring through my father’s huge collection of National Geographic magazines—he had whole bookshelves full of them. I’d spend many rainy afternoons in Memphis pulling them all down onto the floor, making a huge mess, enthralled by all of the photographs from around the world.

While I loved photography from a very young age, I didn’t pick up a camera with any level of seriousness until my college days at LSU.  My parents gave me a point-and-shoot digital camera for Christmas, and I loved experimenting with all of the settings—black-and-white, different tones, and even video.

At the time, I was pursuing a major in English. That following semester, one of our assignments was the Depression-era documentary, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  Like many English majors, I struggled to keep up with all of the different written works we were assigned, however, I found myself especially frustrated with the wordiness of this particular book and instead flipped to the photo essays by Walker Evans embedded in the middle.  The first image I came across was of a woman with gaunt features and piercing eyes. There, in one instant, I immediately understood the immense poverty and suffering of the Great Depression. What the author had been trying to communicate with thousands upon thousands of words, Evans did in one image. That shook me to my core, and I knew immediately that I wanted to make photography my life’s work.

The switch from English to Photography may have required me to up the ante on my technical prowess, but my introspective nature was always a key asset. Photography is more of a mindset than an occupation or activity. It’s about possessing an innate curiosity about everything, yet having the ability to take a step back and observe situations and environments. Most of all, it’s about finding the beauty in everything.

One of my favorite subjects to photograph is my family. For one of my projects I asked several members of my family to sit in the yard on a plastic chair—the men would hold pictures of their fathers, while the women held pictures of their mothers. The resulting photos spoke volumes about how images are made up of so much more than lines and tones—they serve as placeholders for a particular time and place in our lives and often become priceless artifacts as our memories begin to betray us.

After finishing my degrees at LSU and UNC, I had the wonderful opportunities to work at the Post and NPR—exposing me to two vastly different, yet equally effective approaches to journalism.  The Post taught me that once you’re “in the field,” you won’t always have total control over your work.  A national newspaper like that is obviously deadline-driven to the hilt, so it challenged me to bring my best to the table with each assignment, within a really tight framework.

NPR, on the other hand, was very open-ended, with lots of creative freedom, working on longer-term projects.  There, I learned how to wisely steward high levels of artistic freedom.  It’s easy when you’re having fun, doing what you want to do, to take your eye off the ball. But the people there are so committed to bringing their best work and meeting their deadlines, never sacrificing the fun or the deliverables.

Tangents:  What attracted you to working at Trig?

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  From the time Ty Hagler approached me about working for Trig, I could appreciate this company and how it’s structured for success. I see it as a group of creative professionals who try to find different ways of presenting information on products, as well as connecting customers to brands.  What drew me in was the room for my growth, aligned with Trig’s growth and that of its customers, by establishing a service that’s a real void right now for many companies.

I had no preconceived notions about doing more commercial work—I entered this project with a completely open mind.  While I always want to push myself to become better with each and every client engagement, I always need to step back and make sure that our client is absolutely thrilled with what we deliver.  

Tangents:  What do you enjoy most about your work at Trig?

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  There’s no “prescribed formula” here, something I think is quite rare. It speaks to the trust that Ty has in each of us within our respective specialty areas. So in the area of camera work, I have a voice—a real say—and get to articulate my vision for the work first. This strikes me as very unusual—Ty is an open book. He tells me about the products and the person involved, and then cuts me loose to put together a vision for the photo or video work.

This is the foundation for what I love most about my work at Trig—the creative freedom I have to use my own vision and judgment to make decisions based on my abilities and my limitations.  I also love working as a team with the Trig team and our clients, plugging in with people in our group for animation, website, and social media projects.

Tangents:  What do you think is the Trig team’s greatest collective strength, now that you’re a part of it?

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  We take a product out of the dry realm of deliverables and shape it into something much more—real brand-building. Sometimes our work is tutorial in nature, such as instructional videos, and that’s fine—people have to know how they’ll actually use products. But what I really love is grabbing people emotionally on how they connect with the product on multiple levels.

I’m reminded of the recent Tide commercials during the Olympics, and the way they connected athletes and their mothers—the same women who washed years and years of sweaty, dirty laundry, who now had the privilege of watching their kids triumph at the Games.  I want to keep pushing boundaries for Trig and its clients in much the same way, garnering those really deep connections that people have with products they use every day. That’s been the real thrill I’ve found in commercial work. Ultimately, people are interested in other people and connecting with them.  There’s so much of this work for us to do and do well. 

Tangents:  Tell us something else, outside of work, which fuels your passion.

Cristina Fletes-Boutte:  I’m a runner and have been since joining the cross-country team in high school.  What I love about it, and I can’t help but relate this to my professional mentality, is that you don’t have to compete with others to succeed. You can simply go out and run, challenging yourself to do better each time.  I run almost every day, and I learn something about myself each time. 

Like work, some days are better than others, but there’s always a learning opportunity, an opportunity to improve.  While my professional schedule is fairly prohibitive to doing scheduled road races, I tend to do well when I do stop to measure myself against others.  It’s funny that you can achieve so much, whether it’s in running or in professional pursuits, by simply measuring against your own performance each time.  If you try to get a leg up on what you did yesterday, you can often exceed your own expectations. And in business, this mentality has meant that exceeding my own expectations makes a “wow factor” for a client that much more likely.

Back to School—Playing Out Effective Ideation at NC State

By Ty Hagler

Earlier this month, I had an opportunity to go back to school—no, not like Rodney Dangerfield in the 80s, but back at the invitation of one of my favorite professors, N.C. State’s Dr. Jon Bohlmann, as he brings a fresh perspective to the Creativity in Management course by anchoring it in the principles of Design Thinking.

Dr. Bohlmann, whom I consider one of the most engaging and influential teachers I’ve had, invited me to guide his masters-level students through real ideation sessions centered on both products and services.  Rather than simply talk about ideation, I wanted the class to practice it.  But first we needed to cover some core concepts.

Thus, for the first portion of the class, we covered insights from giants like Sir Isaac Newton, Malcolm Gladwell, and Tom Kelley.  In particular, we spent time to understand how Gladwell’s research into successful improvisation and the “Rule of Agreement” applies to the central tenets of design thinking as articulated by IDEO’s Kelley in The Ten Faces of Innovation.  It’s striking to me how the same principles that make for great improv actors, also make teams more creative.

We set up the context of ideation within innovation, to promote greater understanding and results from the coming ideation sessions. We used the Innovation Network’s definition of innovation—“teams of people, creating value through the implementation of new ideas”—as our launching point from that front.  And then we took our company’s definition of ideation—“the creative synthesis of a team’s collective insight into new ideas”—to leap headlong into ideation sessions around products and services.

For our ideation sessions, we built upon this foundation of positive, creative, collaborative thinking and discussed the difference between divergent and convergent thinking.  Divergent thought seeks ever more expansive opportunities, deferring judgment on each idea.  Convergent thought seeks to synthesize and analyze each idea to bring it to reality.  The trick is to delay convergent thinking until you are satisfied with the full exploration of divergent thinking.  We usually provide Nerf guns for defense against those who critique too early in the process!

We are constantly experimenting with new ideation techniques, and this class was a great opportunity to build on the good improvisation analogy with an exercise called Act-It-Out.  The activity was originally one of our Ideation Divergence Cards that had been rolled out earlier this year.  Act-It-Out was so effective at drawing out observational insights from our client ideation session as a mini-activity, that it made sense to create a full ideation exercise. 

The students were given a service challenge to act out in groups of four – with each student acting out a role from the service experience.  After identifying problems and prototyping a solution, the class came back together with an impressive, detailed understanding of the customer’s service experience and an equally impressive range of ideas for improvement.  In wrapping up the class, I wanted to know if the exercise had limitations, posing a theory that it would only work if the team members had direct experience with the problem area.  To the contrary, I was surprised when one of the students remarked that the Act-it-Out exercise was even better when some team members are experts in the problem areas and other team members have no experience at all.  That exchange of expressing expert assumptions and being challenged by novices perfectly captures the value of an ideation session to pull brilliant new ideas from teams of people to drive market success. 

SimpliciKey Continues to Earn Industry Recognition for Industrial Design

We are proud to announce that one of Trig Innovation’s signature clients, SimpliciKey®, has recently earned more recognition for outstanding industrial design in home products.

A remote control electronic wireless deadbolt, SimpliciKey is a former winner of the designSPARK Award in industrial design.  In 2012, SimpliciKey has earned finalist status in the 2012 RESI Awards, which honors the best industrial designs among products featuring at the CEDIA Expo, a trade show focused on technology innovations for the home.  The awards panel named SimpliciKey as a finalist in the Controller (Keypad) category.

Our goal at SimpliciKey is to make life a bit easier by providing attractive, convenient, safe devices for homeowners,” says Jason Pizzillo, President of SimpliciKey LLC. “We were honored and excited to be nominated for the RESI Award and to be named a finalist in our category.  Our collaborative work with Trig Innovation has been instrumental in SimpliciKey reaching its full design potential.”

The team at SimpliciKey collaborated with Trig Innovation on the industrial design for its breakthrough device for home security, a remote control electronic wireless deadbolt system with three different control points:  a keyfob (similar to keyfobs consumers already enjoy with automobiles), a keypad, and a traditional key.

Users can program up to eight different keyfobs with one SimpliciKey door lock, with each fob featuring 128-bit AES encryption and a range of up to 50 feet, allowing home entry with the touch of a button. A blue LED light indicates the door has been successfully locked or unlocked.  In late 2012, SimpliciKey will increase the indoor range of the keyfob for even greater convenience to users. 

The wireless, alphanumeric SimpliciKey keypad allows users to program up to 16 unique four- to six-digit entry codes, which users may change at their discretion. Backlit, the keypad has one-touch locking action and sliding cover that produces a sleek look without sacrificing safety—providing an aesthetic worthy of home use over more commercially-geared competitors in the remote door lock market.

For those users who still prefer to use a traditional key, SimpliciKey also provides two six-pin metal keys and an ANSI Grade II bump-resistant keyway. 

www.HomeDepot.com. 

I am so proud that we have had the opportunity to work with Jason and the team at SimpliciKey during the last few years,” stated Ty Hagler, Principal at Trig Innovation. “They are a great group of people who stay true to their mission of developing products that provide safe, convenient products for homeowners. It was a real privilege to collaborate with them on this product, which takes a concept previously limited to the commercial space, improves it dramatically with beautiful form and high function, and opens the world of remote door locks to consumers in North America.”

For more information on SimpliciKey and their award winning products, visit www.SimpliciKey.com.

Defining Innovation

By Ty Hagler

What is innovation? Perhaps just as importantly, what isn’t innovation?  As an innovation consultant, I’ve heard several limiting definitions, particularly in the product development space.  But for me, it’s a pretty expansive term.

First, we need to understand that innovation isn’t merely some starting point or some particular new thing—be it a product, service, or business model. I like to think that, since the innovation space is an ecosystem that involves lots of people and companies with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, the concept takes in all three of these areas—products, services, and business models—in its expression within the commercial universe.

Since none of us pursues innovation for its own sake, we must contextualize discussion of this concept within the confines of the marketplace. That’s a long way of saying that the ultimate benchmark of innovation is commercial success.  This criterion is what separates invention from innovation.  Yes, innovation has to be new, whether it’s something completely new or a revision of a former product, service, or business model.  But nobody cares about the “failed new,” rather, we celebrate those new things that bring success.

Some like to think of innovation as a specific event that occurs at the stage of identifying opportunities through talking with customers.  Within this narrow definition (and narrow is often good), the thinking is that innovation can only occur when a product or service concept emerges in response to the identification of problems faced by the end-user.  While this is certainly a valuable activity that enhances the process of innovation, it leaves me unsatisfied with what I see downstream from this stage of development.

In a previous Tangents post, we cited an academic research study, “Does Customer Interaction Enhance New Product Success,” that provides a statistical correlation between robust customer research and the market success of an innovation effort.  Customer research is important at multiple stages of developing a product, in addition to the opportunity identification stage.  While highly important to the innovation team’s success, it would be a mistake to think that customer research is the total scope of innovation.

Many people must perform great work to achieve commercial success for new products and services. These people include sales, marketing, engineering, design, executive leadership, manufacturing, and external vendors and partnerships.  When these teams convene for ideation sessions focused around discovery, refinement, and implementation stages, they accelerate the  process of innovation. Each team member brings his or her respective expertise to bear on the problems being faced and effective solutions can be proposed.  If innovation were easy, everyone would do it . . . effectively.    

You can see this in how companies need to restructure their sales and customer service teams to meet demands created by new products and services.  And you can also see that when companies get a taste for innovation that’s successful, it changes the entire culture of the organization.  While many organizations have only change as a constant, companies that embrace innovation and see success from it will see positive change as a constant, as opposed to change for reactionary reasons. There’s a big difference between defining the market and being behind the curve.

Perception Is Reality—A Lesson in Human Factors

By Rob Packard

Guest blogger Rob Packard is a quality and regulatory expert with over 20 years of experience in managing product development for the medical device, biotechnology, pharmaceutical industries.

In last week’s Tangents installment, “A Way Forward for Medical Device Innovation”, Trig Innovation’s Ty Hagler mentioned that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has acknowledged the need for greater emphasis on industrial design by adding a new requirement for medical devices regarding human factors. Industrial design covers a much broader spectrum of product design subjects, while human factors is an extension of industrial design that focuses on the human-machine interfaces to ensure proper function of the machine and human safety.

The FDA actually enacted the “new” requirement mentioned in Ty’s piece on July 18, 2000 (http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/GuidanceDocuments/ucm094460.htm); but it was never clear what was required for approval and the FDA did not apply this guidance document consistently. This fall (2012) the FDA is expected to release a final version of an updated guidance related to human factors engineering (http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/GuidanceDocuments/ucm259748.htm). These requirements are most important for “active devices” or medical devices that have a power source and/or software. These devices are prone to “use error”. In the past, companies would blame patient injury upon “user error” when a doctor would use a device incorrectly. However, this term has lost favor. The FDA prefers the term “use error”, because it is not always clear if the fault lies with the user or the company that designed the device.

Complaints are the primary tool the FDA utilizes to determine if there is a human factors issue with a product.  Medical Device Reports (MDRs) detail injuries and deaths to the FDA, but the agency also requires the results of an investigation of root cause. The FDA monitors trends of MDRs, and the causes, by product code. For each 3-letter product code, there is a Total Product Lifecycle (TPLC) report available on the FDA website (http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfTPLC/tplc.cfm). If a product code exhibits a trend of complaints related to “use errors”, the FDA will begin to require companies to include Human Factors as part of the Design Validation for 510(k) approvals.

One example of a requirement for Human Factors Validation is in this guidance document for infusion pumps can be found here. This document is a “Special Controls” document. It defines all the required verification and validation testing required for devices with well-established risks and user needs. For devices with a significant percentage of use errors, the FDA will add a requirement for Human Factors Validation. For infusion pumps, the “user” is typically the patient. Therefore, there are many product malfunctions and injuries resulting from a graphical user interface (GUI) that is difficult for some people to understand. For example, when I tell my daughter Gracie to “double-click” a mouse, she can do this with no difficulty. When I tell my 98 year-old grandmother to double-click a mouse, she doesn’t have the manual dexterity to click twice in the same place (I also have to remind her of what a “mouse” is). The FDA is aware of the gap in perception of “easy to use”—designers need to be aware of this gap too. It all depends upon the perspective of the user—not the designer.

The Medical Device Division of the FDA (CDRH) has a Human Factors Team. This team is part of the Office of Device Evaluations (ODE) that processes 510(k) submissions for medical devices. This team is also available to answer the question of whether a company’s approach to human factors assessment is appropriate. However, the FDA expects companies to conduct their own research and analysis of current medical device development practices. For Human Factors, this should begin with a thorough review of the draft Guidance Document and other recognized Standards, such as: AAMI/ANSI HE75:2009 (Human Factors Engineering – Design of Medical Devices), ISO 14971:2007 (Application of risk management to medical devices), and ISO/IEC 62336:2007 (Application of usability engineering to medical devices. Table A-1 of the guidance document also includes a seven-part outline for a human factors (HFE)/usability engineering (UE) report. This is the FDA’s preferred format for the output of a Human Factors Validation.

As a regulatory affairs expert, I hope I have bombarded you with all of the boring references that you’d expect; however, I also enjoy providing some practical advice for navigating the world of human factors in device design.  Before you even think about verification and validation, start by reviewing complaints that other companies have received (i.e. – the TPLC report for your three-letter product code). This report has a wealth of information that is readily available—if you can double-click a mouse.

Rob Packard is a regulatory and quality expert with 20 years of experience developing products and managing projects in the medical device, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical industries. His array of experience includes research, product development, operations management, manufacturing engineering, equipment design, regulatory affairs, quality assurance, and fund-raising.  To learn more about Rob and his work, please visit his blog and website.