Brisley Joins Trig Innovation Design Team

Trig Innovation, an innovation management firm based in Durham, North Carolina, announces the addition of Drew Brisley to its industrial design team.

Brisley is a 2012 graduate of North Carolina State University’s industrial design program, graduating with honors (summa cum laude).  During his time at NC State, Brisley earned a reputation for excellence in medical device design, culminating in an ongoing consulting engagement at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the area of device design for heart surgery.

In addition to his medical device consulting work, Brisley has built an impressive portfolio of work  in designing exhibit spaces for museums and trade shows, consumer behavior mapping, and creating social platforms for knowledge and skill transfer.  Brisley was as an ambassador for the industrial design program at State, and he also served as a volunteer with Triangle-area middle schools, introducing young students to the career path and options available in the field of industrial design.

In his new role at Trig Innovation, Brisley will work with lead designer Patrick Murphy and principal consultant Ty Hagler on a wide range of industrial design projects in industry sectors such as medical devices, hardware and tools, consumer electronics, and other products for the home.  Brisley and Murphy will provide critical design work in projects involving concept sketches, renderings, 3D CAD modeling, animation, and prototyping for new and improved products.

 “Drew Brisley is a great addition to a very talented team we’ve built here at Trig Innovation,” stated Hagler.  “As we continue to grow in 2013, it’s important that we not only expand our team, but also its creative perspective.  Drew’s immense capabilities and intellectual approach to design do just that, and like Patrick Murphy, he’s a true student of design that inspires the rest of the team on a daily basis.”

Murphy’s Hypotenuse: Thoughts on the Passing of Bill Moggridge

By Patrick Murphy

"If there is a simple, easy principle that binds everything I have done together, it is my interest in people and their relationship to things."—Bill Moggridge

Bill Moggridge passed away on this past September, leaving many of us in the global design community saddened at the loss of not only a great designer, but a great person. He also leaves us with his monumental legacy achieved on two continents, in multiple areas of design—doing it, teaching it, and serving as one of its principal champions over the course of four decades. His influence will live on for at least as many to come.

When we think of industrial design, we tend to think about objects. Objects are, after all, what we shape from our designs. As designers, we envision, sketch, sculpt, CAD, prototype, look at, discard, re-envision, make, drool over, and implement . . . objects. The design process can be so robust at times that it seems that there is little space for thinking about anything but the object. Thus, we often find ourselves, as designers, consumed by objects.

From the German Bauhaus school, whose curriculum and alumni are attributed with founding the modernist approach to product design, to Raymond Loewy, whose career and notoriety catapulted industrial design into the media spotlight, practically all industrial design in the last century has shared a somewhat common, object-centered goal: design something aesthetically pleasing and mechanically functional that can be produced in sufficient quantity to meet market demand. Industrial design’s ideal is thus expressed in an object as the harmony of form, function, and pragmatism. This ideal has been the foundation for thousands of successful products throughout the last century.

However, design must keep pace with and react to the rapid evolution of technology available that integrates with products. And no more rapid an evolution in history took place than the boom of computing—in the workplace, but especially in the home—during the last quarter-century. The computer’s presence in our everyday lives, both obvious and not, is absolutely immense. But unlike virtually all products that came before it, the computer required an entirely different kind of interaction with its users. The computer wasn’t used in a physical sense, it was used mentally—channeling, altering, and delivering information. Suddenly, computers demanded a new design paradigm, a real divergence from the “just make it fashionable and manufacturable” pragmatic mantra. Early computers were notoriously difficult to interact with, and Bill Moggridge, who was involved with the design of some of the earliest consumer computers, certainly took notice.

After graduating from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London in 1965, Moggridge set about a career that took design on unforeseen paths of greatness. He went about steadily rejecting the sandy foundation of pragmatic design by showing us that objects are not the center of the design universe—people are.  Bill Moggridge wasn’t just a designer who understood the notion of human-centered innovation—he was the man who brought the entire concept to fruition.

You can see Moggridge’s steady hand of evolving achievement on everything from hospital equipment to space heaters and ultimately the personal computer.       

Writing about the life and career of Bill Moggridge from an industrial designer’s viewpoint is actually a bit tricky. He was indeed an industrial designer, one of the best; and although I’d love to claim him as a shining example of “one of our own,” it would be just a little inappropriate. And only because Bill Moggridge transcended any normal terms you could place on a designer—it’s sort of like saying, “Yeah, that’s Michael Jordan, the basketball player.”

Moggridge is transcendent, not just for pioneering a human-centered approach in design, but also for pioneering interaction design. Thus his influence hit new levels, since most of the recent notable advancements in the design field have come from the realm of interaction design. Many can credit Moggridge as the John the Baptist of computing, since he designed the form factor for the Grid Compass personal computer—a forerunner species to the Apple Macintosh and others. He realized that the most important parts of these devices were those that connected the user to the software, thus defining the user experience for the device.

Bill Moggridge, too, was the ultimate collaborator.  He understood that other people’s ideas, coming from both industry experts and consumers, were just as important in the design process as his own, and that the combination and synthesis of all of these ideas are what gives design its magic. With diverse ideas and complex teams behind every design, Moggridge saw that the shared process is far more powerful than the individual mind.  This consideration during the design process identified emotional and psychological connections that people had, or could potentially have, with products. He never left design simply limited to the aesthetic.

Bill Moggridge gave us so much, and for so much we are grateful in the design community. He gave us our vision and our perspective, a brash new pursuit of our technical abilities, and, at his very core, our inspiration fueled by constant collaboration—two of the bedrock values designers hold dear. He saw himself as a guy who lived his life in phases, as a designer, team leader/design manager, and communicator/storyteller. He lived design, and he championed it—as an everyday practice and as a phenomenon of human achievement. And he did this for me.

Thanks, Bill. Rest in peace. 

A Way Forward for Medical Device Innovation

By Ty Hagler

About a year ago, we wrote a piece on the contrasts between innovation in the consumer products space versus the world of medical devices—contrasts defined by marketplace driven frameworks and their associated priorities.

Just a few weeks ago, a dear friend sent an informative piece that gave me pause for a re-think, or at least some new thinking about these two markets from a different angle.  In a Q+A session, Stuart Karten, a California-based industrial designer and juror for the Medical Design Excellence Awards, talks about the intersection of consumer products and medical design.  Karten correctly documents the power of the first impression, since consumers often inform their buying choices with that powerful first interaction with a product.

The medical device world faces a multi-pronged challenge in terms of form and function.  Companies must please so many stakeholders—patients, physicians, third-party payers like private insurers and government agencies, not to mention regulators!  You have to please the often disparate needs of these individual sets, while managing to have a unified product presence.

It seems that the medical device space could take many great ideas and best practices in product development from the world of consumer technology, in particular, especially in light of the fact that a more personalized medical experience is an emerging demand from the marketplace.  For example, many consumers want to be able to consult with their physicians via telephone or email on medication choices for chronic conditions.  Often, physicians need diagnostic data in order to make decisions informed from medical testing as well as qualitative data received from the patient’s description of his condition.

The infrastructure, phone and email, is already in place to connect these needs.  Numerous diagnostic devices are available for personal use at home, and we have the ability to bring devices together through ubiquitous computers, secure cloud-server storage, and wireless broadband and internet connectivity.  The intersection of these technologies will be defined by each company’s approach to the challenge of integrating hardware and software.  There are two successful models in the world for consumer devices—Apple and Google.

As Karten mentions in the Q+A piece, the iPad is an iconic example of a majestic interface.  This is critical to the consumer electronics experience.  What Apple also gets right is taking command of both sides of the hardware/software equation.  Not only is the iPad itself disruptive in terms of UI, the hammer blow to Apple competitors comes from the iTunes and App Store experience.

Apple has created a sleek, seamless, integrated hardware/software experience articulated through the iOS operating system and iTunes for interacting with music, movies, apps and other media content.  With an Apple device, you’re not just turning on a smart phone, tablet, or PC—you’re stepping into Apple’s world of thoughtful packaging, easy start-up, and you’re never more than 2-3 clicks from accomplishing anything.  It’s elegant simplicity at its finest.

Google offers another template for device companies that may not have the vertical integration to pull off both an optimal device experience and the software to drive it to a greater user experience.  With the Android operating system, Google has achieved market leadership in the smartphone market, outpacing Apple, and making a nice challenge in tablets. While they have done some periodic experimenting with homegrown handsets, the company has focused on partnering with external experts in the hardware space, such as Samsung and HTC.

While any kind of electronic device can fall prey to over-engineering, it’s important to remember that smart phones and blood sugar monitors both need an appropriate measure of design to balance the user experience.  It’s the designer’s job, and it’s right in his wheelhouse, to distill incredibly complex mechanisms into what each user needs from the device in terms of his or her individual experience.  The new Chromebook is an example of a unique product resulting from an effective design process.  The secret sauce comes in when designers squarely hit the needs of both average and power users. Apple achieves this as well as any company.

In the world of software, it’s easy to create a bloated, over-utilized experience.  Microsoft Windows, for example,  makes a lot of trouble available to the average Joe’s fingertips—one click of the wrong icon and Joe will be sorry for hours and days to come.  Whether companies develop internally or leverage external partnerships, designers need to resist the urge to do too much.  Again, design and development should achieve a balance and measure compatible with the needs of users.

One of our clients, Mustard Tree Instruments (MTI), is one of the best examples of this marriage of hardware and software.  Verifier TrueTest, one of MTI’s devices, measures the chemical composition of pills and capsules produced by manufacturing.  The genius of MTI lies in how the software platform articulates the test results.  Competitor products display data in a way that only a Ph.D. could read with any level of coherence.  In contrast, MTI made the user interface a core selling point by communicating data through friendly graphics with high accuracy.  The engineering power in their products yield a accurate and robust scientific testing experience, while the design displays actionable information to anyone who needs to make real-time decisions on a manufacturing floor.  This is how MTI’s products combine the elements of design and engineering with a wonderful balance.

There are many pages that medical device companies can rip from the consumer electronics playbook.  Obviously there are limits.  No one dies from an iPod failure. Therefore, while engineering needs a balance with industrial design, certain requirements cannot be compromised.  These engineering requirements are defined as “Design Inputs” by the regulators, but a case can be made that a greater commitment to user experience could improve both patient compliance and reduce use errors.

In the past, US medical device regulations attempted to address the need for proper industrial design by requiring companies to perform a risk analysis.  The most popular tool is called a Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (dFMEA).  More recently, the US FDA has acknowledged the need greater emphasis on industrial design by adding a new requirement for human factors. The new human factors requirements for medical devices will be the subject of a future guest blog.

Murphy’s Hypotenuse—The Unmistakable Power of Icons (Part Two)

By Patrick Murphy

 In Wednesday's edition of Murphy’s Hypotenuse, we explored my love for icons, as well as how Canon makes nimble use of a virtual icon flood to effectively demonstrate product attributes in digital cameras.

 Now, we’ll take a look at a couple of different impactful ways that icons drive the world of products and services.

The second reason for increased icon prevalence is that they contribute heavily to the customer experience. They’re optimized ergonomics for our frazzled consumer brains. Today’s product and service markets are complex and saturated  with vast options and an incessant flow of information, and trying to make decisions based on that multitude of information available can be an arduous process. Any time this information can be simplified or summarized, as with icons, it’s an opportunity for a better experience for the customer.

There are quite a few examples of good and bad information delivery with or without icons, but I’ll focus on one to get my point across. Time Warner Cable offers TV, internet, and phone services. The services they offer have gradually shifted, in consumer minds over time, from luxuries (the 80s) to commodities (now), and they are now taken for granted so much that actually shopping for them is seen more as a hassle by many people than an enjoyable experience. Add to that consumer perceptions of TWC being a monopolized utility concern, and you have a couple of ingredients for a platform of diabolical consumer experience.

However, Time Warner has mitigated some of this perceived awfulness through the use of icons:

TWC’s main product page offers this banner of four simple icons, the first three representing their different services, and the fourth a clear combination of the first three describing the ability to “bundle” them. Unlike some tech service companies that flood their websites with so much information that it’s difficult to grasp exactly what it is they’re selling, they’ve stripped down and iconified their entire breadth of offerings into a simple set of graphics. These icons don’t remove the chore-like element of subscribing to these services, but the intuitive and clutter-free interface at least infers some element of ease in the process at the very beginning of the purchasing experience.

Now for the not-so-practical truth about icons—they simply have a cool factor you can’t get in any other design vehicle. A good icon has swagger, and it’s a bold statement of confidence and character. It’s a brand planting its flag with pride on its merchandise.  

Icons draw a buyer in, much in the same way tattoos draw your eyes on people on the street day to day. Due to its simplified nature you may not even understand it the second you lay eyes on it - but when you get it, it burns into your retina and delivers its message. Some of the best logos feature icons – especially newer, emerging companies who cannot be recognized by simply their name or centuries-old trademark

Icons are the little guys in the design world that pack a great punch in so many ways, telling brand stories, making bold statements to define customer experience, and alerting buyers to important features, benefits, technology, and applications that drive the purchasing process in a powerful fashion.

Murphy’s Hypotenuse—The Unmistakable Power of Icons (Part One)

by Patrick Murphy

Out of all the artistic expressions I have the privilege to explore in my world of industrial design, there’s nothing that provides the instant gratification of an icon, whether it’s placed on a product or used in marketing applications to sell it.

 In other words, I love a good icon. I’ve recently been creating quite a few icons to further flesh out Trig Innovation’s brand identity for some of our emerging service frameworks, as well as some work for some really innovative clients. In a short time, I’ve become the icon guy around here, and I love that. Here’s a taste of what I call my “Iconfolio” at Trig (barring work still protected under current non-disclosure agreements, of course):

Icons offer the designer their own unique challenge—icon work essentially takes a complex concept and represents it with a small, simple graphic, a graphic that communicates a ton of information in a very concise way. It’s also a great exercise in “stencil techniques,” that is, posterizing an image into just black and white. A lot of icons out there involve multiple colors, shading and even complex gradients—especially with the recent prevalence of mobile device apps. But I generally guide my work with the the basic graphic design rule of “if it doesn’t look good in black and white then it’s too complicated.”

 It’s difficult to create certain forms or scenes using just pure highlighting and pure shading. Working through sculpting some of the more difficult icons I’ve created has undoubtedly made me a better designer though, especially in the realm of fast-action concept sketching. I usually colorize icons later in the process, sometimes with multiple colors, but generating them in black and white imbues them with extreme flexibility and an inherent striking look that can only come from a “stencil” image. Banksy knows what I’m talking about. I’d like to imagine that every icon I make could be tattooed on someone and still look good in 30 years. Karim Rashid clearly has the same mentality about icons, seeing as he has literally done this:

Icon creation is a skill set that I’m glad to have developed, because icons are now, more important than ever, so prevalent in the product and service marketplace. They are important for a couple of very practical reasons, as well as one that’s not so practical.

The first reason is the perceived increase in value that icons can bring to a product or service. While they may not necessarily bring value in the monetary sense, more value in terms of attributes, features, technological advancements, and benefits. Surely if people took their time to make icons for specific features or advantages of their products, they must be something new or innovative, or just plain better, right? Iconizing these elements, like product attributes, features, benefits, and technology advancements, elevates them from a boring regurgitation into something special that deserves buyer investigation.

A package displaying eight icons of a product’s attributes, versus a competitor’s with only three, may automatically register the first product to a buyer as a better choice, regardless of the validity of the comparison. Granted, there is an upper limit to icon quantity, a point of diminishing returns where a manufacturer plasters a package or product page with so many icons that the value of each is compromised in a sea of multitude (of course, this breaking point varies by product type and industry context).While upwards of 10 icons would normally be too much for packaging, on this website for Canon digital cameras it works quite well. Digital cameras compete within a highly-saturated market for technical dominance. The difference of a single feature or product spec can leapfrog a brand offering ahead of a big pack. So, in this case, the more icons the merrier. The vast iconography actually simplifies what would be page upon page of text into a visual summary of what features and technology consumers are obtaining within the product.

Canon also consistently marks this format and layout of its iconography across its entire product range, so that customers can ascertain differences between models quickly and proceed to making a purchase. Many of these attributes, may, in fact, be standard across the variety of digital camera brands, but when Canon displays them in such a compelling way, it appears that their cameras are even more feature-packed.

Part Two of this series will appear on Friday, June 1. Stay tuned!