Read more about the symbiosis of modeling and prototyping (PDF) for designing microscale parts in an article I wrote that was published in MICROmanufacturing Magazine this month, page 33 (Jan/Feb 2010, Volume 3, Issue 1).

They found that, when test subjects are in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they’re less able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal. That failure to filter slows them down because they are unable to ignore irrelevant information. Frequent multi-tasking, such as keeping up with incoming email while reviewing a document and listening to music, may actually decrease your ability to filter through information later, even when you are not multi-tasking.

A few years ago I attended a course at MIT Sloan on Product Portfolio Management, taught by Dr. Rebecca Henderson. Part of the material Dr. Henderson presented included results from research on engineer productivity as a function of the number of projects the engineer was juggling at once. On reading the recent Stanford research, it struck me that media multi-tasking is probably not that different from juggling multi-project activities, and that proper management of multiple simultaneous projects should include focusing on one thing at a time, as recommended by the Stanford group. The MIT-cited productivity data looked something like the plot below, showing that productivity peaks at about two assigned projects, and falls rapidly away as the assigned projects approach 4 and beyond. It probably goes without saying that the best people on a team will end up with the most projects. If possible, don’t let that number of projects exceed 2 or 3.

Now, back to my other tasks…

Research results on an engineer's productivity as a function of the number of projects they're working on.

The traditional way to make a product cheaper has always been subtraction – in essence, minimizing the size and complexity of a device without sacrificing its performance.  Size and complexity reductions can drive down costs on materials, packaging, and shipping, while also favoring higher-throughput production and the use of disposable parts – an increasingly important consideration in biomedical applications.  With that said, the simpler and smaller approach is not without limitations, and these limitations are being tested now by “hugely small” applications.

In the case of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), microfluidic chips, nano-sensing technology, and numerous other scale-intensive fields, reduced size is actually a profound contributor to increased complexity.  And while these innovative fields show tremendous promise for the future, they currently pose costly manufacturing hurdles as a consequence.  The cost of prototyping and manufacturing micro-parts should be carefully weighed when considering whether or not to pursue an otherwise-avoidable micro-approach.  As of now, these costs can quickly consume the benefits of implementing questionable technology since this often requires several iterations of low-volume custom components.  Lab-on-a-chip devices are a good example prone to this paradoxical limbo.  Even a relatively straightforward microfluidic component can require robust interfaces and innovative prototyping and assembly processes to ensure proper functionality.  Before long, the microfluidic system isn’t so “micro” anymore – in size or cost.

So what can designers and our manufacturing comrades do to advance the cost effectiveness of these emerging technologies?  For starters, let’s abandon subtraction and opt for addition;  additional measures to define and achieve design tolerances, additional manufacturing techniques for creating repeatable micron and sub-micron parts, additional design features for ease of alignment during assembly, additional quality assurance measures to assess as-built dimensions, and – most importantly – additional communication between manufacturers and designers for continued success on the field of dreams we now find ourselves playing.

In The Innovator’s Prescription, Clayton Christensen discusses how disruptive solutions are the evolutions that take the status quo to the next level. They may or may not be technical leaps, but they are new business models that take Blue-Chip titans by surprise, knocking them from #1 and leaving them trying to catch up. Think Canon taking printing business from Xerox by moving it from the giant mega-machine to the desktop. Christensen’s book specifically addresses the business models of health-care, but many of the concepts can be easily transported to other industries.

Here are two examples of the DIY mentality creating some disruptive, and hopefully game-changing, solutions to common problems.

Michelle Khine is an Assistant Professor at UC Irvine working on microfluidics and nanotechnologies. As part of their research, she and her team developed a technique to create microfluidic chips quickly and cheaply using Shrinky Dinks®, an oven, and a printer. Although she was just trying to get her lab up and running quickly, she ended up creating a breakthrough technology that resulted in her being named one of MIT’s TR35, an award given to top innovators under 35 years old. Yes, the toys of childhood are now the research tools of the future. So, if your boss asks you why you have Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots on your desk, you can point to this.

Technology Review 2009 – A children’s toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips

Chemistry students at Harvard University devised a $2 device to separate plasma from blood using an egg-beater and a few other parts. The resulting plasma is more than sufficient to detect diseases such as Hepatitis B and cystercosis. While not quite ready for the major laboratories, the device would be useful to doctors in remote locations without the financial resources to send blood off to a lab for testing.

$2 egg-beater could save lives in developing countries

Photo credit: Malancha Gupta

Griffith sees three routes to cut the amount of energy embedded in personal possessions. One is to simply have less stuff, though that seems more like poverty than efficiency. Another is to make goods more efficiently. That has a role, Griffith said, but a limited one.

“Through material and design changes, say you can cut in half the energy used to make the object,” Griffith said. “For an object that should have a lifetime of one year, if you just do those material changes and design changes, you can halve the amount of energy over that year.

“But because time is in the denominator of the embodied energy equation for an object, it dominates the equation,” Griffith continued. “The easiest way to get the most out of your objects is to make them last a lot longer.”

I agree with the sentiment, and, “they just don’t make it like they used to” is true far more than it isn’t. But, can this philosophy of making long-lasting products translate into my work as a medical device designer?

My first hurdle, and probably the toughest to overcome, is the efficiency of disposables. Because of sterility requirements that prevent the spread of disease and because disposables provide an attractive long term revenue stream, the medical industry has grown quite fond of the disposable model. Quite often, a device has both a durable portion and a disposable one to reduce overall waste. Perhaps we could design parts for chemical or thermal sterilization instead, but there is considerable inertia in the marketplace that will resist such change.

• Any new products would have to overcome the perception that it’s not clean unless it came from the factory in a sealed bag
• The marketplace would have to show that disposables are not an attractive business model

The second hurdle is the pace of innovation. Products and technologies change so quickly that it’s easy to imagine that something will surely supplant my latest product. However, hospitals and insurance companies are generally not considered “early adopters” and can be especially fickle about buying the latest “thing”, probably because of the accountants that are driven by the bottom line. If a product is guaranteed to last for 10 years instead of 3 years, a 3X higher cost can be easily justified.

I’m sure there are other considerations that keep designers from developing longer-lasting products, but are they reasonable? Can we work around them by thinking differently? Can we improve the bottom line for the medical device consumers while maintaining the standard of care and reducing our impact on the environment?

Today, April 22, is Earth Day. It is a day to pause and think about environmental awareness. For most of us, over the course of a day we use hundreds of different products, everything from pens and pencils, to computers, to cars, and yet few people stop to think about the full lifespan of the products they use and the impact those products have on the environment. Luckily, environmental awareness and conservation are growing factors in product development, and thus the products we use are becoming progressively more “green”.

When a designer focuses on creating a product that will minimize its impact on the environment, there are a number of factors that can be considered, many of them cheap or cheaper than the alternatives. While these may not all be feasible for every product, with a dedicated effort it is always possible to produce products greener than the ones being made today. A couple areas that can be considered when thinking about green development include:

• Materials – Choosing materials that are recyclable and reusable goes a long way towards reducing a product’s impact on the environment. Perhaps a product can be molded out of recyclable plastic or metal, or used 5-10 times instead of once, both means which allow for an increased lifespan rather than being dropped into a landfill.
• Energy Consumption – The past decade has been all about devices becoming battery operated. From a design standpoint, this has forced development to become increasingly focused on efficient use of the energy available. Many of the energy consumption tricks that have been learned in the battery-operated world can be carried over to other devices, even devices that do not run on batteries. Making all devices energy efficient reduces the amount of energy that needs to be produced, makes each device cheaper to operate, and decreases the depletion of resources from our environment. To this affect, the European Union has gone as far to begin implementing energy consumption rules for even plugged-in devices, to help reduce unnecessary energy waste.
• Energy Harvesting – A burgeoning field of design is based around energy harvesting, or the ability to gather energy from localized sources such as solar energy, vibration, heat, or mechanical motion. These devices then become self-sustainable, drawing no energy from the electric grid or batteries. From a green designers view energy harvesting devices create their own energy, with little to no waste. Energy harvesting technology has an exciting future in front of it, with the potential to take many forms of “waste” energy such as heat or vibrations and turn them into a positive gain.

When environmental compliance is a design goal early in the development process, these and many other opportunities exist to create innovative products with green footprints. On this Earth Day, consider how your next product could be made more environmentally sound with some green design principles.

Photo credit: Flávio Takemoto

There are many ways to lose focus developing a new product, especially with so many people involved and so much at stake. By taking a disciplined approach, one can avoid many of the common pitfalls that cost money and cause delays.

1. Develop a realistic schedule and stick to it. Always keep the critical path in mind and avoid letting non-critical path items slow down the project.
2. If possible, secure sufficient funding to complete development with some extra padding to cover the unavoidable things that come up. While the product development is best done in phases, raising funding in stages is often very inefficient and more expensive because the development team loses momentum if the timing is off.
3. Develop a comprehensive specification up front and be disciplined about preventing spec creep throughout the project.
4. Obtain voice of the customer (VOC) input very early in the project, since it will focus and define the feature set outlined in the product specification.
5. Perform market research prior to embarking on the development. Developing the marketing plan late in the game inevitably leads to costly last minute changes to the product.
6. Select the development team carefully, ensuring that members of the team communicate well. If outsourcing only a part of the development, make sure that part is very well defined and verify that the outsource partner has a full understanding of the requirements.
7. Prepare a detailed project plan that identifies the overall schedule with stage gates. The plan must clearly define the criteria necessary to pass each stage gate.
8. Identify the high risk aspects of the development and address them first in the project plan, before the bulk of the work gets underway. Wasted work equals wasted money.
9. Line up manufacturing partners as early as possible and involve them in the design process – include them in team meetings, design reviews, etc.
10. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Weekly team meetings often seem unnecessary, but keeping everyone on the same page throughout the project will reduce expenses in the long run.
11. Reduce the risk of safety and environmental testing by considering it early in the design.

This list goes to 11!

Photo credit: H Assaf

1. Use Resources Efficiently

Getting a full time, highly trained engineer to do everything in the product development process may move the project along faster, but it can be more expensive. Instead of paying an engineer to perform every task, such as testing a prototype or drafting a report, maybe a lab technician or college intern can run specific parts of the test and write up the final report under the engineer’s supervision. What they cost in inefficiency they often make up for in reduced overhead.

2. Plan Ahead

Nothing wastes time and money more than having to do things over. There’s certainly plenty of iteration required in product development, but making mistakes by rushing or failing to prepare for likely problems should be avoided by taking the time to plan ahead.

3. Mind Your Perspective

While working on a project, it’s easy to get caught up in the details. At least once a week, step back to look at the big picture. Consider what you (and others) are working on and where it lays on the path between the design specification and the finished product. Is your team working efficiently? Are you spending time on minutia too early in the project? Adding (and rebuilding) the draft angles and fillets required for injection-molding are often unnecessary when using most rapid prototyping techniques.

4. Look Off-The-Shelf

Using commercial off-the-shelf parts (COTS) is a great way to reduce the schedule and cut development costs. Designing products takes time, so if someone has already spent the time and money to build a sub-system, try to take advantage. Look for at least one more supplier so you have options if they raise the price, discontinue the product, or don’t meet expectations as a vendor. Sole-source products should be avoided as much as possible, but you can spare yourself some pain by purchasing stock well ahead of time or negotiating a contract with the supplier. Of course, don’t squeeze a square peg in a round hole just to save a buck, either. If you can’t find anything to meet the requirements, and changing the requirements is out of the question, it’s time to design it yourself.

5. Conserve Energy

We have a responsibility to be environmentally conscious, but efforts to that effect can also make financial sense. Reducing the power requirements for your product can decrease the size, weight, and cost of your power supply. It can also increase the battery life for a product used in the field. Choosing the same materials or components within a product or across product lines makes recycling easier, but it also means you can save money by purchasing raw materials in higher quantities.

Keep your pipeline moving. Photo credit: Steve Knight

You can save money and continue working with a smaller budget by implementing stage gates early in the product pipeline to examine risk – technical risk, market risk, manufacturing risk, regulatory risk, supply chain risk, etc. A well managed pipeline has procedures in place to identify areas of risk and evaluate them. The process of assessing and addressing risk is an excellent, cost effective means of advancing the product pipeline in lean times.

• Technical risk is assessed with basic proof of concept prototypes and technology research that address specific aspects of the product that are considered high risk.
• Market risk is assessed with targeted market studies, limited voice of the customer (VOC) interviews, and other information gathering efforts focused on reducing risk. For medical products, preliminary research to understand the reimbursement environment for the product may be of particular importance.
• Regulatory risk can be minimized through careful planning of the submittal process and preliminary discussions with regulatory personnel. For products that will be launched into regulated environments (medical, nuclear, etc), regulatory acceptance of the product is critical to product success.
• Supply chain risk is assessed through detailed conversations with manufacturing vendors and suppliers. Risk may be significantly minimized by reducing the number of “single-point failures” required for a product such as a sole-sourced component or highly-specialized service. Trusted vendors often prove to be invaluable resources later in the NPD process and should be involved as early as possible.

The risk assessment phase of NPD is absolutely critical to maintaining the health of the new product pipeline and preventing unpleasant surprises late in the game when a product is almost ready for release. By attacking and reducing risk early, unfeasible projects are eliminated earlier in the pipeline and feasible projects become easier to forecast. It is also a relatively inexpensive phase, as compared to the balance of the development process. In weak economic times, focusing on this early phase can filter multiple concepts, preparing them for the more costly process of advancing them down the pipeline when the economy improves.