Today we’re talking about everyone’s favorite topic: failure. What does it really mean to fail fast? How do you learn from your failures and keep moving forward? 

 

Britt

Hello and welcome to today’s podcast. We are here with Andrew and Megan. Why don’t you guys introduce yourselves? Andrew, tell us a little bit about how long you’ve been at Blur and what you do here. 

Andrew

Hi, I’ve been here at Blur for just over three and a half years. It’s a lot of fun. It’s always a learning experience, which I guess is kind of what we’re going to be talking about today. I am the model maker here, which means that I make stuff for people. And when we have a design or something that we need to hold in our hands and see how it feels and looks and interacts with everything else, I’m the guy that 3D prints it or molds it in urethane or silicone or something like that. Then we take a look at it and see what we like and what we don’t like.

Britt

How about you Megan? Tell us a little bit about yourself: how long you’ve been at Blur and what do you do here? 

Megan

My name is Megan Buckingham, I’ve been at Blur for a year and some change. I’m a mechanical engineer. I was in R&D to start off and then I switched over to manufacturing in December, so I guess by now it’s been about half and half. Now I’m sort of between the two. 

Britt

We got her over to the other side in operations and we’re happy about that, but yeah we can’t actually keep her forever because she’s so good at mechanical design that she is whisked away in R&D as well. 

Julia

What does it look like for you to sort of split your time like that? 

Megan

So far so good. I think it really depends on what the workload is for the different clients and where I’m needed and what the other resources are on each project. 

Britt

So today we’re going to be talking about some failures that you’ve had at Blur and how you’ve overcome them. Talking to our audience about how failures can be good. I mean, you have to fail in order to learn and to grow and just sharing some of the things that we’ve seen in the past.

Andrew

Finding the things that don’t work is a good thing, most of the time. Sometimes it’s disastrous, but a lot of the times it’s just progress and figuring out where to go next. 

Megan

Especially in early R&D, one of the purposes of building prototypes in general is to find your failures and pain points and whatnot. All sometimes expected. 

Britt

So what’s an example that you guys can think of that you’ve seen at Blur where you’re trying something in the design process and it just didn’t work, but you learned from it and can now do it better?

Andrew

One thing that comes to mind is just after I started working here, I was working with a two-part foam system. I hadn’t worked with this particular foam before and I underestimated how much I didn’t know about how it was going to behave. So, I designed a mold with very little vent relief and I mixed up my foam and put it in the mold. I clapped it shut, clamped it, and it almost immediately burst in my hands. It cracked in all the places and I was left with foam all over my hands, my shoes, and a broken mold in my hands that I needed to redesign and reprint and go back to the drawing board. And I felt kind of dumb for a second but it was a fairly inexpensive learning moment, so it gave me a little better appreciation for what that foam is capable of. 

Julia

Yeah, and now you’ll never make that mistake again. 

Andrew

Never again. Right. 

Britt

Until the next foam. 

Andrew

Like until a few months later when I was mixing up some expired foam, mixed it up in a bucket on the counter and turned around to do something else. Turned back around to find it bubbling out all over the counter and the floor and I had a little mess to clean up. It was going into the trash anyways, but…

Britt

It wouldn’t be R&D without messes.

Julia

Yeah. I’m imagining that science experiment: elephant foam? They mixed it up in the beaker and then it shoots up in a giant column, that’s what I’m imagining but I’m sure it was much more contained. 

Andrew

I wish it was that fireworks-y. It was a little more boring I guess but still a surprise. 

Julia

Well, Megan, Andrew has shared one of his learning moments, any learning moments from you in manufacturing or R&D?

Megan

Yeah, I have an example that spans R&D and manufacturing, actually. I was working on a product that’s an electromechanical medical device. It has lots of cables in it. It’s designed to be as small as possible as sort of a wearable device. It had many cables in this design, one of which was revised and grew in diameter. And so then we had to accommodate that change in the design. Increasing the clearance holes was a problem, increasing our cable ties for strain relief was a problem. There was hardly any space in the housings for these parts to grow. It should have been an easy change to increase the size, but without any millimeter to spare, ultimately we had to come up with a more complicated solution. 

Luckily we were able to kind of shrink some parts and lengthen some screws and make it work, but it definitely brings to mind that maybe an ideal solution could have been more easily reached if we had just left that tiny bit of clearance in the design in the first place. 

Yeah, there’s really that fine line between making a device as small as possible versus making it too small. So as long as the requirements allow, I’ll definitely be conscientious in the future to add that little bit of space if I can because it’s much harder to later revise a device to be larger rather than smaller. 

Julia

I like that you brought up that example because I think there’s a spectrum when we think of failure. From things like my foam exploded all over the model shop and now I have a big mess to clean up, versus, oh if we had designed this a little bit differently or left some more clearance, it would have been a lot easier to make this change. That’s something you can take into the future, and I think they’re all valuable. When you start to look at [failure] from a perspective of, “How can I learn from this and how can I grow?” and get to that point quickly versus sulking and thinking you can’t do anything, [that’s when it’s valuable]. You just have to keep moving forward and having creative solutions. And I think that’s something that we’re pretty good at and talk about a lot here: there aren’t many things that stop us from moving forward. Sometimes you just have to be a little bit creative in what you do. 

Britt

Yeah, I think that’s one thing that we do well at Blur is, you know, we may come across failures, but then we just keep pushing forward. There’s usually an urgent deadline and you don’t really have time to think about the mistake, you have to think about, “How can I overcome it and still meet the client’s needs and then get there creatively?” It’s not always an easy answer, sometimes you have to really put some thought into it to get there. 

Andrew

Yeah, and that brings to mind a deadline that we were trying to meet. One day, a few years ago, we had a part that we were finishing for a customer that was across the country and we needed to ship it that day. We needed to paint it and fill it with body filler. We were trying to get the shape and texture just right. I had to get the right color too of course. So we were going through this process of applying filler and then letting it cure and then sanding it and then applying filler and letting it cure and sanding it. We were getting a little impatient about how long that was taking, so in order to try to accelerate the cure time of this body filler that we were using, I put it in front of a little miniature personal space heater. It started to cure the filler a little bit more quickly, so we’re happy about that. 

I left it alone for a few minutes and came back to find that part had taken so much heat that it was starting to melt. It was deformed. It wasn’t even deformed very much, but it was deformed enough that it was completely garbage. So not only was that part garbage, but the last three or four hours that we had spent trying to finish that part to perfection was garbage and was lost. We still needed to get a part out to our clients that day and by the magic of having two of them, having a backup, we were able to recover from that and finish the backup and get it looking very good. We did get it out on time but it made us take a step back. Sometimes we are under the wire but we need to remember stuff like when you’re working on thermoplastics don’t put it in front of a space heater and walk away. 

Britt

Yeah, that’s a good lesson. 

Megan

Really putting the thermo in thermoplastic. 

Julia

I’m interested to know if there are any times, not necessarily a failure, but something that could have been accidental worked out in your favor and gave you new insight into a component. Or, it did something that you didn’t expect and then you’re like, “Oh, now I know I can use this for these other things that I wasn’t expecting.”

Andrew

I mean, I work with many different materials and even similar materials might have very different reactions to other environments or materials. So it’s kind of a constant, “Let’s see if this works.” And, “Oh, no, that didn’t work.” You know, and some of these things are very clear from data sheets and stuff like that. But some interactions between different materials, there isn’t documentation for that sort of thing. So it’s kind of a, let’s find out what works and what doesn’t. I’m saying that a lot today, but you know, that’s what I do.

Megan

I’ve also seen instances, specifically with materials, where a client requests a certain material and then maybe for whatever reason it doesn’t turn out the way they expect or they end up with a different material and then they actually like that one better. So a lot of times I think when you make something and actually get your hands on it you might discover, “You know, this isn’t exactly what we had in mind but this actually is really a good solution”

Andrew

Right, sometimes in giving a client what they want you have to sort of read between the lines and hear what they actually want rather than what they say that they want. They might ask very specifically for this hardness rubber in urethane. So, you go ahead and make those but then you go ahead and make one in silicone or you make one in a different hardness and you slip it along with a note like, “Hey try this one out when you get a chance.” Then they wind up loving that one better because it had a feel for what they were interested in. When you work with these materials day in and day out, I just have a little bit more of a feel about how they’re gonna interact with other components. 

Julia

I think that also has to do with really digging down to the root of the problem. Not just with clients, but with users too. Sometimes they’ll say, “This is the problem I’m facing. This is what really is impacting the way I use this product, or this is what I want to have fixed.” But when you dig into it a little bit more, you realize, okay, it’s not the color of this thing, it’s actually, they can’t, I don’t know, open it correctly. Or there’s this little latch that’s really hard. And so I think when you understand that, you can start to present solutions that will actually fix the root of the issue rather than band-aid fixes. 

Megan

Right, like treating symptoms versus treating the illness, if you will. 

Britt

So, Andrew, are there any recommendations that you can provide to our listeners out there, just based on the materials that you have handled so frequently? 

Andrew

I can easily say that silicones tend to be much more resilient than urethanes to a variety of environmental factors like temperature and UV exposure and chemical resistances. Sometimes a urethane is what you want because silicone likes to stick to silicone and doesn’t like to stick to anything else in general, whereas urethanes love to stick to anything. So if you’re doing an overmolding on a cable and you need a strain relief, then a urethane tends to be the way to go. If you’re doing, say, a button pad for a device, it might be silicone that you want so that it can be resistant to any sort of cleaning products. 

Britt

Megan, do you have any tips for our listeners out there? 

Megan

I think one other thing we see, talking about failures or areas to optimize and whatnot, I think a lot of times our clients want to build a prototype. They want it to be cheap, they want it to be fast, and that ultimately is usually some 3D printed parts, those sort of designs. That’s great for a prototype, but sometimes I don’t think there isn’t enough emphasis on future DFM considerations. Sometimes I think if you go down the road really far in a 3D printed design, then if you do want to switch to injection molding or whatnot and your design doesn’t allow for that pivot that can be very difficult. Especially as a financial decision of, “Is it worth it?” and, “When would you do that?” Those are just my thoughts: if you’re designing a product basically from scratch all the way through to production, you kind of have to start with the mentality that it’s definitely going to be production eventually. 

Andrew

If I could add to that, kind of the flip side of that, our engineers and designers of course tend to design for manufacturing and often will send me a part file and ask me to 3D print it. Sometimes I have to kind of come back to them a little bit, I’ve got to push back just a little bit like, “Hey, let me look at your design and talk about a couple things with you.” I could 3D print exactly what you asked me for but you might be really disappointed because it’ll come out slightly different than what you might be expecting. 

Megan

Yeah, it works both ways. 

Andrew

It sure does. 

Megan

Yeah, it’s really hard to 3D print parts that are designed for injection molding and you certainly can’t injection mold a lot of parts that were designed to be 3D printed. Yeah, seen that a lot. 

Britt

It is great that in-house we have a lot of 3D printers so that we can kind of rapidly prototype. But to your point Megan, you have to be thinking long-term. What does this 3D printed part look like for manufacturing? It does end up being something down the road that we have to kind of think through and sometimes it’s good to just get ahead of those decisions and think long term. But definitely agree, like it’s nice that Andrew can spit out tons of 3D printed parts back there and you can start to get a feel for the design and how things are going to fit together. 

Julia

So we’ve talked a lot about failures today. I’d love to hear about what’s your favorite success story so we can let you have some positive time on the microphone too. Like what’s a moment that you’re really proud of where you had a problem that you solved that was really hard but you did it and now you can look back and be like, yeah, that was a good solve. 

Britt

Well, Megan builds robots, that’s pretty cool.

Megan

I certainly am not personally building robots alone but I have been on some robotics projects. I will say it is extremely satisfying when everything finally comes together and it actually works. A lot of steps in between testing all of your small subsystems and making sure those all work, but when you really integrate everything it’s very satisfying. And that first time you turn it on and everything works as expected, those are the really fun wins.

Britt

I can see that. When something’s really hard and it feels like you might not be able to do it and then you pull it off, that’s always a fun win. 

Andrew

Mm-hmm. 

Britt

Well, we have a BlurBQ today, so we’re about to go to that. If you are listening out there and you haven’t been to a BlurBQ yet, you should be reaching out to us because they are really good. 

Julia

Pretty fantastic. Got our own BlurBQ sauce. 

Britt

Yeah and apparently we’re gonna have some BlurBQ biscuits? I think Megan made that up.

Megan

Brisket. 

Britt

All right well thank you both for being here today. We really appreciate it and we look forward to having you guys back.