Ever wondered what it’s like to intern at Blur? 

Curious what types of projects our interns get to work on? 

Today we’re talking with Anna, an electrical engineering intern, about her experience this summer and the things she learned along the way. 

 

Julia

Anna, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself? What’s your role here at Blur? 

Anna

I’m a grad student at NC State studying electrical engineering. And I was an intern this summer at Blur and decided to stay on part-time to just help out wherever it was needed. 

Julia

So how did you hear about Blur? 

Anna

So during my internship search in the spring of last year, I was just kind of looking on all the basic job sites, looking on Indeed or LinkedIn, and then I actually looked on EPAC, which is NC State’s career development website. I saw a posting for Blur, and then did a little bit of research and thought it sounded like a cool company, so I applied after that. 

Julia

What was the thing about Blur that stood out to you that made you decide out of all the internships you had seen or looked at or job postings, this is the one you wanted to go to. 

Anna

Yeah. So the job description was probably the first thing that led me to Blur because I was like, this sounds like it’s right up my alley because it was relevant to medical devices, which I’ve always been curious about and wanted to work in that industry. But then just doing more research about the company, I kind of found some old YouTube videos that have been posted, introducing Blur and what they do and some of their projects. And I thought they all sounded really interesting. So I just applied and here we are. 

Julia

What areas did you get to work on this summer in your internship? What areas are you working in now? And was there anything that was sort of surprising to you about that or areas you got to work in that you weren’t expecting to? 

Anna

Fortunately I was able to work in a lot of different areas, specifically the research and development area, kind of the upstairs building, but I got to work a lot on one specific project. So it was kind of surprising how much I got to follow that project. I got to see all the different updates and revisions and all of the testing that went into doing everything. And that was unexpected, but exciting.

Julia

That’s cool that you were able to follow a project from the beginning and see its completion through your summer here at Blur. 

Anna

Yeah, it definitely gave me a newfound appreciation for what goes into a medical device, just knowing like how many hours of work go into even something that seems simple like a software update or a design change and all the testing and of course all the documentation that accompanies it, but have a newfound appreciation for how much work goes into it. 

Julia

So you said you interned through the summer and then you decided to stay on throughout the school year sort of part-time. What made you decide that you wanted to continue working and interning here? 

Anna

I think the biggest thing was probably my involvement in that one particular project, just knowing it was going to be continued and knowing that I had learned a lot about it and felt comfortable with the project to be able to help out more of a part-time role during the semester. But also, I just really liked my time here and the community was great. So I felt very welcome and it was easy to ask to stay on part-time. They were very excited to have me, which was great. 

Julia

We’re always excited to have interns stay!

Julia

Do you feel like your time here this summer, the things you’ve learned, have impacted the way you view your education or even like what you want to do after school? 

Anna

I would say yes, just because I’ve learned a lot that I didn’t necessarily know went into medical device development and design. I think part of that is because my sophomore year, when you’re really supposed to do all the hands-on stuff, was online due to COVID, unfortunately. So I think this filled a big gap that I had in terms of missing hands-on experience. Now I definitely know this is something I want to do afterwards, and product development specifically for medical devices seems like it’s right up my alley. 

Julia

Cool. That’s awesome that you got to fill that gap here. 

Anna

Yeah, it was unexpected, but I’m glad that it happened. 

Julia

So what advice would you have for other people in school looking to get into the medical device field or wondering like, am I going to like this? Am I not going to like this? What advice do you have for someone like that who maybe is looking for an internship? 

Anna

Kind of just looking at the job descriptions, they’re all probably going to be similar. You know, the type of job you’re applying for, the job description, they’re going to ask you to do the same thing. So I think just doing a little bit of extra research about the company itself to know if it’s a good fit for you was really what made the difference between my other internships and Blur. And also, you know, I’d always thought I wanted to work at a really big company. And so my internship after junior year, that’s what I did. I worked at a really big company and, you know, I loved all the people and the work, but it was just a little too big. It didn’t feel as personal or have that community that I was looking for. So I think that’s what influenced my decision to look at a little bit of a, you know, more medium sized, smaller company like Blur. 

Julia

And what was your favorite part of your internship? Your ongoing internship, I guess.

Anna

Aside from the festivities, the Blurthday Party happened my first week of the summer and then the Blurbecue happened the last week with the cornhole tournament. So aside from the obvious festivities, I think it was just getting to work with so many experienced engineers and just their willingness to answer questions. I had a lot of questions, so that was great that they were so willing to answer and just let me be independent and kind of do what needed to be done. And then if I had questions again, just ask them. They’ll help me out. 

Julia

Yeah, that is something that we’ve talked about quite a bit on the podcast, or at least I have brought up several times, is the freedom to ask questions and to learn while you’re here. No one’s gonna, like, ostracize you for not knowing something. And I think that’s just advice for people maybe getting into internships for the first time or coming right out of school. You can feel like you need to know everything and that if you ask a question, then people are going to look down on you or think you’re not as much of an expert or why didn’t you learn this in school, but it’s more of a testament to your character and your willingness to learn if you do open up and ask those questions. I find around here people are super respectful and they’re not going to bash you, but they’ll take the time to educate you. 

Anna

That was one of my bigger concerns coming in. I was like, because I did graduate with biomedical engineering in the spring before I started, and I kind of had that concern of, well I do have a degree now, even though I’m an intern I felt that I should maybe know a little bit more than I did. Within my first week, people would just explain stuff, say like, it’s okay if you don’t know how to do this, which just made it feel so much better asking questions. 

How do you design for different levels of technical expertise in a medical device?

When should you translate design ideas from paper into physical models?

Today we’re sitting down with Damein, an industrial designer, to discuss his experience designing medical devices and tips for creating a successful product.

 

Damein

I’m an industrial designer and usability expert here at Blur. I help to bring the voice of the user, their needs and constraints, into a conversation early on so that when we’re designing a product it doesn’t get designed only from the inside out but also from the outside in.

Julia

Have you ever seen a product where that happens, where they don’t start with the user needs and sort of what were the ramifications of that?

Damein

We’ve all seen those things, like when you look at something and think, “This is going to be really nice.” For instance: this microphone. We were just trying to plug the cord into it but the cord plugged into it is sort of cumbersome and difficult to access. That could have been a consideration made early in the process, thinking how does this thing plug in, how does it go together, and how is that experience going to be interpreted by the user? Are they going to get frustrated and just get a better microphone, or are they going to press through that problem and make it work? 

We always want to when we’re designing something, especially early in the process, ask who’s going to be using this thing? How can we champion that user throughout the process so that every step we take and every direction we go we’re always looking back and asking how is it going to be used? That informs a lot of decisions that we have to make in terms of what shape it needs to be, can a person hold it, can a person operate it, can you reach the buttons, do you have to go back five screens to get back to where you need to be? Those sorts of considerations are really important and you can’t really have those if you’re zoomed in so close to a problem. It’s important to always look back up and ask, “Does this matter to the person who is going to be using the product?”

That’s something that we try to do at Blur and infuse into our design process, having that design consideration for the person who is going to be using the product and not getting too caught up in the technical details and feasibility too early on. Before asking, “Does this work [technically], how are we going to do it?” we make sure first that it will work for the person we’re designing it for.

Britt

And what kinds of questions do you start out with our clients? High level versus detailed? To get to what you said, even with plugging in the microphone, what questions could they have asked or thought of to mitigate that?

Damein

When we’re talking to a potential client who has a really great idea, or a technology that they’ve developed, they often want help getting it off the ground. We start with stuff that is super high-level: Tell me about who is going to be using it and what does it do? What are we actually trying to achieve and what’s the goal for the product, and then what’s the goal for the user?

Sometimes the user is a different consideration than the person that the product is being used on. Especially in a medical device space, where you have maybe a clinician or nurse or surgical assistant using the device on a patient. The experience for the surgical assistant or the clinician is going to be a lot different than the patient’s experience. Making sure that they have considerations on both sides of the equation [is important]. 

When I start, I start with who is using the product? Is that person, the primary user, also the patient or secondary user? How does that experience go? Sometimes you’ll have a product that the primary user is the patient, but the secondary user would be the clinician who sets it up, hands it to them, and then performs whatever function they need to perform. 

I start with those two profiles and try to understand approaching it with that mindset, and then you look at the workflow. How is that workflow going to go? Do you need to unbox it? Does it need to be paired to something? Are there speakers and buttons? Does it need to be shrouded so it stays sealed and stays clean and sterile throughout the use case? Those are all really important things that we need to know upfront because if you have to put a drape over top of a product, and you also need to have buttons or an interface underneath of that drape, we’re wearing two pairs of gloves, we have a drape, and now we’re trying to push a button underneath of that drape. So, what kind of button is that going to be? It’s probably not going to be a touchscreen, it’s probably not going to be one of those capacitive microwave buttons. It’s going to need to be something relatively chunky that gives good feedback and has a tactile feel so that when you’re pressing it, it’s deliberate, intentional, and thoughtful. 

Julia

As you’re designing products for multiple different users, there’s also different levels of technical expertise that you have to weave into these products. How do you balance that? Say you have a user that really doesn’t have much technical expertise on this very technical thing, even potentially life-saving medical devices. I think about an epipen, someone has to look at that and know how to use it right away because there is very little room for error. If there is an error, that’s potentially costing someone their life. How do you balance that as you’re thinking about these questions in the beginning of a design?

Damein

Not everyone has the ability to look at a product and understand how it functions right off the bat. What you want to do is make sure that it’s designed in a way that is intuitive in that direction. If it’s an epipen, one side is always going to be pointy and one side is always going to be blunt, so that makes a lot of sense for [telling a user] “This Side Down.” If you have a basic understanding like me, who’s never used an epipen before, in an emergency I could pick up that device and say, “All right, I know I have to put what’s inside this syringe into this person, so I’m going to stick them with the pointy end.” That helps you to understand how that product functions. Whereas, if it were a rectangular shape or any other sort of shape, it might [spur questions]. Do I do it this way or do I do it that way? Is this like a glow stick, am I supposed to crack it? How does this work?

Designing the form of something can really help inform how a user is going to perceive it and then how a user is going to end up using it. Everyone is going to tackle it for the first time without looking at an IFU. Even though we don’t condone that and we say they should read it, sometimes they don’t. You want to make a product that is going to be safe and effective even if there is an uninformed user. 

Britt

In manufacturing and service, I can think of a lot of things that if I could tell someone what I learned from, I would tell them these mistakes and what I did to prevent that in the future.

Damein

Sure, one thing I would say you want to steer clear of is making assumptions. I know that’s sort of a baseline thing, but especially making assumptions about how someone is going to intuitively use a product. We talked about intuitive use cases where you have a product that looks like it does a function, so form is following function in that case. To me, the designer, the client who had the idea might have had preconceived notions about how if we hand it to a third party, someone who has never seen the device before, how they’re going to use the device. 

We can get the whole way down the process, have a great thing, say, “Look how cool this is! Look how well it works!” and then hand it to someone who’s never seen it before and they hold it upside down. 

Britt

I’ve seen you at Blur give [prototypes] to several different people at the office and say, “Use this,” and they do.

Damein

And that is something I really value about being at Blur is that our team operates in a way that they can take a product or project and run with it. You can take this to someone else who has literally never seen this technology before and say, “Hey, look at this cool thing we’re working on. Can you just hold this?” You’ll learn so much, and it’s about that physical interaction. 

You can send out Google surveys, multiple choice questions, but there is so much in the intonation of having a conversation with somebody, watching them hold the product or watching them try to set up the device that is really huge. They’re making a mistake, you’re just watching, and they don’t even know they’re making a mistake. I can then go back to the drawing board and ask questions. Maybe it’s less comfortable to wear it that way, or maybe it doesn’t fit together like that, and make it in a way that it won’t even work [if they put it together incorrectly], so it’s not an option and it’s not a problem.

Julia

How do you elicit the correct emotion from someone? Say you’re using a product and you talked about red as being this very alarming color, this goes maybe more into the UX or UI design, but just being very aware of not just the physical use of something but also how is the person feeling as they’re going through this process? If someone’s using an epipen they’re probably going to be pretty anxious, so it needs to be fairly foolproof in the way that they use it. How do you incorporate that into your design as well?

Damein

In medical devices it’s an interesting issue because you’re dealing with high stakes situations, and oftentimes life-threatening situations, and adrenaline can be pumping and it’s really sort of an intense time, even for trained professionals. On some of the devices that we’re developing, seconds can matter. Getting an infusion on time, moving a millimeter to the right and getting the wrong artery, these are things that are really important. 

[You have to be] cutting a balance between alarming someone and telling them something bad is happening versus alarm fatigue, which is a real thing in the industry where if you’re in an OR, there is constantly something beeping at you. There is constantly something trying to get your attention and flag you down, so you have to be sensitive to that environment and alarm on things that are actually alarms. Not just low batteries. Really sort of playing with that threshold of what is actually an emergency and what is something you can deal with after the real emergency is over? 

When you think about that, you think about, “Do we need to use a red light here? Or would an orange do?” There’s also things you have to do with some regulations, like in 60601 testing you need to be sensitive to what their alert system is and what can and can’t be in that bucket. There’s a lot of different things you have to consider when you’re thinking about how to grab someone’s attention, and what level of that attention you need to grab depending on the class of the device, use case, and the scenarios you’re in. 

Julia

Can you walk us through your ideal timing and timeline for the start of a design project all the way through the end?

Damein

Well, the start is not always the start and the end never ends. Ideally, you would get a cross functional team together: someone who is in the design space and represents the user, someone who is a technical lead, whether that’s a mechanical, electrical, or software engineer depending on what the project’s needs are going to be, and you get the client in the room to lay out the problem you’re trying to solve. What are our goals? What does success look like? We put together a road map of how we would like the project to go. It almost never goes how we want it to go, but we can get close. 

We get that cross functional leadership team together, which is really important because I might not always throw out ideas that are perfectly feasible. If we have someone else in the room to say it might not work, or they have an idea for a different type of technology to supplement what we need to do, it’s important to have that organic transfer of ideas and information. 

After we understand our baseline roadmap, the design team will take that and start throwing stuff at the wall. We’ll have a brainstorming session and start understanding the strengths that we have, the goals we have, and proposing different ideas of how to get there: different technologies, different forms, different things to solve the problems we want to solve. 

We can really explore a large swath of those ideas pretty quickly with fast and dirty CAD models, sketches, renderings, any tool in our tool belt, sculpting foam, and making volumetric studies. We refine it down and I like to see at least five good ideas, usually it’s three, but if we can get five good ideas that go from our most conservative concept that just absolutely solves the problem without taking too much risk all the way to the pie in the sky, something that will shake up the industry or change peoples’ lives. That sort of spectrum is always nice because when we present that to the stakeholders, they can pick the parts they like from each one. They can mitigate the risk with the conservative features and maybe up the perceived value with some of these more interesting ideas on the other end of the spectrum.

Then we go back and explode out what we have. We take the ideas we have, what they wanted, and we put them into new concepts. We push those boundaries to get past the low-hanging fruit, the initial exploration, and into something that is really digging deep and grabbing those good ideas right at the top of the tree. You have to climb high for them, but once we get there we can show three solid directions and the client can pick the one they like the best.

Then we can move into mechanical design and understand all of the intricacies of how we’re going to design this for manufacture, how we’re going to design it for assembly and get Britt’s team involved. [They’ll tell us] how exactly to set up an assembly line, how many times we have to flip this thing over to make it work. We can really find some efficiencies in that space, but design sort of tapers off there, where the engineering starts to grow. We have this symbiotic relationship where we don’t really hand it off, but it sort of flows. One process leads into another, so we go from design to engineering to usability studies and then manufacturing. 

Throughout that whole process, there’s designers involved making sure that the vision is maintained, we’re always pushing boundaries and never just accepting the status quo, thinking of new ways to do things and implementing new techniques to achieve the problems we want to achieve. Otherwise, you might get stuck with “good enough” when it could have been a lot better. We never want to be in the position where we’re just settling.

Julia

How do you differentiate between something that is a good idea and something that is a great idea? Do you have questions you ask? I know that’s dependent on the goal of the client, but how do you keep that in mind as you’re having this very exploratory phase at the beginning?

Damein

Sometimes great ideas turn out to be bad ones, and sometimes what you think won’t be good ideas are actually pretty good. 

That’s sort of a non-answer, but it’s kind of a gut feeling when you’re designing something. It’s like, you start sketching something, you start doing a CAD project to understand how things will go together and sometimes something will click. You can feel it in your gut that that is a good direction, and you can feel that flow when you start pushing even further in that direction, and you can come up with something that is, hopefully, really ground-breaking on the other side of that effort. 

Sometimes you’re doing it and you think, this is okay, but I don’t know. You never want to kill something too early because down the line you might want to pull it back up. In fact, right now on a project we’re working on, we’re struggling with how to attach this cartridge to the side of this piece of equipment. We had been doing it one way, but we had to change a couple of things about how they went together. We remembered a couple of weeks ago we had this idea where we would hinge from the bottom. Can we resurrect that? At the time it didn’t make sense, but now that we’ve had these adjustments in the design and some constraints around the engineering, it makes a lot more sense. We can revive that old idea, dig up those prototypes out of the bins on the shelf and now we don’t have to retread that and start from scratch. We have a bit of a leg up. You never really know, sometimes they come back.

Julia

Back to haunt you. 

Damein

Or save you!

Julia

We’ve talked a lot about this exploratory phase and getting a lot of these ideas down on paper. How do you move from paper to where you’re actually getting user feedback?

Damein

Absolutely. That’s a really critical part of the process and specifically our process here at Blur. You want to get designs out of your head and into your hands as quickly as you can. That route from A to B needs to be a straight line, if at all possible. So, when you have an idea you might sketch it or do a quick CAD model. Basically, in the ideation phase we don’t restrict designers to make them just do sketches, or just do CAD work, or just do renderings. We want to get any and all visual physical communications out, whether that’s a piece of foam that’s sculpted into a shape, or a 3D printed version of CAD model. It’s really important to get those things into three dimensions so we can actually hand it to that end user, to that stakeholder, and say this is what we’re thinking. If a picture’s worth a thousand words, a model’s worth a million. 

It’s wild, you can have something on a piece of paper but once you hold it in your hand everything becomes so much more clear. You really understand, oh, it looked this big on paper but when you hold it do you really want this thing to run for 24 hours straight? It’s pretty big. Those sorts of constraints become very relevant and very obvious when you have them in three dimensions. 

Really for our process, we try to get things off the page and into your hands as soon as we can because you can make so many more informed decisions about what you’re actually building that way.

Julia

What’s one of your favorite projects that you’ve worked on here at Blur?

Damein

One of the more rewarding projects I’ve gotten to work on during my time here at Blur was a surgical robot that really helped pave the way for a lot of the surgical robotic equipment that is being developed now. What was so interesting about it is there are so many different users, and there are so many different constraints around each user. You have a surgeon, you have a surgical assistant, you have a patient, and you have a scrub nurse, and they all interact with this device in different ways at different times for different reasons. 

The device has three main components: a central unit that drives the instruments, an endoscope, which is a camera on the end of a snakey tube, and an insertion tube or the part that goes into the patient. Our main focus was the central unit and how that interfaces with the endoscope and the insertion tube for the instruments and endoscope. You have three challenging mechanical interfaces that have to remain sterile, that have to be intuitive and usable in almost a blind way because you can’t see what you’re doing when it’s in position, and it’s used by those three users. They all have different needs. On top of that, the whole thing is draped in plastic. So, you have to be able to feel what you’re doing, see what you’re doing, and have the human factors in a way that is always intuitive and easy to access. 

That was a really challenging project, but I think we were able to come up with some really innovative, elegant, and thoughtful solutions for the way that we approached it and how we got those challenges solved for the client. 

Julia

Do you think there’s anything you learned from that project or solutions you came up with that you find yourself coming back to for other projects? Are there any lessons you learned that you can implement into your work going forward?

Damein

I think some of the biggest learnings I gained from working on that project is understanding the importance of working in that cross-functional team. It wasn’t really specifically related to the design, but because it was such a big project there were lots of engineers and designers working on it. We all had to work in a very small space virtually: we’re working on the same CAD models, adjusting the same dimensions. We really had to mind-meld to drive to where we want to be as far as the solution we’re looking for. It really drove home for me our workflow and having these teams work as one consciousness almost, this hive-mind of engineering to achieve a goal. We learned a lot about what works well and doesn’t work well in those challenging, intricate projects that require a lot of effort but a lot of dexterity.

I really love working here, honestly. We have such an amazing team of talented engineers and designers and people working together that it makes it easy to really dig into these hard problems. A challenging project doesn’t feel so daunting when you’re backed up by an incredible team. For me, when a big project comes in the door I’m chomping at the bit to check it out and dig in to see what’s going on because I have someone sitting right next to me, or right behind me, or right across from me who can answer any questions I might have. As a team we can knock it out of the park. That’s been something that’s been really rewarding for me about working at Blur and with this team specifically. 

Julia

We are super collaborative here, which I appreciate a lot as someone who is not on the engineering side of things. I can ask any questions I have without feeling like I should know [the answers].

Damein

There’s a lot of questions I ask that I feel like I should know, but no one ever says anything. 

Julia

Yeah, thanks for sitting down to chat today.

Damein

Absolutely, thanks for having me. 

 

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What, exactly, are design controls?

Why are they important in the world of medical devices?

Today we’re talking with Grace, a mechanical engineer, about her experience with design controls and how to implement them without stalling design progress.

 

Julia

So Grace, what’s your role at Blur and what experience do you have with design controls?

Grace

I’m an R&D engineer here at Blur, so I work primarily on mechanical design. Throughout my time here I’ve worked on several projects that involve design controls, from drafting requirements and user needs to creating design control matrices and then that dictates V&V. Also, executing V&V protocols and writing reports.

Britt

So what are design controls and why are they important?

Grace

Design controls are a road map for medical device development, and it takes a concept and brings it to a final design. It really starts from the beginning of a design and evolves with a device.

Julia

What’s one misconception people have when it comes to design controls?

Grace

That you can start after you’ve already designed your device. I know that Dustin touched on in a previous episode that a pitfall is you’ve only concentrated on the device and then you have to go back and come up with your user needs, product requirements, and the whole process. You could miss something because you don’t have all of those requirements outlined. You’ve created a device where there’s no way to calibrate it, or there’s a part in your device that is going to need regular maintenance and it’s really difficult to access, so from a service standpoint you’ve missed something and you’ll have to go back and change things. 

I think it’s best to start after you have some sort of concept, or maybe the client has come to you with some sort of rudimentary prototype. That helps you identify here’s my user needs, here’s my product requirements, I have a handle on that. If you move forward and iterate on the prototype without design controls, you’ll probably end up with something close to the final device but have to go back and generate all of the documentation.

Julia

How do you balance the paperwork side of design controls, getting it done and not letting it all live in your head, but as a mechanical engineer getting the actual design done. Working on it, testing it, and evaluating it. I think maybe there’s a perception that design controls are taking away progress of the device design.

Grace

It has to be hand in hand, where you’re making progress on both sides, not just focusing on the design and you’ll do documentation later. It really impacts the timeline when you have to go back and do all of the documentation when you weren’t trying to keep up with it throughout the design.

Britt

Or even adapting. We had a client recently that came and they designed a device to fit in your hand, and it does that beautifully. Then when they actually put it in the field to test it out, the nurses were actually putting it in their coat pockets because it’s a small device. Now when the nurse bends over, it will fall out because it’s kind of slippery and it’s meant to be a remote control type feel.

We’re helping them come up with a more durable solution now that we understand that they’re not going to hold this and walk around the hospital. They’re going to put it in their scrubs pocket or they’re going to put it on a cart and their cart is also slippery. So then just working with clients to adapt their products and then think through the next risk associated with that. That’s some of what we have to do.

Julia

What does the process look like at Bur for implementing design controls?

Grace

Well, we start by generating a development plan. We work with a client and define the purpose of the device, provide a basic overview of what we want to create, and we break up the design into phases so we have a more manageable timeline. It’s an easier way to manage budget as well. 

Then identify any regulatory standards you want to comply with, that’s really important. Then working with clients to outline the needs of the user, and then after that’s defined including engineers to create product requirements. Think internal hardware, like pumps and sensors, anything that’s important to create a functional device. 

Once you have your user needs and product requirements laid out, you’re going to move on to risk assessments where we’ll identify potential hazards or harms associated with user operation of the device. So, how are you preventing unnecessary exposure to laser or electric shock which is very important to demonstrate to the FDA.

Once all of those inputs are defined, we’ll go into design and development. Now I’ve got a strong foundation that I can create my design, making sure I’m taking into account the user needs and the product requirements. 

Julia

Having those requirements actually takes some of the fatigue out of making decisions; when you give yourself those guardrails, you can more easily say, “Oh, do we need an app or do we not need an app? Is the user population actually going to use this?” It takes the fatigue out of it, makes it easier to make decisions, and that also helps the timeline.

Grace

I think it helps to involve the whole team, too, so the teams aren’t siloed. You don’t want to say your firmware needs to do this, your mechanical engineer needs to do this, your electrical engineer needs to do this. Once you have an overall idea of how you need your device to work, I think it helps cross-functional teams communicate better so you can move faster in design and development.  

Throughout the process you’re doing design reviews, so have I checked all of the boxes for my requirements? You may change things from your design review. After that you’re going to generate your design control matrix, which is the big document that links all of the user and clinical needs and product requirements and risk to the design characteristics of your device. Say the user needs to use the device in a wet environment, now I need to create a sealed enclosure with a gasket to prevent water ingress. 

From that big design control matrix document, that’s how you generate all of your verification and validation protocols. This is really the final step in your design, you’ve made it, you’re almost there to submit regulatory approval. You have to test your device and make sure you’ve met all of those outputs. 

Like I said before, if you’re trying to create a device that’s going to be used in a wet environment then you would send the device off to a third-party ingress testing. They’re going to test your device, open it up and make sure there isn’t any water inside. 

Julia

How does Blur’s design control system adapt to different levels of technology with different levels of risk?

Grace

Taking risk into account from the beginning of the project so you’re not designing blind to any harms to the user or the clinical environment. So, having a risk management plan to outline what steps you’re going to take throughout the design controls process to identify and mitigate risk and determine who’s responsible for what tasks along the way. Then doing a risk analysis where you’re breaking down every risk associated with the device or process by identifying the intended use or misuse and then the hazards or hazardous situations, and assigning a probability of occurrence. What’s the likelihood of  a fire hazard or electric shock to the user? Taking all of that and putting controls in place to mitigate the risk. Say for a fire hazard, I know I need a fire-rated enclosure. For electric shock, I know I need to design the housings to prevent the user from being exposed to the electronics if they drop the device, things of that nature.

After device V&V, we can always go back and see if there is any residual risk by completing a benefit-risk analysis and maybe modify the intended use if necessary. Throughout the design process you’re conducting risk reviews, writing reports, and ensuring the final design is a low-risk device that is safe for the intended use.

Julia

Having seen a risk document or two, they can be super detailed. How do you know what to put in there, how do you determine that?

Grace

That’s a good question, I think it takes a team to fill out a risk analysis. You’re going to have to lean on the client because they’re going to know more about the environment it’s being used in. 

Also, not just having one person do the risk analysis is very important; one person is only going to think about a subset of the risk, and maybe they’re only going to think about the risk from the electrical standpoint or from the mechanical design standpoint. Having as many eyes as you can look at the risk analysis is how you get to a good document that everyone is happy with, including the FDA.

Julia

We’ve talked a lot about mechanical design and device development on the physical side of things. Can you tell me a little bit about how software and firmware is handled within our design controls?

Grace

Our approach is to separate the software and firmware from the hardware. Software and firmware gets its own development from the outset of the design. 

Once the user needs and product requirements have been established and you’ve created your software and firmware, you generate a product specifications document. You basically describe the functionality of the software and firmware to show how you’ve written it and accomplished those functions. 

Obviously we’re going to have separate V&V protocols to test against the inputs and show that you’ve met your requirements. All of the software and firmware releases are documented; every time you release software and firmware on the device it’s a heavily documented process. Everything is under controls. 

Julia

If you were to sum up design controls and the importance of it in a couple of sentences, tl;dr, what would you say?

Grace

Design controls are important for knowing how the device should be designed and what features you need to include to mitigate risk. 

We talked about having water ingress protection, or being able to pass a drop test to prevent electric shock, or having a fire-rated enclosure so there’s no fire hazard to the user or use environment. 

Ensuring that you’ve included everything that a user needs to successfully use your device and ultimately benefit from the use of your device, because that’s what medical device development is all about. 

For more information on Medical Device Design and Development.

Julia

Anthony, can you tell me about yourself? How did you come to work for Blur and what do you do here?

Anthony

I’m a mechanical engineer and industrial designer here at Blur. I work on both of those, so designing the outside of the products as well as the internals and any combination in-between.

Britt

How many years of experience do you have in both of those?

Anthony

Maybe three or four years of purely just industrial design, and then I went back for a mechanical engineering degree after that. My jobs have all been a combination of mechanical and industrial design. So, maybe 13 years doing both combined.

Britt

That’s great.

Julia

What would you say made you decide to go back to school? You started as an industrial designer, went to school for that, and you had four years of experience doing just industrial design. What was that turning point for you that made you say, “Yeah, I think I want to go back to school for mechanical engineering?”

Anthony

I don’t know if there was a turning point. I had considered it when I was in school the first time. I didn’t want to give up on industrial design completely, I like doing both, I just don’t like to be pigeon-holed as just doing industrial design and styling stuff. It just made sense. I’ve always been interested in the internals as well and the development of an idea; more than what it should be but also the nuts and bolts of how to implement the idea.

Julia

Not just making it look pretty, but does it work?

Anthony

Yeah, yeah. It’s an interesting thing that you say that because industrial design can be a lot of things. It’s not always just making it look pretty. 

Britt

That is kind of a cool thing to think about. Industrial design everybody does think of, you know, the creative, the look, the sleek aspects of it. You’re right, there’s also asking if it’s ergonomically correct, how easy is it to use, etc.

Anthony

Yeah, I think that’s a big part of what we do here. It’s a medical product, so the look of it is not typically the driver of the product itself. I mean, it’s important, but a lot of times you have to have something that’s easily usable and meets all the product specs and requirements. It may need to look like a medical device or a well-planned product, or easily usable without having an instruction booklet tell you how to use it. All those are variations on the look, how to design it so somebody can actually use it. 

Julia

And that goes back to something we talked about in Dustin’s interview. He was saying that user needs really need to be the foundation of the product requirements. Everything needs to be traceable back to what the user needs it to do, and that’s the same for industrial design and mechanical design. At the end of the day, if you’re designing something that’s not usable by the person who’s supposed to use it, then you need to start rethinking. 

Anthony

Absolutely, and it’s going to depend on what industry you’re in for what you need industrial design for. There’s industries that really just care about the way something looks, where it’s purely fashion. You may be more budget constrained on your product so you care more about how cheaply this thing can be manufactured. Or, it could be a combination of usability and various facets coming together. You kind of have to balance how much to go into it; what’s the trade off between aesthetics, usability, cost of manufacturing, and everything else there.

Julia

Did getting a degree in mechanical engineering impact the way that you approach industrial design or change it in any way?

Anthony

It did change it. Previously I was able to hand off a design to a mechanical engineer, so I would develop what I wanted it to look like, maybe the skins on the outside and do all of that in CAD, and hand it off to somebody else who did all of the bosses and ribs and mechanisms. I do have to be a little bit more cognizant of how I’m designing it so my pathway isn’t a mess. 

I know the balance so I fight with myself while doing it, whereas previously that interaction was external between you and somebody else and give and take. Some of these products, it’s more of an internal argument with myself and determining the priority of a mechanism versus what I want it to look like. It’s a balancing act. 

I don’t always have the right answer for it and sometimes it may be easier to do that with somebody else. It’s great being part of a team where you can bounce these ideas off of somebody else, but I think I’ve had to be a little bit more aware of that next step that is handing off. 

Julia

What are some misconceptions that people have, either about mechanical engineering or industrial design, that you want to correct?

Anthony

So people typically think of industrial design as just styling, but in school you learn a lot more than that. You learn competitive product analysis, you learn doing some of these ergonomic studies. Obviously, styling is a big component of that. You learn a lot of different manufacturing processes and other things as well, things that people may typically think of being more mechanical engineering. 

It’s surprising a lot of times what people do learn in mechanical engineering versus industrial design. Every educational background is different, so where I went to school was more math based, based on the underlying theory of what was going on with the system. So, fluid dynamics or heat transfer or mechanics, whatever that may be. It wasn’t really practical knowledge in terms of manufacturing stuff, it was the equations that govern things underneath it all so that you could maybe apply that to a real world problem when you need it.

Julia

For your mechanical engineering degree?

Anthony

Yes, for mechanical engineering. For industrial design, I had a lot of classes and background on manufacturing type stuff. So, I learned thermoplastic processing, mold-making and injection molding, processes on sheet metal, die-casting, and a bunch of different production types. That’s really come in handy, having that background. When you get into this niche of product development people expect the mechanical engineers to have a lot of that knowledge from going to school. They think, “Oh, you’re a mechanical engineer, you must know about this stuff.”

Julia

Right.

Anthony

It’s really theory based. You may come into a situation like this where you learn more practical knowledge about manufacturing something from industrial design than you did from engineering. 

Britt

I’ve always been interested from an industrial design perspective how you handle clients when they really want something from an aesthetic perspective that just really won’t work or it won’t meet some requirement they’re looking at. How do you talk them through that and get them to where they need to be?

Anthony

This goes back to one of the differences between mechanical engineering and industrial design, which is the process. As far as mechanical engineering goes, in school you learn about this [process] that’s like, “Okay, I’m looking for this answer, I go through this process, I end up with this answer.” Whereas industrial design is very much a different process. In school I was like, why do I need to go through this whole process? Who cares about the process, the answer is the important part. Why do I need to do all of these derivative designs, all these iterations? It’s not super important.

Today I’ve realized the importance of that. A lot of times these multiple iterations will be great for showing the trade offs to a client. You can do exactly what they want and show them that they can do this, but it will cost them “X,” it’s gonna be way more expensive to develop. It may look great, but you’re gonna have problems with these human-interaction components of it or something like that. So, you can come up with these multiple different solutions to it and walk them through each one of them. 

Maybe I have a different idea of what I think the solution should be, but present it back to them, let them choose. If they really do think this is the most important part, that’s great because they typically know what is the important part of the solution. Earlier in my career I thought maybe I knew what was important, but I’ve come to realize that the client knows more than I do about whatever they’re doing. They’re the expert in that. 

In terms of what they need for their solution, pose it back to them. Make sure that they’re making an educated assessment of what goes into a solution, and then if they’re still set on it that’s the right path to go. 

Britt

That’s great, so we partner with them. Kind of help them get to the best solution for them.

Anthony

Exactly.

Julia

So in that iterative design process, how do you let go of the designs you create and be willing to let them go in the trash? I feel like that’s something that I would really struggle with. 

Anthony

That was a problem when I was younger. I’ll remember this forever: My very first studio professor, my very first project we had, we do these designs, we post them up on the wall, we do a critique of them, or the professor would. The students join in and talk about the good things and the bad things about all of these designs, and I remember being absolutely hurt the first time she did this. There were kids crying in my studio because you had never really had this honest assessment of what you had done. I think she was particularly harsh, maybe compared to some of the other professors, but I think it was a really good lesson and I appreciate it much more now than I did then. 

There is some benefit in being hung up on what you think is the right solution. Maybe your first or second idea is a pretty good solution; you may want to give that more attention. But, at the same time, you can’t fall in love with them. There’s probably a better solution on your fifth attempt, or your seventh attempt, or something like that. If you fall in love with that and you can’t clear your mind of it, you basically keep drawing or modeling the same solution, you’re never going to move onto a different solution or path. 

Julia

What do you do when you find yourself in that spot, where you feel like there’s more but you can’t get the idea out of your head?

Anthony

That’s a really tough question. I think that happens to everyone. What I’ve done is I’ve looked for people that have flashcards or brainstorming processes. I’ve pulled some together over the years of doing this, and I have a list of things I can look at to spark a different idea. Like, make it smaller. Make it bigger. Can you split out the functionality? Can you combine the functionality? Can you reuse a component? Can you do something recycled? All these different things that you can do, I have lists of all of these prompts that I can refer to if I’m stuck or just want to think about it a different way. 

Julia

Where do you draw inspiration from, and if you could describe your style how would you describe it?

Anthony

It’s tougher these days, I feel like I do more mechanical engineering than industrial design. When I did more industrial design I had a reference of pictures that I appreciated, whether it be old stuff or new stuff. 

There was a period of time when I really liked machined metal pieces. So, I did a lot of design that was based off of the details you might see in machined metal pieces. You might see a chamfer or holes for screw heads and things like that. Obviously you don’t have to have that for a cast or injection molded piece, but it still is an interesting aesthetic. 

If you do something like that, sometimes it looks even more powerful because you’re used to seeing it in this reference of being a metal piece. It goes back to the design thing, where maybe you’re not looking for the most beautiful thing but there is some kind of criteria you’re trying to meet with your design itself. Maybe you want it to look robust, or well thought-out, or minimal. 

There are a bunch of things that can cause someone to buy a product or interact with a product well. It might not be that you want it to be beautiful, you just want it to be durable, or whatever that word is that makes a person think or realize that there’s more to this product than what meets the eye.

Julia

I noticed you started picking out adjectives. When you start designing a product, do you pick out an adjective and then decide, “I want it to meet this”?

Anthony

I have in the past, but I don’t typically do that now. Typically it’s not a deliberate act to pick out an adjective; as I’m drawing it I might think that it’s not quite the right aesthetic and I want it to look smoother or curvy or more user friendly. 

For a lot of stuff we do here, I don’t want it to look tough. If a user is interacting with a device you want it to look comfortable, or you want it to look user friendly. A lot of those don’t mean completely smooth, but there’s going to be some aspect of, “This thing needs to look like it can fit in your hand” and not just be “strength” or “rigid” or something like that. Probably not an intentional selection of adjectives, but there’s a flow there.

Britt

What’s your favorite project at Blur that you’ve had to work on, or a challenge you’ve had to work through that you’re excited about?

Anthony

There’s one in particular where we did kind of the medical device aspect of it and a bunch of other components to it. We did packaging, we started on the software internally, and things like that. I mean, I didn’t do the software, I don’t know how to do that.

Julia

Yeah, me either.

Anthony

But, it was nice being able to design all the components to go together. Sometimes we may just do the hardware or the hard goods and there may be other aspects of the system that integrate with that that you don’t get to control. But this time all those pieces came together, we did them in-house, and where we arrived with that was a really nice, integrated solution where everything looked like it went together. It fits together nicely.

Julia

I know the project you’re talking about. Yeah, that was very satisfying being able to say we really took our time to make sure that the needs of the user were being met in every aspect of it, not just the device portion.

Anthony

I know I was talking about the design process. You develop iteratively, you make progress by making prototypes, you don’t settle on your first solution. You hold it as a truth as a designer because that’s what’s ingrained in you at school, and I think that’s something that we’re pretty good about here. 

As a company we make sure we roll through the prototypes, you learn by failing in each prototype, and you iteratively improve.

Julia

Yeah, it is very much part of our culture. Fail fast, we want to fail fast because failure isn’t a bad thing, it’s where we learn. If you can translate that word failure into learning, then you can take those learnings and move them into whatever the next solution is. It’s just this snowball effect until you arrive at whatever the final solution is actually going to be.

Anthony

It’s a lot easier now. When I first started off you had to send your part off to some prototype house, and a few days later you’d get back this SLA or SLS part. You pay a bunch of money for it and you hope that it’s right. Now everyone has 3D printers in-house. We have FDM and SLA printers. It’s just so easy to come up with a concept, print it out, test it out the next day, have it in your hand, and iterate off of that. 

That was a problem when I was first starting out, you didn’t have access to getting this thing printed off immediately and trying it out. You basically had to plan to have this thing work right, you take your best shot at it, you hope everything is good, and you send away for it, and you get it back. You didn’t have that many cycles of the iterative process. 

That’s a really great part about having all of these printers on hand; I think the process has improved just because of the technology.

Britt

You can fail fast, you can fail the same day.

Anthony

There have been times when I’ve done that, especially with a small part. You put it on the printer in the morning, it takes a couple of hours to print, you clean it off, put it in your assembly, you make changes to your part, recycle it and you’re going again by the next morning. You’re printing it overnight so you can do multiple rounds a day too. It’s really useful.

Britt

It has been nice here because if we have a long lead on something, for the most part we can find a short-term solution in-house.

Anthony

And it’s expected that there will be some iteration. Your first solution is not going to be a perfect one, and it just takes time. We want to go as fast as possible, but that doesn’t mean settling on the first solution or expecting that first solution to be the right one. It’s probably the wrong one if you go down that path. 

If you pick the first solution, settle on it, do all of your engineering, everything else around that first solution, it takes a lot of time. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into product development, so it takes a lot of time. If you pick that first solution and make sure all of your drafts are right, make sure your bosses are right, make sure your screws and inserts fit, and everything works in the assembly including packaging, it takes a long time. If you come back to it a couple of months later and say, “This doesn’t do everything we needed for it to do and the users aren’t really happy with this,” you’d have to redo all of that work.

On the front end, doing that iteration and the process is where it really pays off. You don’t get too far down the line where you have a massive amount of work to redo at the end; no one’s happy when you do that. If you run with the idea early on maybe you look great for a little while, but when you have to backtrack no one is happy about that. 

Julia

Yeah, client’s never happy about that.

Anthony

No, they’re never happy about that.

Julia

What’s some advice you would give someone who is just starting off in mechanical engineering or industrial design?

Anthony

It really depends what you want to do as far as mechanical engineering goes, that’s such a broad topic. For product development, it’s maybe just tear-downs if you’re naturally inquisitive about how something works. The more solutions you see the better you’re going to be at it. If you’re trying to work in a vacuum without ever having seen these solutions before, everything is going to have to be created from scratch which is really difficult. I mean, it’s difficult to do once, you don’t want to have to do that for everything you’re designing. 

So, product tear-downs for mechanical engineers, the other one is application guides. Everyone wants you to use their product, so make sure to look for their application guide. Injection molding, metal casting, everything under the sun has them; make good use of them. I have a library of hundreds of these application guides on these different processes or materials. It’s easier to just refer back to the file that I have rather than having to scour the internet to hopefully find what I need next time.

Julia

Right. 

Anthony

Industrial design: never stop looking at inspiration. It’s always changing. 

I feel like you can typically identify an industrial designer by the work that they do, there’s kind of a style to it. I don’t know if I’ll ever grow out of the style that I have, but at the same time I think it changes over the course of years. It’s like music, you get bored with one thing so it migrates away. You find something else interesting and you pull those accents into your work. There are definitely visual styles and you maybe combine that into what you do. 

Not working in a vacuum in terms of references; they teach you that in school, but make sure you do that in your work life too.

View some of our industrial design examples.

How do you research effectively when beginning to prototype a solution? How do you know you’ve done enough research to troubleshoot a problem?

In this episode, we’ll chat with Erin, one of our R&D engineers, about her process of finding the best solution through rapid, iterative prototyping. 

 

Julia

Erin, thanks for being with us today. Tell me what you do here.

Erin

I’m a research and development engineer. I’ve been here a little over four years.

Julia

And you started as an intern, right?

Erin

Yeah, not counting the summer I started as an intern, I guess that would be four and a quarter years then.

Julia

Talk about that research part of research and development and prototyping, because I know that’s a lot of what you do here.

Erin

Yeah, definitely! As an R&D engineer a big part of my job is doing research, especially at the start of a project. We’ll come in, the client will have an idea for a concept but there’s a lot of research that has to be done to figure out what components you need, how to source those components, sourcing materials, and finding people that can produce the parts we need. I do a lot of research in my day to day job.

Britt

You’re about to do some research, where do you go first? Google?

Erin

Yeah, I mean honestly, most of the time Google. I try to start out with a broad search and cast a wide net. I’ll see what key words I see popping up a lot and use that to modify my search, and then I seek out experts, whether that’s someone at Blur or someone out in the field for their help. I also keep a log of every person I’ve contacted, what suggestions or notes come out of that conversation. That way I have a log of everything I’ve done and I can go back to that research, or if someone else at Blur is researching a similar part or concept I can go point them to that. 

Britt

It’s great that everyone seems to be creating these libraries that you can reference instead of recreating the wheel every time.

Julia

I think it shows just how collaborative we are too. The resources that we find or the processes we use, it’s not just about us and getting our work done, it’s about saying, “I did this and found it useful, let’s keep it so that someone else can use it because I know someone else is going to run into this problem at some point.”

Erin

Right. Someone else is going to need a camera, so let’s compile a list of all the cameras we’ve used so we don’t have to repeat that work on the next project. 

Julia

Yeah, definitely.

Britt

Do you ever have times where you’re having trouble finding data? Just altogether you can’t find any information, and how do you handle that?

Erin

Yeah, we definitely run into that more than we would like. I think that’s sort of where the testing and prototyping comes in. For instance, if we’re looking for a specific material property that we can’t find, can we get the material in and prototype something ourselves? Is there a simulation we can run with CAD software, find a similar material, and see if that gets us close enough? If we can have a simulation and a test that point towards the same answer, maybe that takes the place of whatever online answer we’re looking for. 

Julia

How often would you say we run simulations here to help in that research process?

Erin

I say we do it on almost every project, whether it’s a finite element analysis (FEA) or a flow simulation. I feel like I’ve done that with a lot of the projects I’ve worked on. We’re always 3D printing components of a device and testing those before we’re going to full scale production. 

Julia

What would you say in your research process is the most challenging part and what do you find the most rewarding?

Erin

I’d say the most challenging part of the research process is if it’s a really specialized component and there’s not a lot of people who make it or know a lot about it, you’re really relying on people to respond to your cold calls and emails. That can be challenging sometimes. I’d say the other big challenge is when a part has a lot of requirements, so it needs to be low cost, high lead time, really durable, juggling all of those different requirements can be a challenge. Or, if you’ve thought you found a new part that would work and a new requirement gets added, you have to go back to your spreadsheet that you’re keeping of all your options and reevaluate that. 

Britt

Yeah, I was going to ask how do you manage that with a client? They’re adding new requirements, how are you able to communicate with them that this new requirement means extra time or extra cost?

Erin

I really think you just have to be transparent with them and say, “We can switch to this part, that’s not a problem, but that may mean the lead time changes, the overall cost of the device changes.” If you’re switching from a smaller part to a bigger part, that housing that it lives in will probably have to change and that part now is going to get more expensive. Understanding that changing that one part can have a ripple effect is important to make sure the client understands as well.

Julia

I think that’s a super important part of presenting anything like that to a client. Having all of those details worked out so you don’t just say, “We can’t do that.” Instead say, “If we do that, here’s what’s going to happen” and then letting them make the decision. At the end of the day it’s their decision to make, and maybe they don’t mind that it’s going to cost more and they really want that specific part or to use that specific process. Definitely make sure you’re getting them all of the information they need to make that decision. 

Erin

Yeah, I agree.

Britt

When you’re first starting to prototype with a new client, what are you go-to initial questions to get the ball rolling?

Erin

When we kick off a design, the thing that I care about most is what function it needs to serve. I’m not as concerned with the overall size it needs to fit within, or if it has to meet all of these certifications. I’m most concerned with function at first. After we have an initial design, the next things I’ll look at are the material it should be made out of and the quantity we’re looking at. If we only need three for some demos we’ll probably 3D print it, if we need one thousand we’ll be injection molding it. And then past that, it’s good to look at usability. Does it need to have a handle, does it now have to fit inside this other part, what constraints does that mean? Also, being aware of color, does it need to be transparent, does it need to be waterproof, biocompatible, food safe, all of that. Those are all important to know, but they’re not the first things I worry about when starting a design.

Julia

How do you know or make a decision that , “Okay, I have done enough research to confidently go with the solution to the problem I’m experiencing in this design.”

Erin

It depends on the test. A test is targeting a specific function, whether it’s usability or waterproofing. Typically there’s a sequence of tests. I’ll start small, like if it’s how two parts interface I’ll just prototype and 3D print those two parts cropped to where that interface is. Once I have that working I’ll print the full-size parts, make sure that works, share it with the client, and have the users handle it and make sure they don’t have any complaints. Past that, what are the differences between the part you’ve prototyped and the production part? If one’s 3D printed and one’s injection molded, is there going to be any difference between them that would cause it not to seal properly, or be waterproof, and making sure you’re confident that despite those changes the design you have will still work. I think that’s when you can check that box that testing’s passed.

Julia

Getting prototypes in the hands of users is so important because, as we have experienced many times, they will give you feedback you haven’t even thought of. 

Erin

For sure, yeah. The earlier the better.

Britt

So you’ve been at Blur for four and a quarter years, what’s something you wish you would have known your first year that you could advise others?

Erin

I’d say just not being afraid to ask people questions. Everyone at Blur is so smart and so capable, so if you get stuck and you can’t solve a problem, don’t spend time just noodling away on it yourself. Go take a walk around the office and bounce some ideas around with people because someone is going to have an answer and it’s going to be a lot quicker than if you were just to sit there alone in your corner of the office.

Julia

Yeah, muddling through it on your own. 

Erin

Right.

Julia

What was the most intimidating part of our machine shop when you first started?

Erin

It’s not really part of the machine shop, but the casting-molding station was really intimidating. At first, just because there were so many components and steps to the process. I was so worried about messing things up. You have to measure stuff initially, make sure you have the A and B components at their correct ratios, de-gas it and pour it into the mold. Make sure there aren’t any bubbles and put it in this pressure pot; make sure that’s all sealed correctly, which always freaked me out. Then you just have to wait a couple hours until it finishes molding. You don’t know if you’ve failed or not until you take it out.

Julia

I’m sure there were times when you took it out and you were like, “Aww, dang.”

Erin

Yeah, like last month. I had a part that I thought didn’t need mold release, which helps it come out of the mold easily. I went to take it apart and it didn’t move. I was trying to use all these tools to pry it open and it was just chipping away at the tools. I had to just throw it away and start over, so now I use mold release

Julia

As you’re prototyping and testing, what parts of our labs do you use most frequently?

Erin

I use the 3D printer probably the most; right now it’s every single day and I’m kind of hogging it. The laser cutter I use fairly often, that’s really handy when you have larger assemblies that you have to build really fast. I work a lot with the UV cure adhesives, so I am using our UV light pens pretty often. Those allow you to bond things together really quickly, and we have a whole bunch of different UV adhesives for different materials. 

I don’t venture into the machine shop with all of the blades very often. When I first started I was using a circular saw and I didn’t realize there was a safety so I revved it; Jeff was standing next to me and I think I really freaked him out. He was like, “Yeah, I’ll do that for you” and I said, “I think that’s probably a good idea.”

One part that took a lot of testing and troubleshooting and iterating on was we had these two components that had to interface and seal in two different chambers. We wanted that to be done in a single connection so that the user just had one piece they had to connect. We looked at a couple different ways of doing that, either a press-fit, a snap-fit, a press-fit that’s just plastic on plastic or silicone on plastic. 

So, I did a lot of prototyping back in the lab. I would print those two parts on our 3D printers, and really just segments of the parts to speed up the prints and save us some money as well. I’d just print a bunch of different interfaces and see how well they sealed. 

The silicone on plastic interfaces I would overmold the plastic with one of our silicones we have back in the lab and test those. We narrowed it down to three different options, and we’re working on getting each of those full-size parts printed to send to the client. They’ll evaluate each of the three designs and see if there’s one they really like, or if they like all three we’ll bring them to the users and see if there’s a favorite among the users. If there’s not a favorite among the users, we’ll just pick the one that we like the best and will be the easiest to manufacture. That’s been a lot of iterating on and time with the 3D printers and molding station, which has been a lot of fun.

Julia

The benefit to having this in-house prototyping capability is we can come up with a lot of ideas for how to do things. You were just saying you made so many… how many prototypes do you think you made?

Erin

There’s like a hundred different pieces on my desk right now. 

Julia

Exactly, we have all of these different ideas for how these two parts can fit together, but by being able to do this in-house and fairly quickly we can throw out the ones that don’t work.

Erin

And each part is really only about an inch big since I’m just cropping it to that interface, so it’s really not wasting too much material or time to get those printed.

Julia

How long would you say it took you from the time you started 3D printing these up until you had the three core ideas?

Erin

When I am working on it, I’ll print a couple designs one afternoon, test them the next morning, figure out what I don’t like about each design, make those changes, and get them back on the printer that afternoon. So, the iteration cycle is pretty quick. 

Julia

Thanks for coming on Erin and chatting with us.

Erin

Yeah, thanks guys, thanks for having me.

 

See examples of Finite Element Analysis, flow simulation and others in engineering analysis.