Product Design For Start-ups – Award winning by design.
We're really chuffed for our client SimpAlarm with a focus on Assisted Living Technology, having just won The Discovering Start-Ups competition.
Design Councils Report #LeadingByDesign
Only a few months away from the Design Council led 2014 #LeadbyDesign Design Summit. Which looks promising. The Design Council released Leading By Design as a PDF downloadable here.
But is it worth the read and are businesses buying the message?
TCT Additive Manufacture Trade show 2013 + Reveal on the Ultimaker 2
We managed to get an afternoon out of the office to visit the NEC for TCT Additive Manufacture show last week. It was our first time to TCT this year, however, first impressions were the industry show is changing. In many ways a coming together of aerospace standard scanning and printing systems and the Maker Faire / Hackspace type community.
Elon Musk on the future of design tools – Or Media Hype?
You will likely have heard of Elon Musk? Techcrunch referred to him as the worlds busiest rich dude / Mad scientist. In fact the video post taps into the concept of Elon as inspiring the directors of the movie Iron Man for his formula of High Rolling tech interests. We have a lot of respect for his achievements, he has certainly been productive in the technology sphere, in ways Branson and the like could dream of...
Techball short-listed for Innovation Lions finals
2013 has proved to be a good year for awards. We have had the pleasure of working with Sapient Nitro, Standard Chartered and Liverpool FC on the Techball. Since we last posted on Techball, the 90seconds to Anfield tour has rolled on. Over the summer Techball visited Sao Paulo and
Ultimaker spool bracket – now on Thingiverse
We know we have been talking desktop printing a little of late, however when we make parts available for download we thought we would share a simple and brief update here. We love the Ultimakers ability to allow us rapid validation of our CAD work , were very impressed with the materials Ultimaker supply also. However there is a plethora of ABS and PLA filament options out there to use from other suppliers. What we found however, is there is a large variation in the spool dimensions. We bought a spool that would not fit the standard bracket. So - we made one ourselves and here it is built only two hours later.
Our new Ultimaker 3D Printer & sharing designs via Thingiverse
We have always used rapid prototyping as part of our product development process. If we need high accuracy parts made from specific materials, then rapid CNC is the way we would prototype our developing CAD model. If material type is less important we may have chosen from various Rapid prototyping techniques, including SLS ( Selective Laser Sintering ) Parts fused by a laser from a bath of powdered plastic and SLA ( Stereolithography ) Parts activated in layers, by a laser in a bath of photo-active resin. These are all good in their own way, however the machines themselves can cost upto £50k and need constant work 24/7 to be cost effective, if used inefficiently that cost would go on to the customer, which we would never want. While we have world class resources in the UK and Far east for prototyping and small scale manufacture, as noted from our previous post, we were keen to have a desktop solution as part of the open source community for 3D printing. We went to the global community for their recommendation,
How is the future of 3D printing shaped by major corporations?
Unless you have been living on the dark side of the moon for the last 5 years, you probably know about the emergence of affordable 3D Printing. An early device to weigh in was actually developed just down the road from us at Bath University. The RepRap project was born out of a philosophy paper - the idea surrounding a machine that helps to build its progeny. RepRap was designed out of 3d printed parts, hence the device could produce "offspring". 3D Printing Significantly RepRap was a not for profit and open source movement, which has to be a significant factor in the explosion of the 3D printing enthusiast community, just run the term "3D printing" through Google Trends and you can see the explosion around 2011. We then saw many devices spring up as commercial start ups, apparently very much based on the RepRap, in particular the majority are based on "Fused Deposition Modelling" ( Imagine an inkjet printer that extrudes a tiny stream of hot plastic over a platform that drops away, as the part builds up the layers.)
We launched our shiny new website..
We thought our revitalised website design and branding refresh deserved a little coverage on the blog. We hope to gain a new level of interactivity with our site visitors. The new design we think is more in line with our brand values and the functionality of the site should make it
A new approach, low risk Product Development?
There is a visible shift in how new product start ups acquire intelligence on their target markets as well as the option to gleam customer input before setting out on their development cycle. We are starting to see an upturn in enquiries from start ups using the "Pretail" model. Enabling low
