A year ago I was told that I needed to read and understand 13 (out of 67) company “Standard Operating Procedures” (SOPs).  Until that time, I had no comprehension of what an SOP was, and after I read through the towering stack, I still couldn’t figure out what they were, or why it was so important that I become familiar with them.  Let me rephrase this: it took me 3 valuable hours to read materials that I didn’t understand, but that were in theory supposed to help me do a better job as Director of Design Research.  As I began speaking to my colleagues across the company – those in Design, Manufacturing and Quality, for example, I learned that they too found them difficult to understand and follow.   Clearly, something had to change.

So you think you are ready to manufacture a device?  As the numerous near life-size cut-outs illustrate, a number of questions must be answered and worked on by various areas of expertise at Ximedica before our clients are ready to ship physical product out the door.  There is definitely more work than just assembling the parts of the device together!

For our recent MIX event we installed a presentation titled, Optimized Development along one of our corridors (featured in these photos).  It’s a graphic representation of how we use our processes and our people in helping our clients achieve their goals of getting their products to market quickly and safely.  

A short while ago, while attending the IDSA NED conference, CoCreate, I had the pleasure of watching a presentation by Ben Hopson. Hopson introduces himself as a “kinetic designer,” and throughout the presentation drives home the importance of maintaining design thinking through the aesthetics from the way it looks to the way it works. A product can be beautifully designed, perform wonderfully, but many times the mechanical aspects of it fall short of what could be a completely positive user experience.

To continue a theme that we’ve posted about in the past, here’s another example of data visualization I came across.  In this information graphic, created by Tommy McCall and David Bassett for the Technology Review, an overview of the sources and utilization of energy in the United States is shown.  Did you know that 45% of energy generated is wasted?