Adept - Design that matters
Design and Prototyping
Form and function
Murray is a great believer that form should follow function, but, he says, good design involves more than that. Because industrial designers design products for the real world, they need to focus on user-centred designs that will also be profitable. They have to know why they are designing the "thing" and its target market. They must design the product so it can be manufactured in a timely, cost-effective way, and ideally, in an environmentally sustainable way. And, Muray Fenton says, designers must build-in the intangible quality of desirability.
"To me, there's two parts to it: engineers make things work, industrial designers add that touch of magic and desirability. To make something commercial, you have to create a good first impression in the eyes of the end-user. It's not decoration – it's something that creates an instant appeal. You have to come up with a shape that does everything you want it to but you also have to convey on first sight, in a second or two, a desirability."
Even for a piece of medical equipment? "Yes. It could look fantastic in pink or be transparent but it's got to look like a sound medical part with a history behind it."
Murray Fenton pondered the issue. He describes design as an "off and on" process, that proceeds "in bursts of success and periods of despair". He uses terms like intuition, inspiration, epiphany. "It's not a conscious thing. You can go off track and most of the time it doesn't work."
"A long time ago I saw a device that the Israelis had made to help control the flow of irrigation fluids to hillside vines in the desert." Their solution was to use a very fine capillary system that could be manipulated to create pressure differences through the system. Murray Fenton reasoned he could use a variation of the same approach.
"I tried to compress the tube [on the IV line] in such a way to create a capillary tube over a length to get better control." A number of prototypes, based on variations of the roller-clamp, were tried but nothing worked.
After mulling things over for a while, Murray came up with an alternative approach. Rather than design a control system that was built into an IV line, why not make a reusable line-compressing unit that attaches to the outside of the line? The up-front cost of such a device was higher than a disposable one, but it was reusable, and therefore would save money in the end. And because it attached to the outside
Working with a client
Clients/end-users also influence the design process: always at the beginning of a project, and usually through to its completion when they may file reports on the performance of the finished product.
According to Murray, the quality of most initial input varies wildly. "Some clients come in with an almost complete design. Others come into the factory with, say, a vacuum cleaner connected to a spray gun, wave their hands around, and say the finished product has to be about yea big."
Quite often an expert in their field will have a very clear view of what they want, but this is no guarantee the idea will be commercially successful. Very few ideas he is presented with are commercially viable, he says.
The inventor often has a very biased view of the value of his product. One in ten ideas are probably worth pursuing further and one in ten of those will be successful."
of an IV line, rather than being built into it, the device could be larger, simplifying the engineering involved. Adept employed a young designer to develop the idea and model different approaches.
"She tried all different things to compress a tube over a bigger length. For the best part of a year she made all these little prototypes and measured pressures, and finally came up with a curved shape that worked better than a flat shape and all the other options."
Modelling a key part of the design process, Murray believes. He remembers a client who ''played with bits of wire and springs'' and made 51 variations of an idea before presenting the refined prototype for development.
"The big secret is to make a bunch of rough prototypes. The rougher the better. If you make a rough prototype, it will probably teach you something. Or lead you into another prototype. But if you make a really good version you become wedded to it. It's hard to let go of something that you have put a lot of time and effort into. Whereas if you just make a cardboard model, you can let go. You have to be prepared to abandon things. When you start getting close to what appears to work, increase the accuracy. Home in on it."
"It was the same with this. We weren't very careful about sizes or dimensions. Some models were just bits of plastic pinched together in a vice."
After deciding they were on the right track, the Adept team produced more refined models in steel, a material that was easily machined to the very fine tolerances required by the capillary system. Finally, after deciding the design offered sufficient control, Murray and his team used a rapid prototyping machine to pre-produce a working model out of plastic.
"It looked pretty promising. We improved the design and got an engineer to refine the shapes on CAD, then we gave the full CAD design to Ray and said we reckon this will work."
At this stage, TradeMe founder Sam Morgan became involved and offered to fund the die-making required to produce the units on a commercial scale.
Choosing the right materials
Materials influence design. In the case of the flow controller, Murray and his team had to very carefully consider the properties of the plastics they used; besides being able to be worked to tolerances measured in microns, the plastic(s) chosen had to resist creeping under load.
"The selection of plastics was critical. We had to try and make something strong enough not to creep, very accurately, which is very, very hard to do with plastics. It was very important to use materials that gave us the properties we wanted. To get the efficiency of production and to get the strength, we had to use much thicker sections than we would have liked. Mechanically we stepped out on a limb."
Hands-on experience counts for a lot when deciding on materials. Murray Fenton remembers on another project discovering, after "playing around", that two particular plastics had an unexpectedly low friction against each other. A lot of alternative choices would have squeaked or bound. "They had a particular feel. It was just like magic, yet I've never seen anywhere else these two materials run together."
