Category: Fun

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Focus on Everything – How to Ace the Product Design Process

ET Highway
Extra Terrestrial Highway, Nevada, USA

Focus.  What does it mean?  I like to find the origins of words because it really helps in gaining a deeper understanding of the meaning.

Focus is a point of convergence.  Like the Extra Terrestrial Highway in Nevada almost goes to a point in the distance.   In Latin it literally means “Hearth, Fireplace“.  Which possibly stems from focusing the sun in a lens to a point hot enough to create a flame.  So how does this definition of focus apply to the design process?  A focus is knowing your end goal and aligning all aspects of the process to get you there.

Product design is a process.  I love product design.  I love to see and buy products that have good design.  I absolutely hate a poor design, especially when it would not have been that hard to make it great.  This is even harder to understand when you look at examples like the Ford Pinto Case.  The executives making decisions in this example actually valued human life as an expense that they could afford when compared to fixing a simple design flaw.  I know this is kind of the extreme, but to see a finished product that went through all the stages of the ideas and concepts, to engineering and development, through prototyping and manufacturing, to marketing and distribution, and to still have a poor design… that, my friends is infuriating to me.  How many eyes and hands did that poor design pass through?  How many people could have spoken up and put in their two cents and made a change?  How does this happen?

I think the answer lies in the process.  It is complex.  It is time oriented.  It deals with people from many walks of life.  Sometimes those people lose their focus, or maybe they are focusing on the wrong end.

Taking a road-trip is like this process.  One time I went on a road-trip through Rachel, Nevada. I felt the trip was long and rather boring.  I missed a lot of the tourist traps and other unique locations that can make for a better, more memorable experience.  I do not even remember why it took so long or where our final destination was.  Just like you may miss a great unique experience that you really needed to see (the A-Le-Inn in Rachel, NV is a great example), it is really in where your focus lies.  Bringing a product to market is very similar.  As it comes down to crunch time people tend to start accepting more and more of what they otherwise would change – they start to focus on just the end rather than the process.

This is where our focus should be – in the process.  Just like when you are on a road-trip, the fun happens when you focus on all the parts of the trip along the way rather than just getting somewhere as quickly as possible.  A friend and mentor of mine, Nelson Boren, once told me to “Focus on everything”.  I was not sure what he meant by this because in my mind it was the opposite of what focus means.  If you focus on everything in reality you are not focused on anything.  It was not till many years later that I finally understood what he meant.  I finally realized that it is possible to focus on everything with the proper team in place with a proper leader that defines the vision.  Each member of that team can focus on doing their job in line with the overall vision.  All these jobs and tasks can then be focused towards the vision.

In product design, there is always a better design.  Even if you think you have arrived, a product can always be improved.

A cousin of mine is a horse fanatic.  She loves everything about horses.  She has studied them, ridden them, has action figures, pictures, blankets, clothing, you name it.  She told me that when you are riding a horse (especially a trained horse), they will move in the direction you look.  The horse can sense the slightest movements and therefore it is important to look where you want the horse to go – not just pull the reigns in that direction.  You need a definite focus.

Back when I was in high school taking a Drivers Ed class, we practiced on what looked like glorified washing machines.  There was an overhead screen that displayed a rather boring simulator movie from a laser disk.  You turned your steering wheel when the car on screen started to turn or a red light would come on.  My drivers ed Teacher was also the German teacher, Herr Corry was his name.  His commentary was the best aspect of the class and is what I remember most.  He told us that “…when passing cars on the freeway and especially semi trucks, DO NOT LOOK AT THEM!”  “Oh wow, look at the size of those tires!?” “When driving always keep your focus on the road ahead of you.”  It is simple to get distracted when passing.  He went on to explain that when you look at a semi truck when passing, devastating history has taught us that you move towards it.

You move towards it.  Whatever you focus on you move towards.  Easy.  Or is it?  How does one determine the focus for a product?  Or a company?  Or a project?

It is simple:  Focus on Quality.

This is the answer to how to focus on everything.  By focusing on quality – it is no longer about the product or the design or the company.  IT is about quality.  Quality in every step of the process.  Quality in concept, quality in engineering, quality in manufacturing, quality in marketing, it all leads to a quality end product design to be proud of.  When you focus on quality the road-trip, though long, will be enjoyable. You will not want it to end.  You will find ways to always improve your process and product which will equal greater success and more opportunity.

Everything will align and fall into place if you make quality your overall goal and focus.

 

 

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Lego WALL•E


I am stoked that this set is finally going to be produced!  It was announced as the winner of the Lego Ideas competition: WALL•E

I think the Lego ideas platform is a fine example of excellent marketing and design.  It not only involves the user base of Legos but shows that the Lego company and brand cares about its customers and puts an emphasis on interaction and feedback.  It is a way to not only bring to market what people want to see, but also to include folks in the design process.  It is a great example of a crowd-sourcing idea that works very well for all involved.  It is a win-win situation.

I recently listened to the book Brick by Brick by David Robertson and Bill Breen.  It expounds on the details of how Lego almost went bankrupt until it changed its strategy and focused on making people their primary focus.   I enjoyed the book, and it brought many good ideas to the table to learn and implement.  This is partially why I decided to focus more on what I can give my customers rather than get from them.

It is interesting to see how such an amazing company like Lego was in dire straights only about ten years ago.  They sure have made a comeback and have diversified enough to remain interesting to young and old.   I will be purchasing the Lego WALL•E when it comes out!

I am excited by this Lego design and I think it’s an awesome toy.  Many creative minds went into designing the character Walle through sketch, animation, story and now Lego building.

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View of Summer

Summer 1995 I was ten years old.  The Summer was something of a dream to look forward to.  A dream of freedom. A dream of warmth.  A dream of long lazy days laying in the grass.  A dream.

Summer was like the epitome of being alive and acting on impulse and finding fun things to fill those endless days.  Summer was a blast.  Summer was filled fixing and riding bikes. Summer was filled with exploring the world around me whether it was the university nook and crannies or the mountains or desert.

All places were familiar and new at the same time.  There were the spots that were traveled often such as the penny candy store and the swimming pool that we traded cheez-its for entry.

Summer gradually turned from neverending days of exploring and wonder to passing quickly as if in a dream.  The days suddenly were gone and school was creeping up much too fast.

As I grew the feeling of summer changed.  It turned from wonder and freedom to striving for money and a job.  It turned to less freedom than school and eventually was no longer looked at as a dream.

At this point life started to speed up.  High school ended, college started, seeking money drove many decisions. Time kept whirling by.

I look to my children and oh how I wish that their summers could be extended indefinitely.  Wonder extended.  Joy extended. Freedom extended.  The time when money means less than experience.

I strive each day to return to that wonder and awe of those dreamy summer days.  Sometimes when I leave work I head out to the desert where there is only sagebrush and dirt and long trailing power lines.  I take the moment to capture pictures of toys and pursue my hobby.  These are the moments that feel again like the summer days of boyhood.

I take my boys hiking and we search for geocaches and I see the wonder and excitement in their faces and I feel again those days of summer.  I take them to the store with me and it is wonderful to feel their little excited wiggles and happiness that can not seem to escape them.  What a joy it is to have my kiddos.  I have found my return to summer.  I have found my return to dreams.  It is through my family that the days start to slow down and become fun again.

Life is a joy and every time is a wonderful reflection of our past experience.  I want my children to find the wonder in the world and seek to keep those experiences close so that they can make good choices based on them.

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Honk if parts fall off – Engineered Obsolescence

farm truck bokeh

I was thinking today about how many products seem to be designed with an expiration date.  Engineered obsolescence.

It is good to think about the life cycle of your product when designing, and is very important when it comes down to sourcing materials and marketing the end product.

What I do not like is when a product is purposefully designed to fail when it could perfectly function for far longer if the design were modified.  Popular Mechanics has some good examples in their technology article on the subject.

Whenever something fails I think of how it could have been designed differently.  I am reminded of my first truck in high school.  It was a faded yellow ’77 Toyota Pickup.  I had created an antenna from a coat hanger and was able to pick up hundreds of messy AM stations on the built in am radio.  I had a bumper sticker on the back stating “Honk if parts fall off”.   Ironically I actually lost that half of my bumper while exploring the west desert of Utah.

The truck was perfect for me because it worked just enough to keep me busy fixing it, but not too much of a problem that I would be eager to get rid of it.  This truck was a junker but still worked quite well.  Whenever I think of Toyota I think of a perfect model company to follow in practice and design.  They make their product useful indefinitely through sound and applied engineering.  They focus on quality as their business plan.

I think the direction where most of our economy is headed now is towards more quality and less junk.  The sharing economy has to have products that are designed well to last a lifetime and possibly generations.

There are many products that do require obsolescence – take electronics for instance.  Especially computers.  They need to be updated to match modern technology which doubles every two years.

But when all is said and done the best business plan really is quality.

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Building Lego is Work we Love


As a kid I thoroughly enjoyed building Lego.  I would work hard doing random things to try and make some extra spending money – which generally went to Lego sets.

I spent many summers traveling out to the mine with my grandfather.  We would ride the backhoe up some haphazard switchbacks he had scraped in the side of a steep colluvial fan.  Sometimes my grandfather would have us switch sides and basically use us as ballast so the backhoe would not slip.

I spent many long hours on a ladder leaned against the cliffs.  I would carry a three foot hammer drill up as high as I could get it and spend 20-45 minutes per drilled hole.  The difficult thing was the cliff was only a foot away.  In order to hold the hammer drill I would have to lean back two feet and hold that position while trying to maintain some kind of pressure.

Once we had made Swiss cheese of the cliff face we would then stuff each hole with dynamite and C4 detonation cord.  My grandfather carried a blasting cap inside his pocket – tinkling with his Wriggleys gum and prospector lens.  He really was an old-time character.  He would take a stick of dynamite and break it in half over his knee.  Then he would dig out the sawdust and nitroglycerin innards with his trusty old timer pocket knife.  He would then tape a blasting cap on the end of the detonation cord and shove it into the hole.  Electrical tape it right and use the end of a broken shovel to ram it down into the hole.

I just imagined how if the cliff blew, I would only hear a slight muffle and then there would be complete and utter blackness.

I mention mining with my grandpa because it was an adventure (We mined Alabaster).  It was a way to truly feel alive.  And that’s how I earned a lot of my spending money that went to Lego.  I loved how each set was created out of so many pieces that had the possibility to be anything I could imagine.  The possibilities were endless…  And so were the options I created to make money. From mining to selling cherries with my dog, there was always something to get me a few bucks in my pocket.

I have since looked back on my childhood and I realized that my days were full of work I enjoyed.  It was fun, creative, and hard.  But it never really felt like work.  I know have boys of my own and I have introduced them to the addiction of building Lego.  Lego is a toy I’ll gladly buy for them (and myself).  I have had many odd jobs from inventory to switch gear design over the past fifteen years but my favorite has been the hardest work that does not feel like work.

I have spent the past fifteen years designing and growing my Wowflutes until it has become my main focus.  I am passionate about making products that can be enjoyed, and ones that never get old.  Like Lego.

My goal with Wowflutes is to show that you can love what you do and be successful to.  I feel that too many folks are focused on earning money as their primary goal.  This is not a bad thing, but what they do not know is that the most successful individuals are those who are doing what they love.  The work does not feel like work but rather play, just like those long hours spent in my childhood working, playing and building Lego.

(see more of my Toy Photography)

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Ideas are Things

This Blog is devoted to awesomely designed toys.  I define toys rather loosely to include dual-functionality products that have a fun aspect to them and could be considered toys for the bigger kids (myself).

I absolutely love to inspect and admire well designed products.  I also really enjoy toys.  They make life fun for everyone.  Who does not have a toy that they played with and remember most from childhood?  My favorite toy growing up was Lego because of all the possibilities from just a simple set of snapping bricks.

Some folks think that when you grow up you should not play with toys anymore because they are for children…  Well, to be brutally honest, they can go be sad grownups who work their lives away hoping to save for some kind of retirement so they can enjoy toys again.

Toys do not just appear out of nowhere.  They are being designed and created and tested and manufactured using highly detailed engineering techniques and practices which include various high-tech technologies in manufacturing and design.  It never ceases to amaze me when I look at a clever toy such as an action figure or puzzle that has numerous joints and detailed parts.  Each one of those parts were thought of and sketched out then taken through the conceptual design phase.  Then being created individually inside an injection mold and assembled with skill to achieve the proper movements and quality.

Through my experiences as a product designer I have learned every aspect of this process.  My own cool toy – the Swirl Wowflute has been such an enjoyable experience to work on.  It has been in the research and development phase for nearly fifteen years and may not ever leave this phase – there are always ways to improve upon an existing design.  I find it rather interesting when I compare some of my year old handmade Swirl Wowflutes with newer ones I made last week.  They are completely different!?  I did not intentionally change the design, but it gradually morphed into what works better and better.

I finally decided to make a manufactured version of the Swirl Wowflute in 2012 as part of a University capstone project.  I spent many long hours attempting to use Autodesk Inventor to make a digital replica of my popular handmade flutes.  I look at the design process as a form of art – even when you are designing a manufactured product.  That product was a concept, an idea – that suddenly becomes tangible in the real world.  This is the purpose of art, is it not?  Producing some kind of physical product from an idea.

I got to use the $10,000 3D printer on my project to print out prototypes for testing.  In this capstone project I was not able to produce a working prototype that was tuned because the time was limited in class.  I did get a functional prototype that whistled though and played it as part of a presentation.  It was not enough for me to just make something that was just there.  I like interaction, and dual-functionality.  I wanted an end product that would build on someones creativity.

Onward and upward.  After I graduated college I had the desire to make this manufactured Wowflute a reality.  I could see the prototypes that were once just simple ideas in my hand – it gave me a sense of excitement and awe.  Ideas truly are things!  It was an ah-ha moment I will not easily forget and it’s worth repeating – Ideas are things.

During my final semester at Southern Utah University I had decided to throw out all my required classes and took what I wanted to learn about.  I took a marketing class from a talented Professor Ellen Treanor who knew how to make a subject interesting and exciting.  I always looked forward to her classes.  One class she introduced us to a website called Kickstarter.  The opportunites I saw almost made my head explode!  I saw the potential to make the manufactured Wowflute a reality in a simple project based platform.  After graduation I took a boring job to make ends meet all the while selling my handmade Swirl Wowflutes on the side.  I soon felt the urgency to quit my well paying salaried + commission job and pursue the dream of bring my Wowflutes to a much larger audience.

I acquired some investments from an awesome friend of mine and started on the process in making a quality manufactured version.  I spent the next five months finding a manufacturer and a product designer who knew how to design for injection molds.  I created a high resolution prototype using the SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) method and tried it out.  It worked well but was way out of tune.  I asked my designer to make the walls thicker and the holes 25% larger.  This would effectively reduce the chamber size and increase the change between holes.  I had another SLS prototype made and to my great astonishment – it sounded better than expected!  It was in tune perfectly.  The many years of making the handmade Wowflute (30,000 of them) had paid off.

I then took that prototype and ran with it on kickstarter.  My kickstarter project was a success and the Tritan Wowflute was brought to life.  This did not appease my appetite – for I had tasted it, Ideas are Things!

So as you pa-ruse my website, know that I am passionate about design in general and I beleive in making ideas reality.  Optimism is key in anything great.  You will always have the naysayers and the haters who are really just jealous.  You can feel sorry for them.  You can use their negative energy to instill what I call “the Oh Yeah Factor”.  The “You wanna make a bet?”  The “I’ll show him”, this is powerful stuff.  I use it all the time.

Thanks for taking the time to read to this point.  Now I will reward you with some pictures of awesomely designed toys that I like:

The Creepy Face Woody Doll:

woody - ebe whistle wide

The loveable, babylike Baymax:

Endurance is patience concentrated. – Thomas Carlyle 

A photo posted by Joseph Cowlishaw (@joecow) on

Pixar’s Carl Fredricksen from UP:  

Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind, the stronger the trees. – Thomas S. Monson A photo posted by Joseph Cowlishaw (@joecow) on

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Cleverness of the Musician!

Creativity needs to be applied in how and where we play our instruments as well as the sounds!

I think the Musician Leonhard Paul has achieved this feat and gone beyond!  I was perusing through The Ocarina Network and found a link to this video.  I think that being a musician in the age of YouTube and social sharing requires humor to be involved.  Humor shows a level of cleverness that people recognize and want.  The word Clever means showing inventiveness and originality.  I think that describes this short act exactly.

So think outside the box and add a bit of cleverness to whatever you do.  This is easier said than done, but if it is your passion that you apply it to it will be easy.  I have strived for this within my own studio Wowflute Designs – I create clever and creative ocarinas!  Many times when I am selling my small wowflutes or deomnstrating them I get the saying “well, that’s clever” or “Wow.”  I decided since I hear these words so much that I should use them in my marketing strategies.  I have applied both to the name of my business and our tagline and it has made a world of difference.  Cleverness when applied correctly will keep you customer involved and interested – even if it is just for a short period of time.

 

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Designing Dual-Functionality

 

I was thinking about how the design process works when dealing with a new product.  This is my favorite part of the design process is figuring out how something works or why it works.  I think this is how every discovery is made.  First you think about something and say  “wouldn’t it be cool if it had this feature…?”.

I have been working in my new ceramic studio for the past couple of weeks designing and refining new products for my business Wowflutes. The concept of Wowflutes is built on the idea of dual-functionality in each creation.  I try to think of something somewhat mundane, like a mug for instance, and make it into a new product with a musical twist.  I have been working on refining my design of the Wowflute Mug.  I first throw a simple cylinder on the wheel, cut it off and let it dry to leatherhard.

Then I take my trimming tools and trim it like a standard mug.  After trimming I take a needle tool and cut in half about 2/3rds from the top.  I then fashion the flute mechanisms into the bottom part of the mug and using knitting needles I create an airflow channel through the top 2/3rds of the mug and make this the mouthpiece.  I then cutout a traced circle of the mug piece and add a flattened mid-section that serves as a false bottom to the mug and a top for my closed vessel whistle that is in the bottom portion.

Then it is on to tuning the mug by putting the proper amount and size of holes in relation to the size of the chamber.  After it is tuned to play the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with the proper fingering to match my tableture notation it is ready for a handle!

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Prototypes

IMG_2006.JPG

I truly enjoy a good prototype. There is something that makes experimenting with new ideas a feast for the mind. This is one of the new prototypes for the Precious Metal Wowflute. I’ve been wanting to try this new material for some time. I finally had the time to test it out. I used Hadar’s Clay in powdered form to make three Wowflutes. I attempted to try the Mokume-Gane method for mixing Copper, Bronze, and Steel to create a colorful swirl pattern similar to my current handmade Wowflutes that are swirled in polymer clay. My fingers were not used to the new weight of the clay! I found the clay was quite malleable when mixed properly but could also turn into something similar to silly putty with too much water. This new material will take some time to get used to. My hands and fingers are trained to the thickness of my polymer clay flutes. I believe I will need to get the wall thickness of the metal wowflutes much thinner and more refined. In order to do this though the clay must be more dry to hold shape – which poses a problem when it comes to drying out and cracking. I will need to make these flutes much quicker when forming to minimize cracks. I think I may be able to use cracks to my advantage and use them for inlay of a different material once the flutes are fired and finished. Quite the new process working in metal! Stay tuned, I will be uploading more pictures of the process soon.