By Tenny Pinheiro - Oct 16, 2018

I'm Confused. Design Sprint or Lean Startup?  

A biased, but truthful perspective.

I guess if you landed here you are confused. That's okay because it is confusing. Well, at least if you try to look at it from a binary, reductionist, point of view. Let me start by saying that, in my experience product developing, it is never about choosing between one

By Malory Johnson - Dec 08, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: How to Build a Prototype User Interface

For this summer's alpha prototype project, we were most excited to implement a new UI design to the Otter Warmer. Firefly, Otter's sister device, has a membrane switch UI with blue domed buttons labeled with CE mark icons and a tinted window atop a 7 segment display. We designed Otter

By Timothy Prestero - Dec 01, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: The Internet of Terrifying Things

Here's a quick story about unintended consequences in design, specifically when product capabilities exceed our design specifications. Voice-commands with audio feedback are becoming a more common user interface for cellphones and digital "personal assistants" like Google Home and Amazon's Alexa. Many of these devices are always on, listening for

By Timothy Prestero - Nov 03, 2017

Book Review: Crossing the Chasm

"Marketing and selling disruptive products to mainstream customers"

You might consider each year's raft of new social impact design startups to be what Samuel Johnson called "the triumph of hope over experience." Unfortunately, many organizations follow a similar and discouraging trajectory: - bootstrapped "beautiful baby" prototype attracts design awards and newspaper articles - PR leads to initial

By Timothy Prestero - Oct 06, 2017

Tutorial: How to Create Tough, Lightweight and Waterproof Gear Bags From Dyneema and Tyvek

In this tutorial, I'll show you how to make a variety of useful zippered gear bags that are incredibly tough, lightweight and waterproof. This tutorial is intended for someone like me: familiar with rapid prototyping tools like 3d printers and laser cutters, reasonably competent with hand tools, but pretty clueless

By Elizabeth Johansen - Oct 06, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: Equipping A Local Social Enterprise to Communicate Ideas Using Prototypes

Listening in the hardest market

Rapid prototyping is a core human-centered design skill. Design that Matters uses prototypes to better communicate with stakeholders across languages and cultures, quickly testing assumptions to efficiently converge on a final solution. This essay includes six examples of insights we gained using prototypes and how we taught these methods to our social enterprise partner, MTTS.

By Timothy Prestero - Sep 29, 2017

Book Review: Notes on the Synthesis of Form

We like Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form for the way he takes a sledgehammer to the fetish over aesthetics and artistic pretension in design. We're often mystified by the design community's enthusiasm for uncomfortable chairs and weird-ass light fixtures. If the goal is to apply design principles

By Elizabeth Johansen - Sep 15, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: Cultivating Design Mind

Making the shift from "I like the color" to creating globally-appealing products

In designing Firefly newborn phototherapy, Design that Matters used human-centered design to transform Vietnamese manufacturing partner, Medical Technology Transfer and Services (MTTS), expanding their impact on newborn health within Southeast Asia and Africa, and positioning their designs to go global. Through multiple meetings with our manufacturing partner in the U.S.

By Elizabeth Johansen - Aug 11, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: What to Do When FDA Approval Doesn't Mean Equipment is Safe

For low-resource settings, you need to go above and beyond

Does United States FDA regulatory approval mean a medical device is safe and effective in low resource settings? The short answer is no. In developing countries, 95% of western medical equipment is broken within 5 years. In fact,only 30% of this donated equipment is ever even turned on. To enable

By Elizabeth Johansen - Jul 28, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: How Focus Leads to Bigger Impact

Design for everyone is design for no one

At the beginning of each new project, Design that Matters creates a point of view statement to focus the project on the need, users, and contexts will be included AND excluded from our design. During Project Firefly, we focused on treating otherwise healthy newborns with jaundice using a phototherapy device

By Elizabeth Johansen - Jul 14, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: Saving Babies and the Environment Using Human-Centered Design

You've got to consider green in every invention

When designing Firefly newborn phototherapy with East Meets West Foundation and Vietnamese manufacturing partner MTTS, we used the human-centered design process to create an environmentally friendly product that truly benefits people living in poverty. The resulting Firefly device: - Lasts for five years, avoiding the medical equipment junkyard seen

By Timothy Prestero - Jun 30, 2017

Book Review: Digital Apollo

Lessons in design thinking from the Apollo program

We love David Mindell's Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight. Mindell's book tells the story of "human pilots, of automated systems, and of the two working together to achieve the ultimate in flight." From our perspective, the book explains the link between what rocket scientists in the 1950s called

By Timothy Prestero - Jun 16, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: How Trust Makes Great Medical Devices

Great products meet the user's expectations and their circumstances. Every designer can tell you how understanding user needs requires lots of direct observations and interviews. DtM has learned that the most valuable feedback requires something more than the standard research toolkit. This short video explains why we go back to

By Timothy Prestero - Jun 09, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: How Will Your Design Fare Over the Long Haul?

Lessons learned from the Kinkajou adult literacy aid

The Kinkajou Microfilm Projector is a teaching tool for nighttime adult literacy courses in rural communities without books or electric lighting. It was DtM's very first projected, started back when the company founders were still graduate students at MIT. It's been more than a decade since the Kinkajou pilot in

By Timothy Prestero - Jun 02, 2017

Design Experience That Matters, Book Review: The Other Side of Innovation

We love Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble's Other Side of Innovation, specifically the second half of the book. For anyone who has ever resented being asked to write a business plan, Govindarajan and Trimble's book will at last explain the profound difference between planning and prediction. Consider that at

By Malory Johnson - May 26, 2017

Design Experience that Matters: How to Build a Z-Rack Whiteboard and Save $150

This studio hack will make your space more productive for less money

Every design studio goes through mountains of post-it notes while brainstorming and charting ideas. We love the portability of flip-chart posters, but even after moving to a big studio in Salem we never had enough wall space. Then we found Make Space by Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft at

By Timothy Prestero - May 19, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: Four Design Principles that Turned a Prototype into a Bestselling Product

...and why customer insights are crucial

This is the story of how we interpreted four design principles for Firefly, and how user feedback gave us confidence that we were on the right track.

By Timothy Prestero - May 12, 2017

Design Experience That Matters, Book Review: The Back of the Napkin

How simple cartoons can help us to explain and visualize complex concepts

Cartoons! They carpet the walls of our studio, and they make frequent appearances in Design that Matters presentations and TED talks. In his 2009 book The Back of the Napkin, design thinker and professional doodler Dan Roam demonstrates how simple cartoons can help us to explain and visualize complex concepts,

By Timothy Prestero - May 05, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: Video of Our Design Sprint

After a series of late nights and endless hours sawing, sanding and soldering, the team finished the Otter alpha prototype. It's a huge step forward for our newborn warmer program.

By Timothy Prestero - Apr 28, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: How to Solve Hard Design Problems

...in four easy (ha!) steps

David Hilbert said "a perfect formulation of a problem is already half its solution." Without a well-framed problem statement, it's easy for the industrial design and detail engineering stages of the product to move very quickly in the wrong direction.

By Timothy Prestero - Apr 21, 2017

Design Experience That Matters: Here's a Look at Our Build Process

Fabrication is always a blast, second only to field research in the hierarchy of excellent things about working in social impact design. It's an opportunity to escape our desks, and trade the abstractions of post-it notes and design frameworks for the satisfaction of creating tangible, physical things. At the

By Timothy Prestero - Apr 14, 2017

Design Experience that Matters: How to Create a Rubber Prototype Using a 3D-Printed Mold

Design that Matters demonstrates the technique with helpful photos

This "Design Experience that Matters" series is provided courtesy of Timothy Prestero and the team at Design that Matters (DtM). As a nonprofit, DtM collaborates with leading social entrepreneurs and hundreds of volunteers to design new medical technologies for the poor in developing countries. DtM's Firefly infant phototherapy device is treating thousands of newborns in 21 counties from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

By Timothy Prestero - Apr 07, 2017

Design Experience that Matters: Here's Some Free Files for 3D Printed Tripod Accessories

3D Printed Tripod Quick Release Why buy one when you can print it yourself? Our goal was to create a fitting so that we could quickly move from tripod shots to close-ups. In a small studio with only one "fancy" camera, we

By Malory Johnson - Mar 31, 2017

Design Experience that Matters: How to Create a Killer Design Portfolio

"Design your portfolio as well as the projects it contains"

Building a portfolio is one of the most challenging parts of pursuing a career in design. On one hand, there's no strict formula and no defined requirements, but on the other hand, we're creatives, isn't that supposed to be where we thrive? In six months, I've had the opportunity to

By Timothy Prestero - Mar 24, 2017

Design Experience that Matters: Lessons Learned in Rapid Prototyping

Valuable lessons learned, just in time

The process of prototype fabrication is really a series of problem-solving exercises. Slot A suddenly refuses to accept Tab B, the beautiful CAD model reveals monstrous qualities when it emerges from the 3D printer, the Arduino code refuses to compile. We always find ourselves doing lots of just-in-time self-education, reading

By Timothy Prestero - Mar 17, 2017

Design Experience that Matters: Handy Tools for Working With 3D Printers

Here's 15 inexpensive items that make the work easier

Here at Design that Matters we do a lot of 3D printing, so we've built up this collection of handy but inexpensive tools for supporting our 3D printers. They live in IKEA silverware caddies mounted next to the machines and they just make the work go easier. 1. Super