The week we had a guest speaker from a startup here at the University’s research park called Earth Sense. Mike Hansen, an U of I alumni, gave an amazing presentation on his product development journey. He spoke of stories during his Industrial Design graduate days, the failures he had, and pretty much every problem along the way. Being an industrial designer myself, a lot of his experiences resonated with me. He talked about a system of going from 0-1000 in three intervals. Taking an idea from 0 to 1. Once you get the original prototype you go from 1 to 100, with different iterations of that concept. Finally the 100 to 1000, which is the mass production of a product. You can only imagine how many issues and minute things that intervene with this process.
A few Mike said during his presentation that stuck with me were to “ fail early and fail often”. The earlier on you fail, the quicker and easier it will be to make corrections/alterations. The more you fail the better the end result will turn out. Every failure breaches an opportunity for improvement. Which leads to the other quote from Mike, which was “ try again and again until you succeed.” This isn’t limit to product development, but across life. There’s two type of people the quitters and the go getters.
After Mikes presentation we broke into our teams. We had the task of designing a logo and coming up with a team name. Im apart of team one and we’re focusing on a innovative tread for prosthetic users. We came up with the name Solestice. Yes, we spelled it like the sole of a shoe. Which lead to the design of our logo. Its two triangles stack on top of one another, but they are off centered. After getting the tinker file finished we sent it off to the 3D printed and printed it out.
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