Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club presents Chris Hoffmann
Here’s the video from my talk. It isn’t edited so run it a bit to get to the beginning. Kind of fun relaxed setting, some good stuff here on my thoughts on innovation.
Also see RYNO’s recent Popular Mechanics article here
Talk at Curiosity Club
Chris Hoffmann will be speaking about design and branding at the bi-monthly Curiosity Club Meeting hosted by Hand-Eye Supply Company at 6:00 pm Tuesday May 31st at 23 NW 4th Ave Portland, OR, 97209 Tel: +1.503.575.9769
The Value of a Good Sketch
I got a great compliment from a client last week who said he hasn’t met anyone in years that could sketch like I do. He also said it conveyed great confidence in the ability of the designer. His frustration was that when working with younger engineers that do all their work in 3D CAD, he says they’ll go off for six hours to model an idea that when he sees it, changes in the first three seconds he looks at it. There is a real art to sketching just enough to convey an idea but with enough though to know that what is there, actually could work.
What’s My Passion?
Some of my clients lately have been asking me what my real passion is. Since I’m feeling kind of cocky this morning, here goes:
I most enjoy bringing a grin to client’s faces and inspiring their imaginations. I’m not talking a cute “that’s cool” smile – I’m talking a primal, saggy lower jaw, drafty kind of grin.
Maybe it started as a freshman in high school when I made a 16” long naval cannon that won first place in the state industrial arts competition. The next year I built a tripod-mounted crossbow that used a truck leaf spring as a bow.
I worked one summer in high school doing drafting at an engineering firm in Detroit to make enough money to buy a 1947 Willy’s Jeep. I learned a lot about fixing cars, after blowing a few engines in my 1968 Chevelle I learned some more.
After that I went on to art school for a while but ended up going back to automotive machine design because I loved the drama of working on such tight time lines and then seeing these huge machines running production on the plant floor. The whole time I was doing that in the daylight hours, I was playing bass guitar in a Punk-rock band, running my recording studio, studying audio recording engineering with an ex-Motown studio engineer and doing sound tracks for film. In 1985 I won the CINE Double Eagle for best sound track for a short film. Even with all that going on I always made it to work on time and delivered precision work.
In 1986 I moved to NYC with my new film and some demo tapes. After only six months I was building sets for Broadway theaters, humping cable doing lighting for world class fashion shows, working as an assistant recording engineer in a small noteworthy studio – and was working with a music producer as a singer songwriter on an album’s worth of material. I was having a blast!
After almost four years I moved back to Michigan with my new wife and re-entered engineering as a senior new product development engineer for a large machine manufacturer. There I worked in their technology center, leading the development of new machine processes to reduce the cycle time and increase the precision of automotive parts. This got me into a much higher level of innovation complexity with more sophisticated design challenges.
After six years we moved to Portland, Oregon. There I shifted my focus to consumer product design, where I learned the complexities of branding, public relations and designing for great customer experiences. With my supply chain background I was a strong player in knowing what features would be cost effective to implement. I spent some time traveling to Taiwan to visit our suppliers and learned first hand the quality challenges of sourcing parts off shore.
After spending eight years restoring our 1917 Arts and Crafts bungalow I got the itch to get back to doing something more radical. When my 13 year old daughter (after seeing it in a video game) suggested I build a one wheel motorcycle, I slowly took on the challenge – which has led me to riding a self-balancing one wheel motorcycle. See it here at www.rynomotors.com.
So even though I’m wiser and a bit more cautious, I still have an insatiable passion for life, still get a thrill from seeing people’s faces light up and am still a provocative instigator looking for the next client with a dry rocket fuse to light.
So if you have a really challenging project that needs development, give me a call. In just ten minutes I can bring to bear more manufacturing, supply chain, customer experience, artistic design, proportion, balance, poise, cultural intuition, sophistication and just pure creative inspiration than anyone you’ll find. But that’s just me talking…ask my clients.
Priceless Two Hour Innovation Session
I can think of a lot of innovation breakthroughs that can be traced back to one informal meeting where some people got together and thought differently for just a short magical moment.
In the middle of the crushing time line and stress of developing the LAST breakthrough in your company, how do you recreate that same magic? One way is to bring in an outside consultant like myself that can pull you out of the ditch, take your blinders off and get you into a head-space that will allow your creative mind to be heard.
One of the simple tricks I use to help people to access their deeper creative brain was learned from a shaman while sitting around a camp fire. He said that the path to the higher consciousness creative brain starts with our emotions. The process he uses to access the full creative energy of his tribe is to break a gathering down into three sections, or for bigger challenges three meetings. The emotional meeting, the idea meeting and the business meeting.
The Emotional Meeting
Before a group of individuals can start working as a group they have to get over their competitive egos and feel a sense of security and safety to say what ever they want and know they’ll be heard by the rest of the group. Rarely in the corporate world is there a section or an entire meeting dedicated to only talking about emotional stuff. I’ve found that when this kind of “emotions only restriction” is place on a forum, people will open their minds and hearts and start to relax their blocks around creativity.
Every product designer knows that no matter what you’re developing whether it’s a new toilet seat or high tech gadget it has to inspire your customer to feel some passion for it. That’s the end goal of what I’m after too. What I’m talking about here when I say a meeting about emotions, is getting the design team to all feel the way they want their customers to feel. This is the first step to creating a culture in your company that will continually deliver products that inspire.
Talking about emotions starts with going around the room to get a take on where everyone is at on how the group is functioning. Once everyone has had a chance to be heard on a basic level the mind will start to relax its defenses and sit back into a more meditative state. In this context it’s not a low energy state but quite the opposite, studies have shown that the mind is actually highly charged when your mind is channeled into pure creativity. I know it sounds kind of touchy-feely but trust me until the group is in this state of mind no real magic is going to happen. Even if you think you already have a highly functional design team I recommend you open every meeting with a dedicated emotional venting moment.
In the emotional meeting the rule is to not try and come up with an answer or product idea. For example, if you’re a knife manufacturer and you want to come out with a new knife deign, in this part of the meeting you should be talking about how your customer will be feeling when they are looking for a new knife. This is really different from designing products that try and make your customer feel something just by looking at it. To me that’s tough without a big advertizing budget. If you get your mind into a state where you feel the emotion for yourself, you’ll naturally design to that. If I’m a big and bold wilderness explorer and I want a knife that resonates with me, the knife I find needs to be designed by a team that has that same feeling.
The Idea Meeting
As the emotional meeting is underway each team member should be taking emotional notes and suggesting ways to get closer to the the feeling they are trying to capture. Capturing feelings on paper is a skill more understood by poets and musicians. It may require going to an event or doing something to get into the right frame of mind.
Trust me in the idea meeting the inspiration for product form, function and features will start to flow fast but the amazing thing is the group will know exactly how to design the product to inspire or resonate with the essence of the feeling the customer has. Having done the emotional work ahead of time eliminates the need to stop in the middle of an idea meeting and start arguing about what emotions the product is about. The brain just doesn’t like to do that.
The Business Meeting
Here is where you hand off the idea to the people that can make it happen. They need to decide if it matches the corporate vision, is manufacture-able at a cost that makes money and when or if they should implement it. If the design team has done their job right this should be a pretty efficient process.
What I’m Offering
Today I’m offering a two hour mini innovation session that runs your team through the basics of my process. It’s a great way to get a sense of how effective this is for your team and for you to get to know how I think. Act now, it may be the most important two hours in your company’s history.
Chris Hoffmann
503-939-7068
Engineering Problem Solving?
For me, engineering problem solving really sorts out into three main disciplines that must continually synchronize in the same mind. The people that excel are the ones that can effortlessly shift between these disciplines while constantly challenging every underlying design assumption that a high level concept is built on.
1) Perspective Gathering
Any product engineer that enters a new field must invest a considerable amount of time understanding why things are designed a certain way, what has worked in the past and what materials or technology they consistently turn to as their tool kit. In the auto industry, because of the need for high production, 50% of all design is based on the tooling or machines that will be used to make the part.
The opportunity in this discipline is in challenging why they do things that way, is it based on an old technology, is there a training issue that would cost more than the reduction in the cost of the product? When looking for new ways to innovate, the talent comes in knowing what to accept and what to see differently. My favorite expression here is to first understand the socket before designing the plug.
2) Problem Statement
This discipline is focused on clearly defining the problem. This is where a lot of engineers go wrong in jumping into the design process before understanding what they’re looking at.
At OregonLabs (skunk works) we were presented with a design requirement from the parent company to reduce the cost of their biggest selling hard drive disc transport tray. They were being undersold by a competitor and they needed a lower cost solution. Part of our process required that we go down to the plant where they use this product to understand what was going on. We discovered that during the process of transporting hard discs, down their processing line, small particles of the plastic trays were contaminating the discs causing a 10% scrap rate. We did the math and found out that if we could reduce the scrap to 2% we could charge more for our product. With the customer’s support we went on to design a tray that gently gripped the discs on their edges thereby preventing the vibration that caused the particulation. As a result we salvaged a $30 million dollar a year business unit and added 20% to the sales price of our product.
The opportunity in this discipline is in looking at all aspects of the environment where the problem exists. It requires a perspective on why they do it that way now and experience with looking at things from many angles. An added bonus is having experience in how problems are solved in other technology sectors.
3) Implementation
This discipline isn’t simply about design, it’s about developing a solution that meets as many design constraints as possible for the least amount of money. Along with a design solution, every aspect of the supply chain must be considered from digging the material out of the ground to disposing of the product when it’s no longer of use.
When looking at design constraints, another area of focus needs to be on effectively ranking each constraint. I’ve seen many solutions end up overly complicated trying to meet a need that really doesn’t matter. Sometimes the cost of a product can double trying to meet the last 10% of the requirements on the list. I constantly question how important a constraint is. Innovation can sometimes happen by realizing that we don’t need to do it that way anymore.
How Green is Your Supply Chain
People talk about their process being green and then argue about how sustainable their company is. It’s one thing to use green materials and components in your supply chain but quite another to use low power lighting in you office and bio-diesel in your delivery trucks. Green doesn’t mean it has to cost more, if you’re smart it really is about saving energy and reducing waste. That translates directly to saving money.
When looking for ways to reduce energy consumption in your supply chain look first at areas where the biggest savings can be found:
If one of your components parts is a big plastic molded shape that doesn’t stack well then look for a local supplier. If you’re buying blow molded bottles that are filled in your plant you really want to have them molded in-house in real time.
If you build complex assemblies and want to save cost by ordering in volume, remember you don’t have to order all the components at the same time at the same volume. Only order the few parts that have a major cost savings in bulk and keep a supply of those in stock, then order the readily available components in small lots based on your production schedule.
Moving heavy materials around like pallets of sheet metal or bags of cement costs money each time to touch it. Make sure your supply chain has the least amount of moves in it from your supplier to the floor at your retail customer. There are a lot more companies now that will ship direct to your customer which eliminates the need to bring material to your warehouse. This also reduces your inventory cost overhead and reduces the chance for waste buy not keeping material too long in your warehouse or of damaging it.
When you think about reducing cost in your supply chain think more about how you communicate with your suppliers and what relationships you have in place that allow you to keep material flowing with the least amount of cost and energy.
Ten Fold Increase in Capturing Water
Take a look at this article. It’s a new nano material that both attracts and repels water. In capturing water, droplets form on attractive areas and spill into repellent channels. The most exciting use for this technology is a low cost way of extracting water from air.
Component Part Cost Reductions
When looking for ways to reduce the cost of manufactured component parts, the one thing that sticks out the most from my days in the auto industry is this one thing: never let go of the part until you’ve done everything you can possibly do to it.
What this means is that once you let a part go and drop it into a bin or hopper, when you’re ready to to continue work on it, it costs a lot of money to re-orient it, relocate it, keep it from getting damaged or keeping it from being loaded upside down.
This is why the dial or transfer machine was used so extensively in the auto industry. This keeps the part oriented while still allowing it to be worked on over all six sides by rolling the part over, flipping it around and turning it.
So when you design a machining process, whether the parts are coming across the shop floor or across the country, watch carefully the time and cost in loading parts into a process. You may find it’s cheaper to add a process right inline that to have it done outside.
Massive CNC Machining Cell for Caterpillar Tractor
Human Powered Helicopter
You have to take a look at this human powered helicopter. WOW!!!
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/09/human-powered-helicopter/
