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Building Technology to Build Good Habits

Silicon Valley teems with slick hi-tech gadgets that make life, work, and play fun, but that at the end of the day none of us really, truly need. Then there are those devices that do actually improve lives or make play more interactive. But can a device help us change our habits? That’s the question designer […]

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Fictiv Guide to Strategic Hardware Product R&D

As Thomas Edison once said, “Discontent is the first necessity of progress.” Many entrepreneurs set out to build a product out of personal frustration. In this situation, the first R&D activity is often researching technologies that can be harnessed to solve the problem on hand. Sometimes, R&D activities are carried out to productize and capitalize […]

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Doing Better Than Good: How WHILL is Redefining the Wheelchair

What’s tougher than creating a new product in a well-established market? Creating a new product in a well-established market that happens to be not sexy, and for some even taboo. We’re referring to the wheelchair. Historically, the wheelchair has been associated with disability, old age, or some kind of infirmity. While multi-billion dollar empires have […]

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Built Tough, Built Loud: The Development Story Behind the Loudest Speaker On the Market

Some of the products in our world are brand new—they’re the things we “didn’t know we needed,” the innovations that ramp up our experience of life a few notches. You know, like the Internet, the iPhone, and now all those Internet of Things things. Plenty of other products are age-old, traditional, ubiquitous. We also can’t […]

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Product Licensing: How to Turn Your Design into a Royalty Generating Machine

You’ve got a great product idea, but you also have a full-time job you love and no desire to start a company. Do you just shelve it? Nope! Instead, consider licensing your product to earn extra income from the royalties. Here’s how you can make it happen. What Licensing is and How it Works Licensing is […]

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Designing for Experience, Not Disruption

We live in a world replete with devices. Tablets, smartphones, desktops, laptops, smart watches, cars, TVs, thermostats, door locks. Probably toasters soon, too. Surely we don’t need another “thing.” Surely, if we want to do something as simple as browse through our photos, we can just pull up our tablets, smartphones, or plug our camera […]

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3D Printing and the Future of Distributed Manufacturing [VIDEO]

We live in an era of centralized manufacturing. The prototyping and manufacturing ecosystem is dominated by massive companies that invest a ton of capital in warehouses full of machines that can fulfill demand. When I was at Ford’s Silicon Valley Innovation Lab working to speed up development cycles, I realized there are real problems with this system. […]

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The Second Coming of VR: This Time It’s “Real”

Back in the 1990’s, virtual reality (VR) was a big thing. The next big thing, the media sang enthralled. Trouble was, the technology infrastructure wasn’t built out to allow any sort of appreciable user base to develop, and so VR stayed on the fringes, its tentative flames kept alive by a small contingent of diehard […]

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The Zen of Product Design: How Lockitron Let Go of the Extraneous and Non Essential

Entrepreneurs are known for falling so hard for their own products that they can’t see past all the fancy features. Not to knock all those labors of love, but when it comes to building products that work (and brands that last), a little cool-headed distance goes a long way. Certain industries lend themselves better to […]

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4 Fundamental Objectives of Prototyping Hardware

When you set out to prototype a new hardware product design, it might seem like there are an overwhelming number of features to test and develop. You want your product to be the best it can be, but the path to get there from a great idea isn’t always clear. While prototyping hardware is a difficult and […]

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