Tor Alden, Principal of HS Design (www.HS-Design.com) in Gladstone, New Jersey is the first guest on the launch of the “hsDNA Podcast” to talk Industrial Design in the medical device space.

Tor joins host Justin Starbird to talk about the big differentiation between industrial design in consumer product development and medical product development. The certification processes and quality are each super important to how products are brought to commercialization and experience success in the market. As a whole, Industrial Design is a wide open and diverse field that touches our lives every day in nearly every activity.

For the very best medical device design firms, they take their clients and projects a step further than that and bring back to the doctors and nurses the updated prototype for what HS Design of New Jersey calls, “formative evaluations” and “formative tests.” Alden explains that, “We will bring these concepts to them, maybe in prototype forms, maybe in a wireframe, depending on the sophistication of the product. It may be a picture, and if it's simple enough, we'll have prototypes for them to hold and talk through. We'll actually get their insight on which is their preferred, and we do that in a quantitative method where we'll have an actual ranking and result of the preferences.”

Listen to Tor share with Justin how the added benefit of going into such depth on the details also helps the project get through the full documentation process (https://hs-design.com/about/process/) that the FDA requires. As Alden explains, “...that really is the differentiation in a nutshell between medical product development and a consumer, for example. If a consumer product fails, the user might get frustrated. In a medical product, the user might die.”

Read more about solving complex problems in the Medical Device Design space (https://hs-design.com/blog/solving-complex-problems-create-state-art-medical-devices/)