Because a majority of the projects I worked on were confidential, here are just a few of the other shareable projects I had a hand in.
IDEO and Eli Lilly have a long history of collaboration on the design of drug delivery products for self-administration. One of my projects was re-designing a legacy auto-injectors to meet the needs of a newer drug. The drug in question was higher viscosity and had a new type of needle shield.
Higher viscosity drugs require more force to deliver the drug through the needle. As a result, a larger spring was needed in the device and it required a longer delivery time. For patient safety the needle is retracted post drug delivery. To ensure that a full injection is completed there is a mechanical delay mechanism that controls the timing between firing and retraction.
Shown here, the base fins of Figure 30 fit into the slot 525 in Figure 31 that are filled with a viscoelastic grease. I was tasked with modifying this assembly to create longer yet repeatable delays.
The second part of the redesign was creating a new needle shield gripper. The needle shield comes pre-assembled with the syringe that is inserted into the device. That shield needs to come off when the user removes the cap of the auto-injector. The newer needle shield had no distinct features to interact with, so I designed a system that was agnostic to shape and simply used compressive forces to maintain a grip on the needle shield. The needle shield gripper shown in Figures 6-9 was the end result and it consists of a small injection molded “crown” that is co-molded with an elastomer.
Patent: US20170259008A1
The elastomer inner part of the gripper interacts with the needle shield, conforming to the subtle ridges of the rigid plastic sheath that makes up the outside surface of the shield.
The device cap is then pressed onto the assembly. The tapered outer surface of the gripper progressively compresses the inner elastomer. At the base of the “crown” is a small groove that snaps into the cap once it is fully compressed, thus locking the needle shield, gripper, and cap together.
The Faraday Porteur was originally created as part of a design challenge around electric bikes in 2011. The lead designer Adam Vollmer saw enough potential in the final result that he decided to turn it into a real product.
While Faraday was being incubated at IDEO, I got the chance to work with Adam to redesign the throttle mechanism for mass production. The throttle incorporated a small e-ink display for charge indication and had three detente positions for different levels of pedal assist. Though the internals have changed, the original form that I created persists to this day.
The SmoothBeauty Laser wrinkle remover from Tria was one of the earliest projects that I worked on at IDEO. The device uses a single laser and a rotating refraction lens to scan up and down, piercing tiny holes in your skin to promote collagen production. If it sounds like it hurts, it’s because it does.
All of the major Industrial Design decisions and most of the CAD wrestling was complete by the time I joined the project, but they needed help analyzing the cooling and the light piping. Before we sent the final CAD package out the door, I was part of the team that carefully toleranced all of the many snaps and hooks and alignment features for the plastic shell to ensure that it would always assemble with part reveals.
We made subtle changes to the bottom vent and the offset curved piece that forms the prominent design feature at the top of the device to increase airflow. I used light simulation software to optimize the light pipe for the skin contact indicator on the side of the device making it glow more evenly.