The Future Is Now: Matthew Bailey On How Design1st’s Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene

There isn’t any magic in problem solving. I have always had a lot of doubt, and when starting my career figured that there were some magic solutions to problems that I just hadn’t found yet… It led to a lot of deep and wide research into different areas, but in the end the core of many types of problems and systems have a lot of similarities. Know your problem, and then look for the best solutions in the market, and build relationships with people in areas of expertise that are different from your own so you can widen your potential solution space.

As a part of our series about cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Matthew Bailey, VP, Mechanical Engineering at Design1st.

Matt is a Mechanical Engineer specializing in complex mechanical design and engineering for many market industries. As Vice President, Product Engineering, Matt develops and oversees the most complex mechanical products and leads the mechanical engineering team. He plays an integral role in setting the architectures of new products being brought to production, including design analysis, system planning, structures, materials section, quality assurance and control, cost saving exercises and design modifications.

Matthew’s leadership and technical expertise touches every project as manufacturing direction and technical feasibility of new products are determined.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

A big part of it was growing up with my father working at Nortel in the Design Interpretive / Corporate Design Group and seeing multi million dollar prototypes of almost finished products and technologies that were decades ahead of their time, and hearing stories about user testing and product design. My earliest memories of this were around 6–8 years old and I continued after that to love to build and tweak products and setup systems. Friends still remind me of the nerf guns I would take apart and improve with larger springs and removed pressure restrictors that would work for 5–10 amazing shots before something broke and needed further improvements…

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

Sadly a lot of the recent stuff we can’t talk about, but i always love getting my hands dirty and in 2013 I ended up upside down in the driver’s seat of a brand new Convertible Bentley Continental GS

We were developing one of the CES show Cars for QNX (the super secure RTOS software provider in a lot of the center consoles / infotainment units in many of the cars you love, as well as many satellites and slot machines as well). We had 2 months to take it apart and put in more bleeding edge electronics than would fit behind all the standard Bentley leather and wood finish panels. Glasses free 3D Screens, 17” DLP screens with touch and pre-touch gesture recognition and on screen tactile dials.

Since it wouldn’t fit we had to strip it down to the frame to figure out where we could “adjust” things to fit the new components.

We took out every available panel and screw we could see, which is where I ended up upside down in the wheel well. But to get things to fit we still had to gut the plastic molded frame that was the full width of the car housing all the way from the gauge cluster to the glovebox and down to the floor for the whole center console.

No one could help either. We tried to get help from auto shops, or Bentley sales offices, but phoning locally didn’t do it, neither did in the US, or the UK… no shops had touched one of these new models before…

After days of trying all the non-destructive options, we ended up dremelling the structure out of the center console down the center of the dash and then flexed it out from the center until a satisfying pop happened and it came out in one piece. Celebrations all around after that one.

After that lots of custom machined and polished parts, as well as a very old sewing machine to get the baseball leather stitching just right, then about a day of grinding and drilling an interference away on the 26th of december when all the machine shops were closed to get the final fit before leaving the next day for Vegas and CES.

Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?

At design first we work on projects of all sorts as we help companies through product development. From medical to industrial, high tech to novel micro mechanisms. Some of the things we are looking at right now help people to recover from concussions faster and with less risk, some may see tri-corders come to life soon, others look to help people break habit based addictions to smoking, and some are looking to improve farming risk and yields and deal with labor shortages for small and medium sized farmers, we also love to help with some of the simpler and fun ones like like alleviating neck strain for all the kids working on IPad’s out there while doing school from home all day, or protecting animals from the smoke from forest fires.

How do you think this might change the world?

The evolution of technologies has always been an area of interest for me, and changing the world doesn’t happen overnight with a singular brilliant idea, but is a process that occurs over time and many companies and inventors pushing hard on an idea and all the systems, from technological to people based that pushes it to world changing. Think of cell phones. Those prototypes I mentioned from when I was a kid in the early 80’s, were the early cell phones of today with flat form factors and mobile ear pieces like the bluetooth headphones of the last few years almost 30 years later. Even when seeing somewhere around a hundred projects a year, seeing the trends of where things are going helps point directions to unicorns but specific companies that make it huge are a combination of many factors.

I truly love the fact that we can bring all of our learning and experience in physical product development to help ensure companies pushing new ideas or integrating new technologies, to companies just starting out with disruptive ideas or industry specific knowledge have the best chance possible of getting through all the details of product development. Through the quagmire of, options weighting, timeline management, resource planning, supply chain options, CM identification and vetting, and the 1000’s of decisions making this all possible, we support clients in bringing data and options to their decision making to help make informed decisions in as many places as possible, and as safe as possible when data isn’t available.

Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks of this technology that people should think more deeply about?

The evolution of technologies is always marching forward, Autonomous Farming machines that take over the world via food rationing to their previous masters would be an interesting topic, and I’m glad they don’t have long range weaponry with all that’s going on in the world today…. All technology has the potential to be used for good or evil, and the more people that know or have experience with a specific technology increase the likelihood it will be used for greater levels of both.

Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?

These are some of the most fun things to arrive at during projects, not all have them, but when they do they generally occur after exhausting all options and having to review your initial assumptions or take a wholly different approach to certain parts of the solution.

When you have a team of people working together on items like this it is an amazing feeling when all of the built up momentum of drilling down the base of a problem and everyone has a clear understanding of the problem that is stopping the entire design and then a novel idea or rewording of the requirements or the problem turns into a cascade of, yes’s. Different teams see a path through the new direction, one after another and adjust the design to match, then it’s a sprint to the finish. These are the best experiences I can think of even if they are absolutely the most frustrating just before you get to them.

One example is when we were developing a product for a medical consumer market that a few design teams before us had tried and got stuck on a thermal problem that had taken the development 2–3 years, the product was to be in contact with the human body for a treatment process using a very specific and very powerful red light but the heat emitted in the testing phantoms (like ballistic jelly but with the thermal properties of human tissue) was causing temperatures that would cause serious burns. Different designs were tried and re-tried to use exotic liquid cooling systems, peltier coolers, and some external heat pipes but all required large blocks of electronics with thick electrical umbilical cords that wouldn’t fly in the consumer market. After looking through the work and getting to the base physics of the issue we reframed the problem for the client and asked can we limit the time required for the treatment? All the electronics in the device were fine with the elevated temperatures so it was just the skin contact surface that we had to worry about and for a period of time the body, especially internally, is great at removing heat from an area.

From this question spurred a lot of creative solutions on systems we had reviewed, and we created what was effectively a big metal chunk inside the device to act as a reservoir of cold along with optically clear medical grade silicone on the outside to let the light through but lower the heat transfer and keep the surface cool enough for long enough to complete a single treatment, and then let the device cool afterwards.

Another would be when a giant sealed robotic shipping container that was the basis of a drone launching and environmental housing and charging system costing more than 100,000k showed up on schedule but leaking like a sieve. The client was to put it mildly, not at all happy. After going through all the phases of product development grief and focusing on the problem, exhausting options with the supplier we decided to deal with it a short meeting and a good night sleep for the development teams ended up in a novel and quick solution that everyone got on board with and a few late nights later we had the container sealed up although we had to deviate from a few of the key requirements, but the client was on board with the direction as at the time, speed to market trumped cost and a small height increase.

What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?

Adoption of technologies is so tied to knowing the needs of your target markets, and that covers a broad range of areas, functions, features, forms, (in different orders for different markets) and clear messaging about the improvements that a specific combination of features and technologies will bring.

Looking at so many new products helps us to identify some of the early technology and market hurdles, and usually how big they are, but some don’t come until later in the process, once you’re further down the path of combining elements that have never been combined before.

Sometimes it’s a new counter-intuitive manufacturing process, sometimes it’s a breakthrough on Oprah’s couch, and frustratingly time and waiting for the right moment to launch is the key to success. Society has to be ready for your solution no matter how amazing it is, and understanding then solving the specific and sometimes very minor hurdles that turn people off of a solution can make all the difference, from PalmPilot to Apple sort of thing.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I have had a ton of great mentors along the way, but my fathers experience when I was young was hugely formative for me and his guidance since I joined Design 1st has allowed me to design and develop products over the years that i could only dream of prior to working with the team we’ve built here at Design 1st. I believe we end up with many mentors that help through different parts of our life over time, and I’ve been thankful to have so many people to turn to with different challenges.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I try to use the things I’ve learned to help others and take a lot of time to mentor and help where I can. I mentored FIRST robotics teams in Ottawa for 10 years and it was amazing to see the kids progress through that program and get a sense of what it takes to really build something new. With young kids now it’s more difficult time wise fulfilling the role of chauffeur most nights and weekend, but I still get to have some fun when we host events or go to schools to show off a Lucky, the battlebot friends and I design and compete with each year on the TV Show to drive an interest in engineering and robotics.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

There isn’t any magic in problem solving. I have always had a lot of doubt, and when starting my career figured that there were some magic solutions to problems that I just hadn’t found yet… It led to a lot of deep and wide research into different areas, but in the end the core of many types of problems and systems have a lot of similarities. Know your problem, and then look for the best solutions in the market, and build relationships with people in areas of expertise that are different from your own so you can widen your potential solution space.

Ask questions, and find teams that want to help you answer them.

If you want to develop hardware you’ll have failures and they are expensive, find opportunities where some are willing to let you learn and work your ass off to minimize issues as someone is footing the bill.

If something needs to be right the first time and you’re working on it, don’t trust anyone / check everything yourself, twice. The number of times I’ve designed based on a spec sheet for something and then it shows up and is different is countless. This is effectively Murphy’s law I suppose with, in my case, many, many physical product development specific examples….

Working with family is hard, make sure it’s worthwhile.

Technology is evolution, use everything that has come before as much as possible.

“Stand on the Shoulders of Giants”

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I’ve been a product designer at heart since long before I started university, and throughout that time I have bought and done many things because they were easy, until I realized at the heart of it we are effectively designing landfill. Everything we build has a lifespan, and then all of it ends up in a landfill (aside from the small portion that actually gets recycled, and it is still sadly a very small portion)

Companies charging for the bottom dollar product, and making things easier and easier to buy makes it too easy to make poor decisions. I learned recently that some of Amazon’s key IP was around the one click to order button vs anything else they have developed that was the one that made them huge!

It would be very interesting if someone reversed the course of making it easy to buy things that are bad for you / the environment / society etc. Maybe not even monetarily if companies had to set limits on how easy some things were to purchase. say having to write in your CC information every time you buy a can of pop online, or having to complete a puzzle before you buy the tool that will fall apart on its 3rd use, it would be an interesting reset, and hopefully drive less impulse spending behavior. It wouldn’t even have to be mandated as to what things were on the list, even giving consumers the ability to set their level of difficulty on different items that they knew were part of their routines in a negative way and this would help them avoid those impulses.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

If you ever do something and think “That was easy!” you should either triple check your work or figure out who to thank for putting in the work to make it easy for you.

“You’ve got to be good to be Lucky, and Lucky to be good” combined with “ you make your own luck”

Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

Developing hardware products is a tricky thing, as so many things can go wrong that immediately cost a lot of money and time(read: more money). Developing hardware products takes a team of people that have bumps, bruises, and black eyes together and have made it to the end of the mass manufacturing road many times. Experience in the technology you are targeting is an asset, experience in the full process is essential. A team that can get you through hurdles from how to prioritize features, to what happens if I ship before regulatory is completed to make my investors happy (answer can range from, ok go for it, to you risk not having a product for 2 years!) is an excellent asset in your physical development project.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.