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This holiday I’m looking forward to digging into some of the books I’ve been meaning to read, but just haven’t found the time to read them. I’m sure my fellow engineers can relate! My picks touch on some key design-thinking principles (yes — there’s value to understanding design principles as an engineer!) + 2 awesome engineering biographies and a visual exploration of classic products.. torn […]

The week’s top hardware news. December 11th, 2015 Products World’s Safest Drone Still don’t know how to tackle drone safety? A Belgian startup just came up with the solution: make a drone like a giant flying marshmallow! Fleye can hover and fly about a room all on its own without injuring anyone while taking their […]

There are a ton of books I’m excited to read this holiday, recommended to me by friends and colleagues, or lingering on a list I’ve carried for a while this year. Here are my top reading picks, centered around design trends, uncovering creative potential, and the key elements of lean, user-centered design. 1. Imagine, Design, Create: How Designers, […]

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our blog — the Fictiv-official source for hardware trends, hacks, lessons, opinions, and more. At Fictiv, we’re democratizing hardware development by providing Engineers and Designers with the tools required to build better products. This blog is an integral part of that mission, and will serve to share the […]

It’s one thing to design a product that improves the way something works, makes things fun, or helps you explore new ways of doing things. It’s quite another to change routine, daily behavior, like typing or using a keyboard. That’s the challenge Gest is taking on. Gest is, in the company’s own words, a digital […]

A lot of hard work goes into making 3D printed parts shine once they come off the build bed. As revolutionary as 3D printing has been for hardware development, there’s still some manual labor that goes into every part. Here’s a quick tutorial that shows how we clean PolyJet parts fresh off the build bed […]

We talk a lot about iteration here at Fictiv because it’s the foundation for lean hardware development and lean hardware development is the key to bringing successful hardware products to market. Iteration refers to the cyclic process of refining a design until you’ve achieved the established product requirements, outlined in your PRD (product requirements document). […]

Software and hardware engineers alike have heard some form of this advice: “Build lots of prototypes; iterate as fast as you can.” For those of us in the hardware industry, these prototypes can cost a lot of time and money. So while we should strive to iterate quickly, we must also get as much information […]

One of the most popular questions I get from hardware companies concerns the pros and cons of 3D printer ownership. The question generally goes something like, if i’m iterating all the time, doesn’t it make sense for me to buy my own machine that I can access whenever I need it? That’s precisely the question I […]

If you’ve worked with consumer electronics, you’ll have come across living hinges. They are found in a wide variety of components – clamshell packaging, attached bottle caps, and electronic cases, just to name a few. They are low cost, easy to manufacture, and have little wear or friction involved in operation — understandably a popular […]