I know book reviews sound lame, but this book is directly applicable to engineers interested in design, which is the majority of biomedical engineers I’ve met. I would highly recommend it as a casual read or a how-to guide for any projects you may be working on now.
Change by Design by Tim Brown was one of my class textbooks for HTE (Health, Technology and Engineering – remember? If you don’t, see my previous posts).
It describes the design thinking process used by the award-winning, groundbreaking product design firm, IDEO. The author, Brown, is the CEO of IDEO and provides hundreds of case studies and examples to illustrate his points, which makes the book extremely useful. The book is lucid, concise, and engaging.
The book covers the entire design thinking process – inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Inspiration, which is mainly about conducting smart needs finding to identify the true need in a market, especially helps biomedical engineers trying to design a device. Knowing the clinical and engineering requirements are so important and this section covers tools on identifying needs which come even before you can determine the requirement. Ideation is more concrete – it is about techniques for generating ideas. Implementation is again abstract – it involves determining through prototypes or other experiments whether the idea will work and is worth putting in more effort.
A great quotation from the book is
“Innovation is defined as a good idea executed well.”
Both the idea and execution are important for a successful product. However, engineers need to create emotionally satisfying experiences, which goes beyond the traditional idea of innovation. The book covers how to create these experiences and how to sell your project to create momentum outside your team.
If you’re wondering how my HTE class went overall, then read my next post! =)
Published on December 14th, 2016
Last updated on August 29th, 2017