news
New Year, New Beginnings in 2024
news
Tactile + Kestra Win MDEA Bronze Award
Last week the Medical Design Excellence Awards (MDEA) announced the 2022 MDEA winners. We're excited to announce that Tactile and Kestra Medical Technologies received a bronze award for...
news
A Party Under the Sea
Halloween is coming! Last year we took everyone to space. This year, we’re taking you into the deep sea where some say is home to some of the most terrifying creatures. Grab your costume and join us on October 28 for Tactile’s 9th annual Halloween party—a frightfully good time with our friends. Come if you dare—we’re dying to see you! Email us for more details.
news
A Big WIN
In 1990 the American with Disabilities Act help pave the way for individuals with disabilities. However, the law pertains to physical disability accommodations in jobs, transportation, schools, and all public and private places—not cognitive, social, or intellectual disabilities. Our partners at Welcome Inclusion (WIN) want to advocate for these individuals. WIN is a public awareness initiative to “promote a world of inclusion” for children and adults with intellectual, behavioral and social differences through three key activities: awareness, community and training. To help elevate the initiative, WIN reached out to Tactile to design the logo and branded campaign materials. The WIN logo will be applied to businesses and organizations that partner with WIN, advocating an inclusive environment for those with differences. We’re proud to be a part of an influential initiative and making an impact through design.
news
Designing Lifesaving Technology for EKOS®
Designing medical products isn’t just an expertise at Tactile, it’s a specialty—we love being a part of making an impact on lifesaving tools. Our partners at EKOS® received US FDA approval in February 2017 for one of their newest products, the EKOS Control Unit 4.0. The EKOS Control Unit 4.0 provides the power to the EKOS System’s ultrasonic core device that uses acoustic pulses to efficiently and safely dissolve blood clots and restore blood flow in patients with pulmonary embolism (PE). Looking to refresh their PE treatment device, EKOS enlisted Tactile to redesign EKOS Control Unit 4.0, the user interface, and the system’s packaging. Learn more about the project here.
news
Panasonic at APEX 2016
For over five years, Tactile has partnered with Panasonic Avionics to develop passenger concepts for the Airline Passenger Experience Expo (APEX)–an annual show where airlines and airline partners come together to unveil the latest and greatest technology and products. At the recent APEX 2016 show in Singapore, we helped Panasonic demonstrate how advancements in bio authentication, identity, object recognition, AR and 3D audio can improve and change the passenger experience. To learn more about Panasonic’s innovations that were displayed at the show, read APEX’s post-show insights here. It was an incredible event and we’re so proud to have worked with Panasonic on envisioning the future.
news
New Hires
As Tactile has grown, our team has expanded to accommodate new projects and deepening relationships with partner clients. We recently brought on two new additions to the team: Christoffer Hart, user experience (UX) designer, and Taylor Thomas, industrial designer. Christoffer adds support to our growing UX team. “The marriage between industrial and UX design is one of the reasons why I came here,” Christoffer says. “To a certain extent, the disciplines merge in many ways. The benefit is a different form of empathy you create for the user. I think those two varying perspectives on the same thing is really valuable. You get really amazing projects out of that.” Taylor is looking forward to working on projects that rely on deeply understanding both the client and consumer: “It gets me really excited about it to think about the fact that I could be working on something that’s actually going to make a change. I came from … a product development firm, but a very different environment,” she says. “They’re about 30 engineers and three designers. I’m really excited to be in this environment—to be back in a place that just lives and breathes design. It’s exciting, it’s exhilarating.”
news
WWU ID Junior Projects
Three of Tactile’s designers (Jonah Griffith, Adam Weisgerber, and Carson Massie) partnered with their alma mater, Western Washington University (WWU), to mentor students in the school’s industrial design program. The students were given an open-ended prompt: Design something that would move a single person from one place to another, as an alternative to other typical methods like cars or bikes. Students identified three initial directions they could take their concepts, then created sketches. They broke into teams to complete research, where they met the Tactile team for the first time. Adam, Jonah, and Carson critiqued the concepts and suggested to each student which path to take, given the time available and the idea itself. During the meeting the students presented their research findings. “That’s typical of what we do in our projects at Tactile,” Jonah says. “We’ll try to research enough to understand the market, doing competitive research and usability research.” After students chose their initial idea, the Tactile team met with them over the span of two months at different intervals to review their progress and provide mentorship. Jonah describes their goals this way: “What we really wanted them to get out of the project was a portfolio piece—or learn how to build a portfolio piece. A big part of that is having a concise and easy-to-understand story at the end. We told them, ‘Try to have a real story behind it, whatever idea that you’re trying to get across.’” Professors want to make sure that students see what it’s really like out in the professional world. When students visited the Tactile offices, they were able to get a sense of the professional industrial design world waiting for them after graduation. “We shared with them the work that we do,” says Adam. “The goal is to strengthen and broaden the network of industry designers in our local area, especially so there’s some sort of networking between students and professionals.” “It feels good to have a chance to give back a little bit to students, because we were once students,” he says. “It allowed them to have a chance to maybe have a leg up; to offer our experiences to them, so that it may be easier for them when they’re trying to get a job.”
news
Into Gear
Our friends at Shift Labs are going places: Tech Crunch reported that Shift has officially launched out of the venerable Y Combinator this Spring as “the Nest of medical devices.” Tactile collaborated with Beth, Koji and the founding team on the DripAssist infusion pump last year, and we’re excited to see them continue to disrupt the medical device model within emerging markets.
