Full Article… - design management europe award

D M E A W a r d 2 00 7 S E L E CT I O N
Winner Micro compaNIES
design
management
europe
FeONIC
UK
User friendly technology through design
Background
As you arrive at FeONIC, you enter a designed environment with a modern feel; a smart
reception, open plan area and glass partitioned meeting rooms. FeONIC is a technology
company that has integrated design into its products and thinking in order to de-science the
company’s technology to be as user friendly as possible.
FeONIC is focussed totally on the conceptualisation, design, development and
commercialisation of innovative products {innovation} based on a specific smart material.
FeONIC’s innovative technology utilises the massive magnetostrictive properties of TerfenolD, a smart material that converts magnetic energy into movement, to create sound, ultrasound
and to cancel noise or mechanical vibration or sense pressure. FeONIC have used a set
of graphic icons on their glass partitions throughout the office and development centre,
representing the most relevant aspects of life in which they believe the technology can make
a difference. These are
Sensing, sounding, controlling, dispensing and assisting
“The technology on its own has only potential, it needs people to convert it into something
useful, something useful and relevant to people; without design and engineering it is nothing.”
Brian Smith MD FeONIC
Communicating the concept
The company is a leader in this technology; in 1991 the technology had no application;
however growing interest around the world has led to the emergence of over 30 products
in the last five years.
Having developed a series of worldwide-patented devices suitable for harnessing the power
of this smart material, FeONIC has chosen to focus on its first market sector - audio for the
short term - a market with an amazingly wide horizon for potential applications.
Making technology useful requires the imagination that design brings when integrated
{integration} with technical capabilities and inventiveness.
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The company was formed as a spin out from Hull University, a group of academics and
scientists in the nineties. This small group saw the opportunity to innovate {innovation} with
a smart material and the potential that such solutions could offer. Their current Managing
Director, Brian Smith had spent the previous 21 years of his career building one of the UK’s
best know product innovation consultancies and had started to work with FeONIC to create
their first consumer product Soundbug®.
The Soundbug®
Brenda Hopkins, founder and Chairman, realised the importance of design to the future
development of the company and persuaded Brian to move from consultancy to industry
to become the Managing Director in 2001.
The company now has designers working alongside the technical team of engineers and
scientists that together are pushing the technology to become something of value.
Brian enthusiastically describes how the technology works, draws pictures and diagrams
to explain the extraordinary opportunities that this incredibly powerful smart material can
create, endless possibilities that could affect the way in which we hear sound, managed
and controlled in a much more conscientious way than traditional technology allows.
Bringing any new technology to market takes time and is has its own difficulties which largely
hinge on others ability to comprehend the commercial opportunities and have the confidence
to commit to something so radical to current thinking..
It was clear to FeONIC that there was a need to find a means to communicate the
concept/technology both to demystify the science whilst at the same time enabling an
example that could be played with by many people around the world. A consumer product
– the soundbug – a small device that size of a computer mouse that can turn a resonant
surface into a massive speaker was seen as the ideal way to manifest it – marking the start
of the design facing future for the company.
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Strategic use of Design
The Company values the strategic importance of design and of design thinking in all that
it does. Their philosophy focuses on design specifically with a view to exploiting the strategic
benefits moving beyond the use of design simply within a project as a way of visualising
the possibilities of the technology and a means of communicating its potential.
As a technology development company, FeONIC has been challenged to gain the confidence
of potential partners and buyers to the point that that they are willing to risks their own
reputations to adopt it.
Design is the key means that FeONIC use to achieve this: being consistent in their use of
their identity, and their products identities, the design of the website, all corporate communication
materials, and third party representation and editorial and brand representation as well as
underpinning the engineering of their devices.
Design Management
Within the design philosophy that the company has developed (based initially on the MD’s
long history of third party product development for many of the worlds leading brand names)
there is a fundamental requirement to manage the internal design of every aspect of the
company and the products, but also by establishing design milestones as methods of control
of the design process, in combination with key commercial deliverables. This unusual
philosophy ensures the viability of both aspects; technical, design, cost and character
requirements in conjunction with commercial interest and adoption opportunity.
The Company has eight people in it, three trained designers, two in industrial/product design
and the other in textile design. They work with a multi disciplined technical team of three,
one electronics engineer and one magnetic physicist led by a Director of Technology who
has a PHD in the use of Magnetostrictive Materials who form the company’s small technology
group.
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Prior to 2001, FeONIC’s technology team were less design aware, however the gradual
success of both the company’s IPR and commercial relationships, coupled to the constant
enquiry the small team receive (upwards of 50 enquiries a month) has changed the culture
as the relevance of design becomes clearer.
The team see itself united by the design challenge as they have added a new way of
operating which uses design at the core. The MD uses visual representation and technique
c ons t ant ly a s a way of co mmu nica tin g an d e xp lo ring re le va nt is sue s.
Product development and innovation
Since 2001 the first generation of the FeONIC technology had already been developed into
a number of products that convert surfaces into speakers; The Soundbug®, the FeONIC®
Presenter and The Whispering Window®, which enabled them to manifest how the technology
could be used. Soundbug won a red dot in 2003 and QVoix a CeBIT IF product design
award in 2006, and the company was also awarded by the UK Electronics Industries the
Best Use of New Technology award in 2004.
FeONIC’s second generation of devices – the culmination of three years of research based
on the companies first generation have a much higher sound quality, wider bandwidth with
much greater intelligibility – in fact they offer a higher level of intelligibility, in package sizes
that volume for volume out perform traditional speakers.
One of FeONIC’s second generation
devices
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The worldwide-patented scalable design
principle that FeONIC has developed can be
miniaturised for use inside portable products
devices or maximised to drive internal walls
and floors to produce very high quality sound
systems. These were born out of the very
focussed design development brief balanced
with stringent commercial constraints in the
dual approach developed by the company, for
multiple market exploitation in different product
ranges in both consumer and professional
markets.
FeONIC devices will in the future manage and
control noise, receive feedback from the signal
they are outputting and.
Whilst a very wide variety of applications of
the technology have been envisaged during
FeONIC’s earlier involvement with a diverse
range of applications: foetal stimulators, pistonic
drills, paediatric pumps, dynamic razors,
suspension bridge stabilisers the company’s
future ability to satisfy these opportunities relies
totally on the effectiveness of it’s investment
in it’s design driven philosophy as well as
finding the most effective routes to market.