What is the back story of how Bright Innovation got started?
My first career was as an IT consultant. A lot of what I did was working with business people to understand what their needs were and how to deliver that in a computer system. I really wanted to find a way to translate that into the world of three-dimensional products. I wasn’t even aware that there was such a thing as industrial design or product design; I just knew that I wanted to be able to take the idea of learning about what people needed and making it into something that would deliver that for them. I actually went back to school at Carnegie Mellon University in its first year of the Master of Product Development program. I started Bright in the beginning of 2005. At that point it was just me, and I found my first client with ClearCount Medical Solutions. That spring, I brought a couple of people onboard and we got a couple more clients. Things started to pick up, and we’ve been busy ever since.
Why are the services you provide important to businesses?
We help companies figure out what to make and how to make it. What we do in the beginning is really try to understand the people that are going to use a product and the context that they are going to use it in, whether that’s a consumer who wants to use a music device or a nurse who needs to use a particular medical device. What’s the environment in which they are going to have to use that and is the technology that the company wants to apply the best solution for that? If it is, how do we apply it in the best way possible for that person so it really solves their problem, so that it’s something that really meets the need they have? That’s the thing that designers and engineers bring to a problem: the ability to look at a problem and envision something that doesn’t exist to solve that problem.
How do you get information on consumers?
We’re a little bit like anthropologists. We go out and watch them, sometimes we’ll videotape them, we’ll ask them to explain what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, why they do things and we’ll do prototyping with them. It’s taking a great big pile of raw information and putting that into a form that can be understood and makes sense relative to what a company is trying to put out there.
What do you see for Bright Innovation in the future?
We want to continue to grow as a fantastic product design consultancy that really helps companies solve all kinds of business problems, not just how to design this product, but how to make an organization work better and more innovative. I’d like to see us find market poles where we don’t necessarily have a client, help apply design thinking to those things and then hopefully help companies use those ideas to meet those market needs. I’d love to see us as part of a big and vibrant design community in Pittsburgh.
