5 Questions with Dylan Horvath (President, Cortex Design)

I found it really interesting that you worked on mobile robotics projects in the 90s. Can you tell me more about that?

‍Dylan: I was interested in robotics from the time I was probably eight years old. I went all the way through university with a robotics focus. I did systems design engineering at University of Waterloo, then went to the Mobile Robotics Lab at University of Michigan for my masters. And that was kind of when I stopped being interested in robots.

At the time, things were just starting to get into nonlinear control systems, behavioural-based systems. That was probably the beginning of this idea that functional robots, or service robots, could be controlled in a simpler way than had traditionally been the case. Robotics was definitely a big interest, along with automated control systems. The idea of taking a sum of parts and putting it together, and the sum being greater than the parts, always excited me. 

I think all of the things that I learned in robotics are still applicable. Machines that do things by themselves, it’s part of what we do at Cortex. Product design is trying to decide the line between human and machine — how much do we want the machine to do, how much do we want the human to do. A lot of product design is about removing behavioural change from the way that a person interacts with a product. Those are opportunities for automation.

This walking robot project that we did in university was a real landmark project at the time. We had developed all this technology, all this stuff, and then this one team member — he bought baby shoes for the thing, before we took our final presentation. He said, “Oh, it would be cute if it had baby shoes.” And I thought that was the stupidest thing. But everyone, after the presentation, mentioned the baby shoes. Nobody talked about the technology. Nobody talked about all the amazing things we had done. Everyone was like, “Hey, I liked the shoes.” And I remember that quite distinctly because it showed how people tend to gravitate toward the thing they can recognize and relate to. So it wasn’t intentional, but it really humanized the technology for people. It was like, “Oh, those are legs. Those are its feet. Those are cute shoes.” It gives you a little bit of an entryway into the technology.

Then, after University of Waterloo, I started working on robotics systems at University of Michigan. I remember there was this robot arm for an underwater, guided, automated vehicle. And the arm was beautiful. I remember just being really taken by it and thinking, too, that I’d never really thought of machinery as being intentionally beautiful. Sometimes it’s beautiful because it’s beautifully built, but that robot arm has shapes and arcs that performed engineering functions but were also somewhat gestural. So that was when I discovered industrial design, because I was trying to figure out — who was it that made it like that, and why?

Then I was talking with someone who knew an industrial designer and she said, “Oh, yeah, that’s what industrial design is about.” And that led me to where I am now — that sense of emotional attachment, how people anthropomorphize machinery, or their phones. Your phone becomes a friend. The devices that you live with every day become an extension of you. Your favourite kitchen knife says something about you. And I started to really understand that, and be fascinated by it, and want to work in it.

Human-centred design is at the core of everything Cortex does. What was the inspiration and motivation to build the firm upon that particular foundation?

Dylan: It was a desire to work with humans. Coming off of working with robots so much — I hated what I was doing, day to day. And also, connection with society and humanity. I remember at the time I was doing a lot of coding, and I was having a really hard time having conversations with people. Because my brain would be thinking of access functions and ways to communicate with machines and I was like, “This is breaking me.” I just didn’t want to do that anymore. 

I was getting really interested in using engineering and art, in artistic exhibits, and that led to industrial design. So I started Cortex as a way to go back to school to do a masters. You needed a portfolio. In engineering they never tell you, “Hey, take photographs of your work as you’re going,” and so I didn’t have a portfolio. I thought, well I’ll go see if I can get people to pay me to do stuff and then I’ll build a portfolio that way… and then I just never went back to school. I started hiring people instead.

If you had to pick one technology-driven trend, which one do you think is most important for the product design industry over the next five years — and why?

I believe in guiding product design from a human-centered design perspective. Ultimately we’re creating solutions to human problems. So the way those solutions are experienced is something that we try to intentionally design, with an empathy toward how people want those problems to be solved.

A lot of times, people don’t want a product to do anything. It’s not through a natural desire for another piece of whatever  to be in their lives that they’re interested in buying something — or, that’s not the part of design that interests me. I hate gadgets. I hate doing work on something which is just for a commercial lens. Like, you feel good because you’ve ticked off a box on some consumer therapy, because you wanted to buy something new and nice? I hate that kind of stuff. I love products that last. I love products that — everything I buy,  I think very carefully about. I don’t like accumulating stuff. I try to make my surroundings work for me, not the other way around. That’s the kind of stuff that I’m interested in.

From a trends perspective, one thing we’ve really focused on as a firm is medical devices and solving the specific pain points that come with receiving treatments or diagnosing conditions or the service delivery of receiving healthcare. And, you know, how many problems are there in that realm that we can solve? That feels like very good work. It’s very rewarding when you can make healthcare accessible.

A big trend right now that we’re interested in as a firm and that we’re actively doing is democratizing access to medical technology. Getting it out of the doctor’s office, out of hospitals, out of clinics, and into people’s homes. So you don’t have to visit a doctor, hopefully you can avoid the need to visit a hospital, and leaving that for the work that does need to be done in person by a doctor or by a surgeon or by a specialist — removing all the things that don’t need to be there. That’s the work we’re most interested in.

But I always want to stay in consumer. Because consumer informs medical, and it should. If there’s going to be widespread adoption of these technologies into your home, if the goal is to help you stay in your home or help you stay out of a hospital — in order to do that, it has to be empathetic to your environment. It has to be empathetic to your use case.

Covid-19 diagnostics, for example, there’s very few that are allowed to be done by an individual. And the ones that are being done by individuals, the particular technology they use is not very reliable. You can get a lot of false negatives, which is the worst thing to get in medical: you think you’re okay, and you’re not. Lab-based technology, that’s much more accurate — that’s very difficult to get into the home, because it’s very difficult for a person to follow the clinical workflow in order to deliver it. That’s an interesting problem.

It would be so amazing if we could deliver the Covid-19 vaccine at home. There are reasons why you can’t do that, so working on those reasons why, and breaking them down, is something that really fascinates me. It’s not that I find it fascinating, it’s that they’re hard problems. We like hard problems. And by solving those problems, you get tangible human benefit. That’s what I like.

People have a natural tendency to idealize who it is that you’re designing something for, and people will often design for themselves. Like, this is how I would like it to be. Then you go and find out who your users are, and your users are not you. Understanding them and understanding the environment they live in, and what they’re interested in having, is a whole other ball game.

How would you describe your approach to collaboration? Has it changed over time — and if so, how has it changed?

Dylan: We put a very high emphasis on collaboration at Cortex. Most of the projects we work on are multidisciplinary in nature. For example, when we start a project there’s usually some open ideation — what you typically think of as brainstorming. And during those brainstorms, it’s really important to have a whole bunch of different people in the room with different backgrounds. It’s great if you can have gender diversity, age diversity, social diversity. Sometimes that’s hard to practically do, so you do what you can to get proxies for that. The benefit of a structured brainstorm is that you get a whole bunch of ideas that come from all sorts of different perspectives. Then you can start to extract and hone and eliminate and promote the things that will make a successful solution. It’s really hard to do that as an individual.

It’s also really hard to do that if you don’t have the right attitude towards collaboration. Because, especially in design, design is full of big egos and people that are just waiting to talk. That’s a really hard thing to eliminate in a collaborative environment. So I look for people that have demonstrated that they work well with others before I hire them. It’s one of the things I check for. You have to start with that attitude, that collaboration is good. Then it gets down to tactics and how you do it.

So, leading into your second question, how has it changed? Obviously this epidemic has really changed the ways you can collaborate. In-person collaboration is not possible anymore, and there are a lot of negatives to that. However, I do feel like the net effect of being forced to innovate the tools that we’re using and innovate the process that we collaborate by, has actually had a net positive effect. We are more collaborative than we were before.

We’re more focused, as well, than we were before. We’re less distracted. Honestly, it’s been a good thing for our business to have been forced to re-evaluate it. But, not “good across the board.” There are some things that are worse. It’s the organic collaboration and those organic conversations that you weren’t expecting to have, weren’t planned — that’s what’s lacking.

With CoLab, one of the benefits that we’ve identified is about how it’s really hard to bring everybody together for meetings all the time, and it’s really disruptive. Being able to do that asynchronously is a big benefit. However you don’t get those benefits of the little thoughtful moments, when we’re all in the same room together and someone’s talking, and you can keep an ear up for what they’re talking about — and then provide an insight they wouldn’t have even been looking for. Sometimes I think that’s an opportunity and a challenge: how do you invite that sort of collaboration to happen organically? I don’t really have a good answer for that.

It’s something that we’re continually tuning. We’ll have a way of doing something then after a while we’ll say, “Okay! We’re going to do it this way now!” We have end-of-day huddles where we actually do get together, in person on a video meeting. For a while, we did it where every huddle was the same. Basically, best and worst, you know — what’s your challenge, what’s your win. We’ve also done KPI sharing, that was really boring.

Our latest thing we’re doing right now is, we’ll do a project huddle on Mondays and that’s half an hour. We do fireside chats, we’re calling them, from Tuesday to Thursday where we will — pretty close to when the huddle actually happens, we’ll decide on a topic and throw somebody under the bus to present on it. You’ve got 15 minutes where it’s moderated, there’s someone who’s interviewing and someone who’s presenting on a topic of interest. Then on Fridays we have social huddles where it’s half an hour, end of the day. You’re allowed to crack a beer or make a cocktail if you want to, and those are no work. Don’t talk about work. So that’s our latest thing, but we’ll keep tuning that, too.

If a manufacturing leader asked you for your #1 piece of general business advice, what would you say?

Dylan: Schedule your next meeting.

It’s setting expectations. There’s actually two pieces of advice that I would give to any team. 

One is: anything that is spoken, it didn’t happen until you write it down. We have a formalized method of providing what we call “contact reports.” It’s actually something that I totally stole, with permission. It was actually complimenting a vendor on their method for doing this. This company, Pixel Dreams, that we hired to do our website — every time we had a verbal communication, the same day I would get an email back of a contact report. It was a record of what we spoke about, with action items (if there were any). I thought, that’s brilliant. Everybody takes notes — I’ve got all these notes from my calls — and they never go anywhere. But contact reports get transmitted to everybody on the project. So we totally stole that and have formalized it into our system, so that’s one.

Second thing is: what we call an upfront contract. An upfront contract is an agreement when you’re having a meeting about how long it will take, who’s there, what the purpose of the meeting is, whether or not you have any questions, whether or not I have any questions, and then what the next meeting is. Those components are part of every upfront contract. So touchpoints with clients or touchpoints with manufacturers follow this sort of waterfall of upfront contracts. You state what you’re going to say, when you’re going to say it, and that call is planned and expectations are understood before you start the call. And at the end of that call, you set the next meeting, so you always reserve time to have everyone on the call agree to a date, time, topic for the next contact point.

And those two things? I think they’ve been gamechangers.