Caitlin Kalinowski: preference

Transcript context

…One of the big decisions that I imagine you have to make when you're designing a new piece of hardware is deciding between using this available stuff, available components that are out there cheap versus, "Okay, we're going to do this something new." It's something in software too, to use the design system or do something new. How do you think about that balance when you're designing a new piece of hardware? Very simply, I use off the shelf whenever I can, especially in the prototyping phases because in the prototyping phases, which are really important phase of what we do, your goal is to show that it can work at all. Can you get a thing working? So often, it doesn't have to be the final pretty thing. It can be the ugly version. You can make an industrial design model of what the final thing's going to look like, but actually, we call it works like looks like models where you have, "This is what it's going to look like and here's how it's going to work and here's a working prototype." Humans are pretty good at this as long as, and this is a pretty big caveat, what you show could fit into the industrial design. For companies that are younger, that's not always the case, but that's what we're going for. And so, in the prototyping phase, man, whatever works, off the shelf, whatever's fast, whatever you can get to quickly, and then maintain a sense of what's really going to fit in your final design. Is it capable? Are the processes and components and materials capable of actually adapting to this size, this new weight that you need it to go into? So that's part of the calculus. When you move into mass production and the final design, it depends. I mean, if I was making Matic and I could buy an off-the-shelf wheel or an off- the-shelf component, I absolutely would and fit it in. But often, what we're doing is highly custom because we have, again, one of those KPIs, "I want to be this size. I want it to be this weight. I want to be this color." And often, off-the-shelf parts aren't good enough, not because they don't work, but because they're just not exactly designed for what we're doing. This is the reason these drones are so cheap now is there's all these parts that have been innovated and built and scaled, manufactured for other things. And now, we just have all these things, and we can assemble a really cheap drone.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.