Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Solutionology Podcast. Today we’ve got our guest, Caleb Vineca with Cove Design, someone that we’ve been talking to for several years now to get on the podcast. And finally, we’ve got him in the flesh.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
For anyone who’s interested in having insight into research and development or how the right sort of exploration happens to come to a positive outcome, Caleb’s feedback and approach is really, really powerful.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
So we’re going to talk to Caleb about sketchy engineering. It’s a phrase that he’s coined. It’s probably not what you think. And we’ll also explore the commercialization journey and Caleb’s approach. Caleb is the founder and CEO of Cove Design, an accomplished mechanical engineer, but really I see Caleb as more of a Renaissance man, and we’re going to talk about that. Caleb has an experience in his career craft making and with cabinets and other woodworking, working in the laboratory environment, developing laboratory equipment, lab processes, and honing his systems thinking skills, and then moving to product development, developing your ROI mindset. And then most recently forming COVID design the last couple of years focused on, again, product development and bringing products to market. I’d love to hear your version of what that history looks like.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
Sure. Back in the ’90s, when I was in high school, I was really interested in art and woodworking and kind of building things with my hands. I’ve always been a builder of sorts. I’m tinkering at home building go- karts and snowboard bikes out of old snowboards and welders and things. I just like tinkering. But then I decided to really push the art thing. So I actually applied for and got a grant for a full ride scholarship at the Art Institute Minneapolis for graphic design. And I made it all of two weeks at the school downtown and I realized I didn’t fit in, so I quit. So I went to a cabinet shop where we were doing custom high end premium cabinets. And this shop was unique that there was no computers in the shop. So clients would bring in a magazine clipping of something they wanted to build and the designers in the front end would turn that into a couple of pencil sketches and they would hand it to us in the back and we would be building it.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
After a couple years of that, I started asking how I could get sort of early on in the design process. How could I push myself upstream and provide value to the people that are just doing production? And so five years out of high school, I went back to college for mechanical engineering. Well, halfway through college, I learned that I’m not really an engineer. The analysis, the simulation, the calculations, optimization, like all of that is cool and it’s interesting, but it’s really rigid. I think of myself more like an explorer or I’m a creative person. And so I memorized my way through college and I got a degree and I went to go work at MTS Systems here in Minneapolis doing serbohydraulic test systems, robotic, airplane test gear, F1, race car simulator, stuff like that. It’s really cool, but I didn’t fit in. And I would ask questions like, “That’s cool, but why does it have to look so bad?” And people are like, “No, it works.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
We don’t need to think about looks. It’s a machine.” And so that was fun, but I decided to leave in 2014 and go to LogicPD, which is a design agency focused on consumer electronics and med device. And this is where I finally figured out what I like to do, where I can provide value in a process. In consumer electronics and med device, the build cycles are short, relatively, a year or less, we’re going to go from concept to production. The ideas are sort of highly varied. So we would go from working on a contact-free ultrasonic heart rate sensor for cattle industry to working on a ultrasonic face tightening therapy device. You end up developing a breadth of knowledge that covers the entire manufacturing from concept to manufacturing, but a really shallow depth. So I’m not an expert in any one technology, but I really kind of understood at that point the R&D process.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
And knowing that from beginning to end helps along that path to make good decisions. I went to Kablui. Kabulu Design is in here in the Twin Cities as well. They do primarily medical device development. So this was a chance to kind of hone the skills that I learned at Logic and really develop more rigorous methods for exploring assumptions, fixing problems, and really prototyping rapidly. Med device, we really need to get in, test ideas quickly, and then move on to the next one. So I got a chance to work in cadaver labs in dog and sheep labs, actually hands-on, scrubbed in as a surgeon to test these surgical tools we were building. So lots of experiences, but as an engineer with Cove, I feel like I wear many hats. One day I’m working on a drone accessory, one day I’m working on a med device, but the skills and the design exploration skills are all the same.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
What I appreciate about you, you say some of this has come from maturity, but there’s a lot more to it than just maturity. It’s intentionality, you’re an explorer. And going through these different journeys, having the aptitude to pick up what you’re experiencing, putting that in your toolbox and then using that into the future is like, that’s pretty rare. And that’s something that I’ve appreciated about you as I’ve gotten to know you from a distance on LinkedIn. And in the posts that you share, you’re sharing your journey and your experiences from all these different facets.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Thank you. Yeah, no, it’s been a fun journey and I enjoy going to work every day. I hear that it’s a blessing if you like your job. So I’m constantly thinking, constantly dreaming, constantly trying to think of what comes next, what comes next for my client’s projects, what comes next for Cove, whatever it is.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
So you’ve coined a phrase sketchyengineering.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And we introed with that phrase. What is it?
Speaker 3 (06:23):
In a nutshell, I would say sketchy engineering is testing an idea thoroughly before investing significant time in it. And testing an idea is a general way of saying prototype it and figure out where it fails, but that doesn’t mean we dive into CAD modeling and 3D printing right away. So sketchy engineering in its truest form to me is actually sketching. I think sketching is one of the lowest barriers to entry. I can pick up a big pen and a piece of copy paper and we can explore ideas together rapidly and those ideas have no significant time invested in them, but when we as humans can visualize something on a piece of paper in front of us in a meeting live or on a whiteboard, those ideas become more tangible when we see them. We can explain, for example, I want to use a linkage to push on this pin and have this swing arm drop down and engage the module and it comes out, right?
Speaker 3 (07:23):
You don’t know what that means. To me, that means one thing. To you, that means something else. And to Brian, it means something totally different. But if I can draw a picture and I can just show what it is that we’re talking about, now we can take that idea, move it aside, and reconsider another idea. But it’s a little bit more than that. It’s even physical, sketchy concept prototyping, which might involve scraps of old prototypes that didn’t work or cardboard and hot glue. Is it too big? Is it too small? Is it too heavy? Is it too bright? Is it too dark? Can I see it in the sunlight? There’s ways that we can test assumptions without investing a whole time to design and develop the entire product. And in R&D, time is our most valuable asset. Out of everything, we can get more money, we can get more 3D printing, we can get more materials, we can get more, everything, but we can’t get more time.
Speaker 3 (08:13):
So if we wasted our time on one idea before we’ve exhausted and made sure that it’s the right idea, then we’re done.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
So that raises a good question. How often as you’re interacting with design professionals out there, what do you think the percentage of design professionals are that are practicing a version of sketchy engineering versus a more rigid approach?
Speaker 3 (08:36):
It really depends on industry. So the engineers that sort of gravitate towards consumer electronics and med devices, those are the ones that I interact with probably the most. Of those, I have to say maybe 10 or 20% of them think this way. But out of engineers as a whole, it’s got to be closer to like one in a hundred. I just don’t see it. I see engineers being very rigid and very analytical and very process driven. I think that’s how engineers are wired. And I don’t know yet today if people find themselves in engineering because that’s how their brain works or if engineering sort of wires people’s brains to think that way. I think that when people talk to me and they say, “Oh, you’re an engineer or a mechanical engineer,” then that’s what they think that I’m here to help them with. But realistically, I’m here to help them develop a secondary product line that generates more revenue for their business or take a product that they’ve been selling for 10 years and cut 30% of the cost out of it.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
It’s just like, “Well, yeah, you’ve been making it with a die cast part for 10 years, but why don’t you 3D print it? Why don’t you injection mold it? ” Well, the materials weren’t there when we looked at it 10 years ago. Okay. Well, it’s been 10 years. Maybe we should look at new materials. There’s a lot of resins out there that you maybe haven’t considered. So there’s a lot of what I do that is engineering and I think my engineering background helps me think about things technically, but that’s kind of the type of work that brings me joy.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
We’ve struggled with characterization of that even internally. And I think we’ve landed on generally, we classify it as system architecture, but even that’s not widely recognized as what we’re talking about. So it’s like we’re talking about something that isn’t widely recognized or acknowledged. So whether you use engineering or ID or architecture or system architecture, everyone’s looking at that from a different lens because it’s not commonly practiced.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
Yeah. In some businesses, they call it a systems engineer who thinks about the multidisciplinary … And maybe this is just repeating what you just said, but systems engineer has to understand a little bit about software and a little bit about mechanical, a little bit about ID and a little bit about firmware and a little bit about distribution and everything, right? And they’re going to kind of maintain that set of requirements and make sure everybody’s working from the same playbook. But generally speaking, systems engineers aren’t super creative outside the box thinkers. I mean, that’s my experience, limited experience. But I think what’s fun about working with designers is they are sort of blue sky thinkers and they look for ways to sort of break the mold. And if you bring them a problem, they might bring you 10 solutions that you would never have thought of and it’s fun.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
It’s free to think about, but sometimes one of those ideas really just cracks open a thought paradigm or changes the direction of a company and it can be transformative.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Do you think it’s really free to think about? If it were that easy, the world would be a different place and the creative thinking or the critical thinking, the time investment, I’m sure sounds like you’re thinking about things all the time, you’re problem solving and picturing different ways to approach things. It takes a lot of energy, emotional and mental, and I don’t know if that’s free. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
I think it is free to think. Well, at least if you consider your time having significant value. If I sat down with some leaders and just said, “Hey, we’re just going to brainstorm. You’re not going to pay anybody. I’m just going to come here and facilitate.” I think you could start to unlock some of that creative juice and it’s fun. I think it’s absolutely fun.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
So maybe the divergence there is that it’s free to think, but acting on that freedom, knowing what to do with it after you think about it, and then being able to nurture the downstream effect of it, because if you don’t know what to do once you’ve come up with an idea, you can’t deliver the message and that’s not your normal mode of operating, then it’s like, it’s really scary.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
It’s
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Like you’ve got to be thinking on thinking in order to prepare for that eventual outcome
Speaker 3 (12:50):
That
Speaker 2 (12:50):
You don’t know what’s coming.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Absolutely. And I’ll just add onto that. Probably the most powerful unlock in my business has been talking to people about the business value of what we’re talking about because for five years I talked about the technical value of what we’re doing and I spent a lot of time saying, “Well, this would be a lighter weight product. This would have a smaller battery or this would be easier to use.” But you can’t put a dollar value on any of that. So probably none of these business leaders are standing here thinking, “Well, I’m staying up at night because that product’s just too heavy.” But what they are staying up at night thinking about is like, my cost is 30% higher than it was last year because of tariffs, right? So this executives staying up, they were spending $3 million last year, now they’re spending $4 million. Where’s that million dollars going to come from?
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Their bonus, their entire sense of fulfillment to the company depends on them keeping those costs in check. So if we can talk about them instead and say, “Your costs just went up 30%. How are you addressing this? ” And we can then say, “Why don’t we try to bring your cost back to three million because that looks good for you. It helps your company. It’s more profitable. Five years from now you’ve saved $5 million. What is that worth to you as a company?” And now people can act on those things. Well, we’re going to audit your bill materials, we’re going to look at your supply chain, we’re going to define what components are your obvious high cost items. Is there a way we can split those? Is there a way we can bring them domestic so we aren’t paying import costs? If they’re too complicated, if there’s too many parts and we can’t handle the assembly costs here in the US, maybe there’s a way we can automate that.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
And so that’s where I can step in and sort of facilitate a project to remove that million dollars out of cost of goods and present them with whatever it is, 100 or $200,000 development project suddenly sounds like peanuts if you’re saving $5 million a year. When you get a smart team of people tackling a really challenging problem and you give them a sufficient budget to work from, a couple hundred thousand dollars, two, three smart people, you can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time. And by damage, I mean, you can really drastically bring business benefits. And I can say that from my experience, most engineers, most designers don’t think about this or care about it. They care about like the tactical work that they’re doing and I become more like a strategic partner in that way that can do the tactical work.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
And it starts with that sort of free thinking that you were talking about, but we really just have to unlock what is it that’s causing this problem because if we’re just going to talk about solutions, solutions, yeah, there’s a million ideas, but which ideas are actually going to deliver that business benefit?
Speaker 1 (15:41):
When do you know when to pull up anchor and stop sketchy, stop the quick iteration and start transitioning to a more constrained design? How do you know when to do that?
Speaker 3 (15:52):
I like the AD20 principle. I apply it to a lot of things in my life, but I feel like if we can target our effort on the 20% effort that gets us 80% of the way there, we can justify spending the rest of the effort to bring it over the finish line. I don’t follow a rigid stage gate process in my development. It’s a lot of gut feel stuff. So when I place something in front of another user or another engineer and they can see how it assembles, they understand how it all works, the mechanisms are logical, the screw placements are logic. Everything’s just kind of working and it feels good and there’s no obvious concerns. Then I feel comfortable going through a more rigorous design for manufacturing sort of exercise where we stop changing every part of the system and we really just start focusing in on each part.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
We’ve tested to find our way through here and we know that we’re at a reasonably good spot.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
Let’s call this design the direction. So we’ll do a phase proposal for let’s say three- Physical, tangible deliverables. And once those are delivered, my work is done until the next phase and then we might talk some more. And then we might say, “We want to take these two forward to the next level.” So we’ll take those two forward to the next level and iterate on those. But the actual decision points, yeah, a lot of it is it’s squishy. It’s a moving target sometimes and that makes a lot of engineers really nervous. I can say that from experience. There’s some engineers are like, “Will you just stop changing stuff? Can you please just fix the housing so I can start detailing those?” I’m like, no, because the housing’s defined my cam pivot locations and my cam pivot locations are going to be constantly moving until I optimize this thing.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
So no, I’m not going to fix anything. In my mind, if I’m building a medical device, a complex mechanism inside of a single use disposable surgical tool, in my opinion, all the parts are released when all the parts are released. None of the parts are fair game until all of the parts are done. And that’s … I don’t even know if that is normal, really?
Speaker 3 (17:58):
There are folks that will say, “Well, we got a side surface from our industrial designer. We have to stick within that. ” So then they tie their mechanical engineer’s hands for weeks, just trying to force it, squish it into this package and I’ll come on and say, “Why don’t we just move that face a little bit or just make it a little bigger?” And the client’s like, “Yes, let’s do that. ” And they’re like, “Why didn’t somebody else suggest?” “Well, because they told us the A side was fixed. “I’m like, ” I don’t care what they told us. “It really takes someone outside the box creative thinking to just push and squeeze and say,” Well, yeah, that was our requirement, but realistically what we’re trying to achieve is move this component this far in this amount of time and we only have this much force to work from.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
So now what else can change?
Speaker 1 (18:46):
“Can you think of any war stories maybe where Sketchy Engineering saved the day?
Speaker 3 (18:52):
I’ll give you my earliest memory of the value of something like Sketchy Engineering. I was working on a med device product, a tabletop mounted console for a med device, surgical tool used in office, and they had clinicians that would carry it in and out of the office. And we’d been working on it for a few months. The requirements were exhaustive. I mean, I want to even say it was a hundred page document of requirements. It might not have been that. Might have been 40 pages, but many, many, many, many, many system requirements. And we sit down with a client in a meeting and we’re showing off our first prototype and their first thought or the first words that I remember is why is it so heavy? And everyone looked at the requirements document and they said,” I don’t know. It says it can be 22 pounds.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
“I remember feeling like, ” Oh no, there’s a lot of time spent in this program to not know that 22 pounds is the wrong weight for this device. How come we didn’t test that assumption early? How did we even get to this? “And I’m just seeing like custom expedited CNC machine parts, custom sheet metal parts, custom urethane cast housings, like lots of time and money, lots of energy that went into this prototype and they said it’s too heavy. So we went on lunch break and one of the designers ran down to the wood shop and cut out a couple of really scrubby little wood handles and they went up to the lunchroom and got six 12 packs of La Croix and they duct taped it all together and brought it up to the room and they said,” How’s this? “And they set it on the table.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
And it was like a light bulb went off. I went,” It doesn’t have to be much. It just has to be something. “When people started picking up and carrying around, we had a decision to make as a team. Are we going to put wheels on this thing and make it a cart or are we going to start gutting equipment out of this box because it can’t have this many power supplies. It can’t have this big of a display. If we’re expecting somebody to carry this thing around, this is the target that we need to hit, not that. And so, I mean, in some ways it saved the day and in other ways it sort of challenged other people’s assumptions and it kind of changed the direction of the project, but it really was proof that it doesn’t have to be an expensive test and tests don’t have to be formally documented and they don’t have to go through a testing lab.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
We just need something real to put our hands on and feel it and get everyone’s buy-in. And once the sort of chief decision maker, whether it’s the chief engineer or the systems engineer or the client, once they buy in, then we’re gold. But until then, we’re all just guessing.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
What sort of buy-in change did you experience after the La Croix test? Were you able to come with a decision that day?
Speaker 3 (21:39):
What I remember was that we ended up going to a cart, developing a cart solution that went with it. So you could basically, you just had to get it out of the trunk of the car and then you could deploy some wheels and roll it in because we couldn’t at that point take everything out of it.
Speaker 2 (21:53):
Those simple tests stamp in a clear direction forward where otherwise maybe you spend two or three weeks after that trying to come up with how do we figure this thing out and you’re okay with diverging when others aren’t and exploring when others would prefer to converge or stay within the bounds.
Speaker 3 (22:12):
Yeah, probably to a fault sometimes. It can be beneficial. My father-in-law tells me, he said, at some point you got to stop designing and start nailing boards together. You can’t just keep thinking forever. And so to your earlier question, there has to be a point when we say this is good enough and now we need to finish it. But I think it’s much like any creative process. Say you’re writing a poem or you’re writing a song, we can’t say for sure when the poem is done and we can’t say for sure when the song has been written. We can’t say for sure when the development of a product is complete, but we can say that we’ve met our deadline. And so what I say is invest as much time into that exploratory process as you can, budget enough time for the development and get done when you say you’re going to get done and then move on to gen two.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
There are companies that will paralyze themselves with never finishing the design process and never moving into the development. They just stay in the design phase forever because they’re constantly thinking of new ideas and that can be a problem too. Well,
Speaker 1 (23:12):
That resonates with me because I’ve got more questions and this conversation could go on forever, but we’re going to have to determine when done is. So I’ve really appreciated the conversation, Caleb, and there’s a lot to learn from the experiences that you’ve had. And I can say from a distance, I’m sure your customers feel lucky to have worked with you, to have your systems engineer approach along with the sketchy engineering. It’s neat to learn from you and really appreciate the conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 3 (23:42):
It’s been fun. Thanks for having me guys. Appreciate it.
