On December 13th, Cortex President Dylan Horvath spoke at TEDx McMaster U in Hamilton about the immense possibilities of product design to improve human potential — and the pictures and videos are up and ready to share! Speaking alongside a lineup from fields as varied as MedTech, conservation science and race car driving, Dylan addressed…
Big things are happening with Lumatone, the isomorphic keyboard – a Cortex passion project that’s taking on a big life of its own. Cortex went down to the annual NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) show in Anaheim for the launch of the Lumatone – a game-changing isomorphic keyboard with roots in the experimental music…
Some awesome news to wrap up 2019: we’re proud to announce that Cortex clients Cloud DX and AceAge have been selected as part of Canada’s first Amazon Alexa accelerator cohort. Both companies won entrance to Canada’s first and only Amazon-collaborated business accelerator after entering a nation-wide competition. This new program, run by the Accelerator Centre…
When AgeWell Toronto invited Cortex President Dylan Horvath to present a workshop to their network of researchers and entrepreneurs, our goal was to relate the vital importance of using ethnography to de-risk the product design process. Many startups (especially those under time pressure and budget limitations) choose to dive straight into development, assuming the product…
Today we’re proud to announce that Cortex has officially received our ISO 9001:2015 Certification! At Cortex, we’ve spent the past several years distilling our mission and goals into a core statement: we develop human-centred products that improve people’s lives. Based on empathy-led ethnographic research, we visualize human experiences, design products to enable those experiences, and…
It’s one thing to practice design in your home city with the materials and culture that you’re used to, but it’s an entirely different thing to work in a completely new environment. It can be instructive: How much does our design thinking depend on our familiarity with a North American environment? What happens if we…
Shout it from the rooftops: Cortex Client Voltera has just ranked #24th overall on Canadian Business’s Startup 50 list for 2018. Voltera makes the V-1 PCB Printer, which is a transformational rapid prototyping platform that allows product developers to quickly produce printed-circuit-board (PCB) prototypes in-house.
A primer from Cortex Design. All medical devices marketed in the U.S. are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA classifies any new medical device as either Class I, Class II, or Class III, depending on the device’s risk, invasiveness, and a number of other factors. If you want to market a…
Awesome products deserve to be appreciated, so as an exercise we put together a quick list of some of our favourite product designs — both past and present — to try to get at what makes a product great. It’s something we think about a lot at Cortex: why do some products fail to resonate,…
Any business leader (along with the venture capitalist who invests in them) knows that there’s no defined skill-set to success — no formula. That said, over the course of my career, I’ve noticed shared habits of successful leaders designing incredibly innovative hardware solutions. Cortex spoke with some of those leaders, both on the entrepreneurial side…
Cortex Design uses 3D printing to rapidly prototype hardware ideas in a physical form. Our in-house Objet polyjet 3D printer allows us to quickly print parts that could cost hundreds or thousands of dollars with subtractive CNC prototyping methods. It’s exciting technology, and it’s easy to understand why startups and Fortune 500 companies alike think…
Cortex Design is integrating Fusion 360 into our existing design process. In order to work with our vendors, we need Custom Drawing Templates in Fusion 360. This is not a feature that the Fusion team has implemented yet, so here’s how we made it work:
You know those little frustrations that happen over the course of the day? Many of them are actually moments of design failure — the gap between the promise a brand makes to you, and the product you actually get. Your life today was probably full of little frustrations This was today’s frustration for me: 11 a.m., and…
If the tech world was a baseball game, the rules would change every time a new player stepped onto the field, a seasoned pitcher unveiled a new pitch, or a spectator entered the stadium. That’s basically how we won $100,000 + $5.4 million in R&D for the XPRIZE we’d already been disqualified for. Here’s how…