A new eBook from Cortex, distilling 20 years of manufacturing experience into actionable advice for entrepreneurs and product champions. The hardware world is too used to seeing manufacturing as the last step of the product development process. Manufacturing comes at the end, so it should be the last thing you plan, right? You identify a…
Cortex has partnered with a group of organizations including Raytheon BBN Technologies, Purdue University, LaDuca LLC and PortaScience on a new COVID-19 point of care test kit. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve been looking for opportunities to bring our skills to bear and get involved. Now, Cortex is proud to announce we’re…
The Association of Chartered Industrial Designers of Ontario (ACIDO) has just announced their annual Rocket Competition winners — including Cortex’s sponsored award! For the past 19 years, the ACIDO Rocket Competition has recognized the best work from Ontario’s graduating class of industrial designers. In addition to helping judge the competition, Cortex provides a special award…
We’re happy to share a big announcement from the team: Cortex has passed our ISO 9001:2015 Surveillance Audit – remotely! Last year, Cortex announced a big step forward: ISO 9001:2015 certification. This was the result of a deep analysis of our processes in everything we do. We dove deep into our playbook, identified gaps between…
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…