A summer at a product design consultancy in Delft, arranged through the MIT MISTI Netherlands program. It was a different kind of engineering from the research I’d been doing, much more about client work and fast concept iteration.
How MMID designs
MMID is an integrated product design firm, headquartered in Delft with smaller offices in Germany. Every product goes through three kinds of specialist designer working together: look-and-feel designers make sure a person can use the product easily, functionality designers make sure it actually works, and producibility designers make sure every part can be made and assembled. I was on the functionality side.
What I worked on
I was helping on projects from the first day, several at once and at different stages, from early concepts to parts already in production:
- a test rig for measuring eductor flow rates: I assembled the design in SolidWorks and worked with suppliers to get the parts delivered on time
- concept development for a high-pressure, tensile-proof pipe coupling, where I did much of the sketching and brainstorming
- concept development for an electrical outlet wall box
- a wall-mounted broom holder
- tensile testing of pipe clamps already in production, confirming that the material choices held to spec
Hand sketching did a lot of the work. It was the quickest way to communicate an idea, and I came home much better at it, and at the Adobe tools, than when I arrived. The other adjustment was CAD: MMID has its own way of using SolidWorks to build clean, functional models quickly, and learning it changed how I model.
The work culture
What stayed with me most was the culture. The team was collaborative and flat, so I could ask for more responsibility and move onto new projects without worrying about bureaucracy or overstepping. Work-life balance is taken seriously in the Netherlands: many of my colleagues worked fewer than 40 hours a week, some while also teaching at TU Delft, and the team was no less productive for it. I left a more well-rounded designer, and I still use parts of MMID’s product innovation process in my own projects.
