The old A/C units that came with the house were not up to the task, so rather than broil while we rip up half the house to install central air, off we go to the appliance store to buy some new window units.  We bought several of the same model, and while I have never thought about an A/C unit needing a remote control, this model had remotes.

After I got them installed, we noticed a tiny little design flaw in the remote.  See if you can spot it.

Were I a dedicated blogger, I would take one of these apart to show you the interior, but now that I have the wonder of a remote control for my A/C, I am not going to risk breaking one of these just for you.  I prefer to luxuriate in my new found comfort like a stereotypical lazy American, thank you very much.

Were I to take the remote apart, you would see that the buttons are molded as one piece.  Molding the buttons as a solid piece is the standard way of doing it, but by creating a part that was symmetrical (likely just a plain rectangle), the designer created a failure mode – the assembler could put the parts together backwards.  What the designer should have done was analyze what could go wrong with the design – could it be assembled backwards? – and keyed one end so the the part was not symmetrical.  Perhaps there is an internal feature that one end of the button strip could have been molded to mate with.  Many companies I’ve worked with use the formal Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA) process, and it is a great tool if you have the discipline to use it.  The Japanese refer to this practice as“poka yoke” (mistake proofing), but often still translated as “idiot proofing”.  I’m not a fan of that translation, because who’s the idiot – the guy would made the momentary mistake of putting it in backwards or the designer who created a flawed product?

PassageMaker often gets classified as a China sourcing company.  While we do source products in China, that is only the smallest part of what we do.  We are primarily a contract assembly company (with that label encompassing vendor coordination, inspection, the actual assembly, packaging, logistics, VAT rebates, etc.).  And I can tell you that we see MANY severely flawed design databases, drawings that appear to have been made by someone who gave no thought to how to put the thing together.

If you are going to spend the money to have something made in China, a dollar’s worth of poke yoke is worth hundred times that in money saved doing inspections, warranty claims and just the general embarrassment of sending a functional part out into the world that is nonetheless defective.

In our Endorsed Service Provider network, we recommend two design engineering firms.  Contract Engineering Services is based in Virginia, USA, and VentureTech is Dutch-owned, based in Shenzhen.  Both do a fine job for our clients and even if you do your own engineering, I strongly urge you to learn from the lesson above and try an mistake proof your design.  It might feel good to blame the Chinese assembly line worker, but who really made the mistake?

Your thoughts?

This project has now transitioned to Pramod KC‘s team for production.  Pramod’s team manages the vendors (we call it Vendor Coordination / Export & Logistics) and coordinates to make sure our Assembly Center gets all components and performs Assembly-Inspection-Packaging to the customer approved Product Quality Manual.  When all is complete, our Logistics Department arranges the shipment, often shipping directly to the client’s distributors and retailers, often in customer-specific packaging, including point of sale displays and barcoding.  In short, this is not only a great product, but it is a great example of how the PassageMaker system works start to finish.

But enough about us, back to the article.  Key paragraphs:

You may think you have no choice about how much you sit. But this isn’t true. Suppose you sleep for eight hours each day, and exercise for one. That still leaves 15 hours of activities. Even if you exercise, most of the energy you burn will be burnt during these 15 hours, so weight gain is often the cumulative effect of a series of small decisions: Do you take the stairs or the elevator? Do you e-mail your colleague down the hall, or get up and go and see her? When you get home, do you potter about in the garden or sit in front of the television? Do you walk to the corner store, or drive?

Just to underscore the point that you do have a choice: a study of junior doctors doing the same job, the same week, on identical wards found that some individuals walked four times farther than others at work each day. (No one in the study was overweight; but the “long-distance” doctors were thinner than the “short-distance” doctors.)

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But it looks as though there’s a more sinister aspect to sitting, too. Several strands of evidence suggest that there’s a “physiology of inactivity”: that when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.

As an example, consider lipoprotein lipase. This is a molecule that plays a central role in how the body processes fats; it’s produced by many tissues, including muscles. Low levels of lipoprotein lipase are associated with a variety of health problems, including heart disease. Studies in rats show that leg muscles only produce this molecule when they are actively being flexed (for example, when the animal is standing up and ambling about). The implication is that when you sit, a crucial part of your metabolism slows down.

Nor is lipoprotein lipase the only molecule affected by muscular inactivity. Actively contracting muscles produce a whole suite of substances that have a beneficial effect on how the body uses and stores sugars and fats.

Which might explain the following result. Men who normally walk a lot (about 10,000 steps per day, as measured by a pedometer) were asked to cut back (to about 1,350 steps per day) for two weeks, by using elevators instead of stairs, driving to work instead of walking and so on. By the end of the two weeks, all of them had became worse at metabolizing sugars and fats. Their distribution of body fat had also altered — they had become fatter around the middle. Such changes are among the first steps on the road to diabetes.

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Some people have advanced radical solutions to the sitting syndrome: replace your sit-down desk with a stand-up desk, and equip this with a slow treadmill so that you walk while you work. (Talk about pacing the office.)

Why yes, yes we have.  It feels to good to be a radical sometimes!

I have found that walking at 2.2 mph at 6 degrees of incline is just right to really get your heart rate going and still be able to type, write and talk on the phone.  So go order a TrekDesk, and if you need help bringing your product to market, give PassageMaker a call!