The advanced technologies being developed every year need savvy designers to build them into products that consumers connect with. Happily, the Internet of Things (IoT) explosion is concurring with the proliferation of new, innovative product design firms with a suite of special skills to bring ideas into 3D.

This might spell stiff competition if you’re in the design business, but for the rest of us, it means better products for our money. “Bad design is becoming extinct,” said Dan Harden, president, CEO and principal designer of Whipsaw, Inc., a firm that has worked with Google, Cisco and GE.

Harden told Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that clients now have a plethora of product design firms to test-run before making a choice.

From noun to verb

Harden said that where design used to be an noun, it is now a verb. “It’s more like a performance art now, and everybody has their own opinion about what it is,” he said.

He also stated that the field and its processes are undergoing changes, expanding and becoming “polymorphic.”

Body and soul

Nicki Boyd, cofounder of VersaMe (an educational products company), also joined in on the interview with theCUBE. Boyd said that when she went looking for a designer for her company’s product, called The Starling, her team consulted a lot of firms before deciding on Whipsaw.

The Starling is a wearable device for young children based on research showing that “80 percent of brain development happens in the first four years of life, and the number of words a child hears during that period of time is the most important thing for that brain development,” Boyd explained.

Harden said that what excites him most are companies like VersaMe that “approach us to have us think about things that are really on the cutting edge.” He said Whipsaw allows the experience to drive the design. “We love giving personality to technology; we like to give it a sense of soul so you can connect with that first, then the technology,” he said.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the ACG SV Grow Awards 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE