SAGE Designs - the product design, industrial design, mechanical design specialists.

Trouble-shooting, fault analysis and failure investigation.

Any new product worth the effort must by definition enter uncharted territory and meet issues no-one has ever encountered before. The challenges of product design are many, challenges of new technology, of cost reduction, of more product features, of better algorithms, of miniaturization, of reliability, of manufacturing processes. Your designers will be challenged to their utmost to give you the market edge and sometimes they will come up against a brick wall. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes can spot things that may be staring you in the face. We take a holistic and methodical approach that crosses disciplines to examine problems from a wide range of angles, so if design problems are threatening to delay product launch and blow out your development budget maybe we can help.

SAGE provides expert industrial design and product design services to companies in Wellington and throughout NZ.

SAGE was asked by an Australian company to help solve an issue with sealing and with excessive push button pressure in their product. Shown here is a distorted overmold that contributed to water leakage.

A microscope photo of the overmolded
sealing strip that was not filling correctly
during molding.

Field failures and incident reports.

In the ideal World all potential problems are foreseen and solved before product release. But sometimes life is not that kind and problems don't show up until long after the product gets into the market (Samsung Note 7 anyone?). Such an event can be catastrophic to the extent it can easily effect the fate of the company if the situation is not well handled. Product recall , PR exercises and damage control measures aside, from an engineering point of view you have to quantify the size of the problem and find its root cause. This is often extremely difficult because once product gets into the field you loose control of it and do not know what un-designed for abuse it is being exposed to. It doesn't help that any feedback from the field is generally emotive and/or conflicting. Then, once you have established the root cause, you have to not not only find a solution, but find one that can actually be retrofitted inexpensively to an existing product. In situations like this SAGE can help and time has proven that this is an area we are very good at. We can drill down and gather the facts methodically from the source onwards, analyse them based on years of technical and user experience, piece together the puzzle, confirm the nature and scope of the problem, outline the consequences and suggest solutions. And if the solutions lie within SAGE's scope of expertise we can project manage and implement the corrective actions.

SAGE designs - providing expert design troubleshooting and failure analysis to companies in Wellington and throughout NZ.

This keypad failed with time due
to slow "sweating" of plasticizer from
the silicone material

For advice on medical device design and industrial design in Wellington call SAGE designs.

Showing burnout of an electrical contact in a
high current connector used in a train