MyBabyBarista
Featured on the 'California by Design' series.
The brainchild of mom and ex-ER nurse, Cara Armstrong, this “Nespresso-like” device is set to revolutionize the infant formula feeding experience by creating a bottle of baby formula, the size you want at the temperature you need, in about 20 seconds, flat.
The Need
As an ER nurse, Cara had seen too many infants come in either malnourished or with scalded throats from poorly-prepared bottles of baby formula.
When she became a mom, she also witnessed first-hand how much precious time bottle preparation took out of your day, and how trusting this to a family member, nanny or babysitter presented big risks in themselves.
Product Development & System Engineering
The first big challenge of Mike's, when joining RKS Design as Director of Product Development in 2015, was to take the design strategy work and some basic engineering starting points, and create what you see here: a fully-working product demonstrator prototype, complete with beautiful and thoughtful product interactions with features that are designed to create a seemless and intuitive user experience and minimize the cleaning burden.
It involved taking the overall design intent and consumable strategy developed by RKS through a complete process of proof-of-principle engineering mockups; product requirements documentation development; briefing and managing the embedded systems team; developing the heating algorithms for consistent bottle temperature delivery; engineering every single mechanical detail (even down to navigating around Google's patents for the Nest-style interface); and ultimately designing, engineering and managing production of the final prototype that was ultimatelty used to demonstrate and sell the product to investors.