Hasta La Ideas

Image courtesy of iF Design Awards

We intentionally omitted one of our favorite iF Product Design Gold Award-Winners from Tuesday’s roundup of a half-dozen notables because we had the opportunity to talk to two members of Motorola Solutions’ design team. Scott Richards, a Senior Industrial Designer, and Mariah Levitt, a Human Factors Engineer for Motorola Solutions, made the trek from mild Florida to frigid Munich to accept the award on behalf of the telecommunications innovators last weekend. The two shared several insights into the premise and process of the APX™ XE Remote Speaker Microphone.

Image courtesy of Motorola Solutions

Core77: Let’s start with a little bit of background about the device.

Scott Richards:It’s a fire-specific microphone: it’s called the XE RSM. “RSM” stands for “remote speaker microphone,” which is a common phrase in the industry.

About four or five years ago, Motorola Solutions made a conscious decision to really invest in what is it that firefighters need that’s unique from other public safety personnel. In a lot of research, a lot of times over the years, we had heard from firefighters, “The products that you’re showing us and testing with us, really just seem to be adapted police devices. And we feel like we need products that are more specific for our needs.

In fact, that’s really Mariah’s specialty as a researcher… [her role is to] speak with literally hundreds of end users that are firefighters, and identify their needs when it comes to communications.

Mariah Levitt: [For our] research, we’ve done real fire training—gone in and understood what they deal with—and you come out and you have that emotional element of what you can and can’t you do in that environment with current devices. You really realize what we need to work on, and [we’ve addressed] a number of those things in this device.

Some other things we did are in-person interviews and ride-alongs with firefighters. And we also used a lot of cognitive psychology techniques—predictive exercises and things like that—trying to get firefighters themselves to think about what would they ideally want.

All that stuff went into something like this, this speaker mic.

SR: Firefighters are all about wet, dirty… hot, and cold environments. And there’s a condition that they have called situational disability, which simply means every user is disabled at one point or another, because of the protective clothing they’re wearing, the noise in their environment, etc.

For example, when it comes to noise, this device is designed with an exclusive noise-cancelling system so that when the user is speaking into it, he’s heard much more clearly on the other end. The team leader at the truck, or the dispatcher, is able to understand what they’re saying, even with whirring fans and motors in the background, roaring fires and everything.

ML: And fire alarms in the building… It’s 50% louder than our previous product.

This is the first microphone that has that. Before that, we had the radios that could [had noise-cancelling]… but as soon as you attach a speaker mic to it, [the signal is] only as good as what comes out of that speaker. So this is the first opportunity for us to actually make sure that the whole system has dual noise-cancelling.

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