Sparkfactor Design

Infobox_Company
company_
company_type = Private
foundation = (2001)
location_city = Palo Alto, California
location_country = USA
key_people = Abraham Farag, CEO
Robert Garett, Co-Founder Claudia Truesdell, Co-Founder
Anthony Del Balso, Director of Engineering
Mike Lohse, Director of Engineering

num_employees = 20 (2006)
industry = Mechanical Engineering Industrial Design
homepage = [http://www.sparkfactordesign.com/ www.sf-pd.com/]

Sparkfactor Design provides flexible product design resources through offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco. They help design products and equipment for the consumer electronics, medical equipment and other industries.

History and work

Sparkfactor Design was founded in 2001 by Claudia Truesdell and Robert Garrett both graduates of the Stanford Graduate School of Product Design [Stanford Product Design Alumni [http://design.stanford.edu/PD/02-people3.html] ] and Mike Smith an Industrial designer from GVO. The current CEO, Abraham Farag, also graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Product Design. Previously, Abraham Farag was a Senior Product Design Engineer at Apple Inc., [Apple mechanical design patent issued [http://www.patentstorm.us/inventors/Abraham_S__Farag-1668001.html] ] Product Design Engineer at IDEO, and a Product Engineer on the General Motors EV-1. [GM mechanical design patent issued [http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5775467.html] ] [GM mechanical design patent issued [http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5603217.html] ]

The firm employees approximately 20 people in Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design. "Inc Magazine" included Sparkfactor in their 2007 list of top 100 consulting companies in the USA. [Inc magazine top 100 consulting companies [http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2007/company-profile.html?id=200721550] ] & in the 2008 list in the top 20 engineering companies in the USA. [Inc magazine top 20 engineering companies [http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2008/company-profile.html?id=200811640] ] Sparkfactor was also included in the "San Francisco Business Times" list of top 50 private companies in the San Francisco Bay Area for 2007. [ top 50 [http://www.bizjournals.com/bookoflists/sanfrancisco/#] ] & in the 2008 top 50 list.

Sparkfactor has partnered with many product oriented companies to help design more than 100 consumer electronic products. In total these products have had sales of over 150 million units.

Notable products

* Mechanical Engineering for the first Apple Wireless Mouse and other mice, the first Apple iPod and follow on iPods and other MP3 players, the first Apple Mac mini and follow on Mac mini’s. These products have won many design awards including D&AD "Gold" for Product Design and "Silver" for Product For Work, Plastics Industry Consumer Product Design of the Year Award and Red Dot Product design of the year awards.
* Complete ME & ID design for the Dash Navigation Dash Express Product: which was named by CNET & LAPTOP "Best of CES 2007" for Car Tech & GPS.
* Complete ME & ID design for the Meraki Networks outdoor product. Product:
* Design and manufacturing of the Apple Design Awards. [Menkentos does cat scan of Apple Award [http://mekentosj.com/goodies/cubism/ Menkentosj] Retrieved on 2007-05-30] , and the Apple change trayFact|date=January 2008 used in all Apple Stores in Japan.

References

External links

* [http://www.sparkfactordesign.com Official website]