“Each night, every asset we have walks out the door,” said Dave Franchino (46), president of Design Concepts Inc., as a compliment to his staff.
With no product of its own, the design innovation firm improves other company’s products and strategies through design, engineering and implementation.
At the Madison office, a bright hallway is flanked by some recent successes. There’s a motorcycle, a tennis racket, a newly designed football helmet, and some medical equipment. The variety is one of the reasons Franchino loves what he does. “We can work on tiny projects, like hearing aids, or huge projects, like semi trucks.”
Lately, he’s been thinking even larger. Franchino is joining industry experts to explore how design can be used to affect the human condition.
“There is an increased level of interest in the power of design for addressing not just commercial interests, but also issues
of social significance,” he explained, such
as poverty, water accessibility, health and pollution.
Last summer, Franchino was one of just 20 design experts invited to Bellagio, Italy by The Rockefeller Foundation to participate in a think-tank conference exploring Global Poverty Alleviation. At issue: How might human-centered design be utilized to improve life far from the world we know?
Franchino’s world began in Milwaukee, where he was the middle of three children born to an English teacher mother and engineer-father. “We had a Norman Rockwell life,” he recalled fondly. As a child, he often tagged along with his dad on visits to large industrial companies like Briggs & Stratton, and found the machines and mechanisms mesmerizing. Franchino knew early on that he would follow in his father’s engineering footsteps.
In 1985, after graduating from UW-Madison with a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering, Franchino was the 50th person hired by the Saturn Corp., a spin-off of GM. After seven years, he took a leave of absence to pursue a masters degree in engineering at Stanford University, and then returned. By the time he left Saturn for good, the company had 8,000 workers.
Recent events surrounding the auto makers sadden him. “They put food on my table for 12 years,” he said, “and I hope they make it out of this. It’s hard to watch.”
In 1997, Franchino, his wife Vicky and their three daughters returned to Wisconsin. He was hired as the director of mechanical engineering at Design Concepts, a company with 16 employees that — unbeknownst to him at the time — was on shaky footing. Its founder and two department heads had just left, creating some turmoil, but Franchino remained. He has been president now for “7 or 8 years” he said, and in 2007, joined the COO and six shareholders in purchasing the firm, which now has over 50 employees.
Franchino takes little personal credit for the company’s growth. “My role is not the most important one here,” he said. “The people who touch the clients and the
products are much more important. But they allow me to do the things I like to do.”
One particular (after hours) interest is SoloGear LLC, a company Franchino co-founded that has designed an ethanol-based replacement for charcoal in the food-grilling process. The green benefits are obvious, and could even be life-saving, according to Franchino, who recently learned that women in Darfur refugee camps are being raped, tortured and even murdered when leaving their camps in search of firewood.
“Things we take for granted — the innovations — in a different context and environment, can have very powerful applications,” he said.
In December, Franchino attended and spoke at a conference in New Delhi, India, again exploring the role of design in solving critical social and environmental issues.
He is hopeful. “Maybe we might, in some small way, be a part of a solution to a really terrible problem.”
