A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
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I must confess that I have never given much thought to the colour of medical products. Neither have you, perhaps. If that’s the case, George Pape would like to have your attention.
Pape is medical device and healthcare market manager at chemicals firm Clariant (Muttenz, Switzerland). When I learned about Clariant’s Masterbatches division opening a new ColorWorks design and technology centre in a suburb of Milan, Italy, I sent the company an e-mail asking if it envisaged working on any medical projects at the centre. That prompted a lengthy and, to my mind, insightful response from Pape.
“Colour plays a more important role in consumer sales [than in healthcare],” acknowledges Pape. “Device manufacturers are more likely to be conservative in their choices: flip-flop colours probably will have few takers for dialysis filters, for instance,” he explains. “But every product has to be sold, and the act of selecting a device for purchase is done by many different people and at different levels within the buying groups. Colour can send an important message. In fact,” says Pape, “critical colour matches are involved in 75% or more of all the medical device programmes we work on.”
Granted, the act of choosing colours for a medical device can be seen as trivial when such weighty topics as a material’s biocompatibility and suitability for repeated sterilization are being debated. But, stresses Pape, colour can transcend cosmetic concerns and branding strategies (which is not to say that these are trifling matters in their own right).
On a rather mundane level, “colour can be used to differentiate device sizes or models,” says Pape. “Careful colour selection can help support a manufacturer’s claim of value or high technology and sophisticated design.” For some device designers, he adds, colour fulfils a more utilitarian function. “Implant manufacturers use colour for identification purposes, pacer leads are coloured to differentiate components during assembly and surgery, syringes are [designed] to give a pleasant colour to overcome gamma yellowing of the base resin, and so forth.”
For the device manufacturing industry, Clariant Masterbatches formulates custom materials at its US medical compounding facility in Lewiston, MN. Pape cites one just-completed project involving an invasive device that made extensive use of Clariant’s expertise. “In addition to tailoring the plastic material via polymer blending and incorporation of radiopaque contrast agents, we helped the customer differentiate the 10 segments of the device with 10 different gradations of the same pastel colour. Why?” Pape asks rhetorically. “To appeal to the doctors using the device and to establish value for the buyers.”
All of the ColorWorks centres are designed to enclose users in a bubble of creativity, and the newest one outside Milan in Merate is no exception. The 300-m2 building has several different physical spaces that are designed to “highlight a specific aspect of colour decision making,” explains Maurizio Torchio, head of Clariant ColorWorks Europe. Visitors move from the “welcome island,” where so-called guided brainstorming helps to bridge the gap between a concept and the beginnings of a product prototype, to a string of “islands of creativity.” It is there that a “recipe” is created in the on-site lab or a physical sample is injection moulded.
The centres also are equipped with a rapid prototyping system and various analytical tools to allow designers every opportunity to translate their ideas into manufacturable products with real-world appeal. In fact, the analytical tools have, on more than one occasion, crossed the colour line to reveal structural design flaws.
Pape cites one recent episode when the ColorWorks’ mould simulation and design software showed that the flow behaviour of a filled compound led to weak areas in the final part. “We were able to suggest mould design changes that avoided these problems before steel was even cut,” says Pape. “This not only saved the company the time and cost of rework, but it got the product to market faster.”
Now that’s something you’ve got to appreciate, even if you’re colour-blind.
