ISSUE_04 / How incorporating product design at early-stage could change your growth trajectory

Jim Hannon-Tan’s industrial design career spans nearly three decades and he has shaped the products of some of the largest brands.

Working with leading European design houses, his diverse client list has included Louis Vuitton, LG Electronics, Unilever, EPSON, Tefal and KLM Airlines.

From a whimsical crocodile-shaped nutcracker designed for Italian homeware company Alessi to award-winning lighting solutions for Schneider Electric, his creations blend innovation with craftmanship.

Educated in Adelaide and Melbourne and honing his craft in Europe, it was the desire to swap the grey London skies with the blue skies of Australia that compelled Hannon-Tan to return home to Adelaide.

Five years ago, he established his design studio at Flinders University’s New Venture Institute in the Tonsley Innovation District at the centre of South Australia’s advanced manufacturing industry.

Design as a gut feeling

There he is applying his expertise to a field far removed from luxury furniture or consumer electronics – medical technology – and quietly advocating for design to have a greater role in South Australia’s innovation sector.

Hannon-Tan is the design force behind Alimetry, a New Zealand startup pioneering non-invasive body surface gastric mapping to provide insights on gastric function.

It’s his experience with Alimetry which Hannon-Tan believes is a case-study in the power and value of founders embracing design as a core component in their innovation product journey.

At the heart of Alimetry’s innovation is the Gastric Alimetry – a sleek, lightweight wearable sensor that attaches like a waistband recording gut activity and providing faster, more comfortable diagnoses for patients.

“It was a new experience for me,” Hannon-Tan says of working with a medical device startup.

“Usually, an established company will come to you with ideas around the brief; but as I had some equity in the project, I was empowered to really shape the solution.

“There’s a real case for design in the C-suite—not as an afterthought, but as a strategic driver that can lift a company from good to game-changing.”

Since Hannon-Tan joined Alimetry’s two founders in 2019, the fast-growing medical startup has expanded to 65 employees across four continents, secured an oversubscribed $28 million Series A-2 funding round, achieved four US Food and Drug Administration clearances for the Gastric Alimetry device and completed more than 30 clinical studies to validate its technology.

Award-winning collaboration

Hannon-Tan earned a Gold Award in the medical devices category of the Australian Good Design Awards for Gastric Alimetry highlighting the advantage of integrating a design team within an organisation’s leadership structure.

Initially, Alimetry’s concept, though technically sound, was bulky and impractical with the Printed Circuit Board resembling a “brick” when Hannon-Tan was called upon to help on the design.

Through a deeply collaborative process, Hannon-Tan and his team worked with Alimetry’s engineers and business leaders to refine the device into a sleek, user-friendly solution.

His input extended to branding, digital design, packaging, and even company culture, ensuring a cohesive vision across all touchpoints.

“I feel the success of my contribution to this company stems from the value the founders placed on good design,” Hannon-Tan says.

“Successful outcomes hinge on close collaboration and a deep understanding of both the users’ needs – in Alimetry’s case the patients and clinicians – and the product’s technical requirements.

“As for aesthetics, which is what most people assume design is, when the puzzle of human needs, technology and business strategy fit together well, the result is a beautiful product.

“Design isn’t just about decoration; it’s the glue that holds a vision together and amplifies its potential and if you want to compete on a global level, it certainly helps if the product is beautiful.”

As well as his work with Alimetry, Hannon-Tan’s team has also designed the hardware for a remote foetal monitoring device for Melbourne medical startup Kali Healthcare.

The power of design to transform lives and economies is something that has occupied Hannon-Tan’s thinking particularly in the context of South Australia’s shift from traditional to advanced manufacturing.

“Global innovation hubs, from Silicon Valley to London, have well-established, design-centric entities like IDEO, Fuseproject, and Layer Design,” he says.

“These organisations underscore the importance of design in technological and business innovation, further evidenced by the UK’s explicit four-year design strategy.”

Designing the future of our state

In 2018, the State Government enlisted Hannon-Tan and creative industries consultant Joe Hay to advise on the value of design and its role in supporting diversification of the former auto supply chain in South Australia.

In their report they said a design-led process would be key to translating the “raw science and technology of the state’s innovation programs into competitive, human-centred products able to be manufactured locally”.

Good product design they said, “improves products and brands by asking questions such as why a product is being made, who is going to use it and what makes it more attractive to the consumer than competing products”.

Seven years since that report, Hannon-Tan says while he was inspired by the growth of SA’s innovation framework there remained a gap in how design is incorporated into the state’s strategic focus.

“Design in Australia doesn’t carry the same deep-rooted identity it does in a place like Italy,” he says.

“As a frontier nation, we lean pragmatic—focused on inventing and solving problems. Italians, with millennia of craftsmanship behind them, have honed making into an art form.

“But here’s the rub: to marry our innovative spirit with global markets, Australian design needs to be world-class.”