The world is made up of ideas. Small ones, like the pen on your desk, and big ones, like the whirring binary code clambering around in recesses of your computer's processor. If you stare at your reality, at all the ideas that make all the things that surround you now – it has a tendency to inspire awe, to make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, disoriented, and uninformed. 

 

But each "thing" littering your peripheral came from someone's imagination. In the words of Thomas Edison, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."

 

Jamie McIntyre is a master prototype developer – an innovator at the crossroads of design and engineering that takes ideas and concepts and turns them into physical things. That's probably why Edison is one of his heroes.

 

"He was a complicated guy, but I respect that he was an experimenter," says McIntyre. "I sometimes wonder if he was alive in our age, if he would have been as famous – we seem to tinker less and Google more."

 

This is how McIntyre communicates. 

 

He chats a lot about the challenges faced by his students at George Brown College's Centre for Construction and Engineering Technologies (CCET) where he's a professor and program coordinator. He also talks about engagement and attention spans. But every once in awhile he nonchalantly drops a profoundly philosophical statement peppered with clarity surrounding the prototyping process. Then he shuffles along to another subject or jokes about the hazards of wanderlust.

 

"Jamie gets it," says Dawn Davidson, director of research and innovation at George Brown. "Everything he does on the research side of things is with his students and he uses it as an opportunity to teach. He really understands the big picture and the small picture of what it means to [the students]."

 

McIntyre earned his degree in engineering physics at Queen's University in 1992 and spent a couple years bouncing around in the electronics industry including stints at Ford and Celestica before starting as a professor at George Brown in 2000. 

 

Back then, surface mount technology for printed circuit boards was all the rage and the college jumped on it, establishing an innovative program – a hub of sorts for what seemed to be a promising industry. Somewhere along the way the program lost steam and dwindling student numbers ultimately led to it being phased out.

 

"Nobody really talks about the microelectronics days," says McIntyre. "It didn't really pan out too well."

 

But that's the way technology is: here today and gone tomorrow. McIntyre knows that. Luckily, adaptability, is one his strong suits. As he gravitated towards teaching mechanical engineering at the school, he started to think a lot about product development and how small companies have a tendency to neglect it. 

 

In 2008, he took a sabbatical from George Brown, packed up his family and moved to New Zealand to get his masters in product development from Massey University Auckland. 

 

"My thesis was about how small companies try to work their way through the product development process and how they wipe out a lot of the time," says McIntyre. "That was the theme that I wanted to bring into the program here."

 

And he did.

 

Even today, as startups gravitate towards the college to tap into the CCET's expertise – not to mention, the chance for some inexpensive product development – McIntyre's thesis rings true.

 

"A lot start with an idea and they're pretty successful, but when they try to go in and do the second product or continue with the first – a lot of them tend to come up short," says the prototyper. 

 

Many fail to see the value of product development – like actually taking to the streets to see what people want from their products, what the marketplace wants. Or even worse, says McIntyre, they think they know the way their potential customers think.

 

"If you have a good idea, you've got to be really quick with getting it to market and I think that's where prototyping becomes important as part of the design process," he says. "But understanding what people want is hard, it's a unique skillset that should be a part of the engineering suite of tools."

 

So he's taken it upon himself to sculpt an army of master prototype developers. On the one end, the CCET takes students looking for applied hands-on learning, to get their clothes a bit dirty and solve some problems. Within the confines of the centre, McIntyre brings them up to his level, treating them as colleagues when he can, says John-Allan Ellingson, one of his students. 

 

Ellingson and several other students worked alongside McIntyre to develop a second-generation prototype of a portable crane for SOS Customer Services Inc. 

 

"You develop a bit of a relationship working close," says Ellingson. "As a teacher he draws on a lot of his own personal experiences."

 

But it's hardly an in-your-face approach. Elingson had lots of wiggle room to push through the challenges – a trait McIntyre is keen on developing in his acolytes. He points out that often times students get discouraged by the challenges and adjust their design in an attempt to make it easier. 

 

"The real world doesn't work like that. If you get a difficult problem that's why it has come to you, if it's easy someone else would have figured it out," he adds. "It's really important to me that they don't get to change the rules about what they're doing and working with a real company does that."

 

Companies such as Infonaut, which makes real time disease-tracking solutions; Komodo OpenLab and their inclusive technology; and Clear Blue Technologies, a smart off-grid hardware developer have all tapped into McIntyre and his student's know-how. In the coming months and years, Davidson hopes the allure of McIntyre's and his colleagues expertise and the infinite abilities offered by 3D printing will help bring manufacturing back to Ontario and position George Brown at the epicenter of prototype development.

 

In the meantime, McIntyre hopes his students continue to be curious and draw inspiration from the world around them when it comes to creating their prototypes.

 

"There are so many ideas that are around you if you're paying attention," says McIntyre. "I just need to get them thinking that way from the start."

Andrew Seale is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose writing has appeared in The Toronto Star, The Vancouver Sun, The Calgary Herald, and Alternatives Journal among other places. He writes our series documenting George Brown's research and innovation labs.