Product Design Leader · Edison Award · Crain’s 40 Under 40
Michael Forbes
I'm a product designer with 14 years of experience solving complex problems across physical and digital — medical devices, cardiac planning software, VR simulation platforms, automotive R&D, and consumer products. I've led design in regulated healthcare environments, innovation labs, global technical centers, and early-stage startups, working directly with engineers, clinicians, and executives from first concept through launch.
The problems change. The process doesn't.
I start by getting close to the people who'll actually use the thing — sitting with clinicians, watching where workflows break, understanding what pressure and time and consequence feel like in that environment. From there, the work is systems design: mapping the full picture before touching a single screen or sketch, identifying where the real friction lives, and building solutions that hold together across every component — hardware, software, physical space, and the human in the middle of it. That's what 14 years across Materialise, Elm Park Labs, Henry Ford Health System, Hyundai-Kia, and Inspire Rx has taught me. The domain is almost secondary. If you understand the system, you can design for it.
What keeps me in this work is the complexity. Every new domain is a new system to learn — new constraints, new users, new failure modes. That curiosity is what took me from a cardiology cath lab to a VR headset to an automotive R&D center and back again. I'm most engaged when the problem is genuinely hard, when the answer isn't obvious, and when getting it right actually matters to someone.
Skills & Tools
How I Work
I do primary research.
I don’t design from assumptions. I interview, observe, and shadow. The cardiologist who showed me how he mentally models anatomy during TAVR planning changed how I designed the entire planning interface. That kind of access is what separates a design that ships from one that gets used.
I work across the table from engineers.
I can read a CAD file, have a constraint conversation, and adjust the design — not the engineering timeline. 14 years of cross-functional work means I know how to find the version of the idea that’s actually buildable.
I build the case, not just the design.
Design decisions need to survive stakeholder scrutiny. I write the rationale, run the research, and present the finding — not just the deliverable. Especially in regulated environments, that documentation is part of the work.