Tapio Parkkinen, Senior Mechanical Design Engineer

Tapio has been a part of Innokas and Medical’s Design Studio since 2014. He works as a Senior Mechanical Design Engineer in various designing projects. The most interesting part for him is designing and working with the wide range of devices and working together with highly professional colleagues.

I have graduated as Machine Automation Engineer in spring 2000. Right after the graduation, Nokia hired me to design mobile phones and I spent there a bit more than 12 years. The whole time I was involved with multimedia devices featuring touch panels and cameras.

After Nokia, I spent a short period of time designing devices for the mining industry, but quite soon, in February 2014, I decided to join Innokas. In Innokas, I have worked with various projects starting from designing a chair for childbirth to my latest project, a fluid management device for surgeries. As these examples show, the variation of devices is huge. From my point of view, this is the most interesting part – there won’t be following projects that consist of same parts and the products aren’t even used for same purpose.

I work a lot with 3D models, but naturally that is not my only job. In general, a mechanical designer creates a construction of a product, makes decisions of manufacturing technology for each part, and finally designs the parts in detail to be suitable for the selected technology. Usually, mechanical designers take care of assembly of first prototypes. For me, this is the most rewarding part of this job. Then you can see the first time how parts created with 3D are fitting together and how the overall construction is working.

Creating a product successfully is a real-life teamwork where every player has their own area of expertise. Most relevant players from my side are HW-designers and people related to production. Also working in industry, which is highly regulated, we naturally need to do quite a lot of documentation. But taking into account that these devices cannot harm patient even in faulty situation, the meaning of thorough documentation becomes visible.

I have enjoyed working in Innokas Medical since designing is interesting but most of all, since I have the chance to work with highly professional colleagues who are carrying out their tasks with passion. I also truly believe we are making meaningful things. As our mission says: we want to improve the quality of peoples’ lives.

In my free time, I am leading some scouting activities for kids and teenagers, organizing motorsports events, and participating in the work of Union of Professional Engineers in Finland.