design | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Touring the Autodesk demonstration gallery

Autodesk’s San Francisco demonstration gallery showcases how design and manufacturing are going to radically change in coming years.

What is the future of design and manufacturing in an age of 3D printing and powerful software? Computer Aided Design company Autodesk gives us some clues at how the world of design is changing.

Sitting in what was once the Southern Pacific Railway’s headquarters at the beginning of San Francisco’s Market Street is design software company Autodesk’s demonstration gallery showcases how design and manufacturing are going to radically change in coming years.

The first exhibit in the exhibition, which is open to the public three days a week with guided tours on Wednesdays, is a scale model of the Shanghai Tower that illustrates the power of simulations and the value computers add to the building and architecture industries.

Currently China’s tallest skyscraper and the second highest in the world, one of the notable features of the Shanghai Tower is how the designers were able to extensively model the shape of the building to reduce the loads on the structure. The cost and weight savings enabled the developers to create a far more lightweight building with a reduced environmental footprint.

For architects, builders and designers the Shanghai tower is an example of how desktop prototyping can be used to experiment with competing schemes to see what designs meet the needs of those using the building or product.

The biggest exhibit in the hall is the Mercedes Biome concept car chassis. First unveiled at the 2010 Los Angeles Car Show, the idea behind the vehicle’s design is an organic form similar to an animal’s skull to create a strong but lightweight structure.

Adding to the Biome’s exotic design is the proposal to ‘grow’ the car’s chassis out of genetically modified seeds. Essentially the vehicle’s structure wouldn’t be manufactured in our current understanding of the word at all.

While the Biome or similar vehicles won’t be seen on the roads in the near future – Mercedes predict the vehicle is at least 60 years away – the idea behind ‘growing’ industrial items is one that may well become commonplace in the near future for smaller items.

The other big exhibit in the gallery is the Lego dinosaur. Made up of 62,000 custom designed pieces, the dinosaur was assembled in at the company’s Czech Republic facility before being shipped to California.

One disappointing aspect of the dinosaur for some of the attendees is that these models aren’t made of solid Lego. Instead an internal brace is made that supports the structure. Again this is a feature of the design software that allows the creators to accurately calculate the weight and build a model that won’t collapse under its own mass.

At the other end of the size range, but no less important, is the display of 3D printed prosthetic limbs. It’s now possible to scan the remaining limb and create a device that closely replicated the lost limb.

Again, using 3D printing allows those limbs to be quickly made to the custom specifications, the design also allows weight saving features to be incorporated into the prosthetic. This exhibit shows just how life changing modern technologies can be.

Finally, one of the most intriguing devices is the The SOCCKET power generating soccer ball designed to promote physical activity and help children in developing nations access light to study by.

The SOCCKET charges up as kids play with the ball, in the evening an energy efficient LED lamp can be plugged into the ball. The Soccket retails for 99 US Dollars and for ball sold one is donated to a third world community.

Products like the Soccket, the prosthetic limbs and many of the other displays in the Autodesk Demonstration Gallery show the potential of a world where new ways of manufacturing join with modern design tools. It’s worth a visit to appreciate some of the ways our world is going to change in coming years.

The gallery is open to the public every Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with a guided tour at 12:30 p.m. every Wednesday. Admission is free.

Designing and the IoT

The Internet of Things promises to change the world of design

A piece I wrote for IoT hub looks at how the design industry is changing as every day devices, even clothes, can start communicating with the world.

In researching the piece, it was interesting just how broad the possibilities are, particularly when we start considering main devices will be able to change their roles depending on the commands they receive or the environment they detect.

What’s clear is the design industry is facing a world of opportunities, and challenges, as not only do objects start talking to each other, but also new materials and manufacturing processes start changing how we think ordinary items should be made and used.

How design will change the world of business

Changes to the world of design are going to have an effect on all businesses

“I always believe small companies usually illustrate big shifts faster than larger companies. In many ways big companies are responding to the shifts being driven by smaller businesses,” says Andrew Anagnost, the Senior Vice President of Industry Strategy and Marketing at Autodesk.

Anagnost was talking the Dreamforce media contingent after a tour of his company’s San Francisco Gallery where possibilities of today’s design and manufacturing tools are displayed.

Those possibilities are changing business, not just in design but across most industries as the means of financing and building new projects changes along with consumer demand as production methods change.

Anagnost breaks these changes into four major trends – the way things are designed, how they are produced, the nature of demand in a world where things can personalised and the very notion of what a product is.

“What people expect in from products today is very different.”

A supercomputer at your fingertips

“Every generation brings something new to design,” says Anagnost. “Imagine the generation that grew up with social media, online gaming, all the things that previous generations did not grow up with.”

This generation will be more collaborative and the idea of working in fluid, unstructured groups where many of the members will never physically meet anywhere.

Cloud computing is the other factor Anagnost sees as changing design as “it puts a supercomputer behind every screen”, which brings to the desktop great power in testing designs. “The designer gets a chance to explore options they couldn’t access before.”

That supercomputer at your fingertips changes all businesses, giving them processing power to carry out complex analytical tasks and modelling in all industries.

Financing the change

Another change to the production process is how people are financing their products. Increasingly platforms like Kickstarter are creating new ways for entrepreneurs to raise funds and also to test the market for a product before investing money and time.

“Before people would have to pitch their ideas to a larger manufacturer, an investor or a VC but now they can pitch it to anyone,” says Anagnost. “The means of financing products is now changing.”

The new means of production

‘Fabless manufacturing’ promises to change manufacturing by reducing the need for massive factories as micr0-factories start to change the economics of making products. These miniaturised robot factories are easily configurable and can be located locally rather than across the country of oceans.

Coupled with 3D printing, again it becomes cheaper and quicker to bring products to market and changes the dynamics of getting goods to market. “When it gets cheaper to deliver a complex product, the field gets levelled and more people can deliver innovative products to market,” says Anagnost.

The other trend within manufacturing is prefabricated assembly. While nothing new, improved design tools and manufacturing methods are making it easier and more efficient to assemble things like buildings onsite, coupled with 3D printing this is going to see massive changes in sectors like the construction industry.

Generational changes

Changing manufacturing and designs creates changed consumer expectations, as design becomes more accessible and personalisations easier customers are increasingly going to want products that meet their specific tastes and needs.

Another aspect to this is generational change, where younger consumers expect personalised products and don’t identify the same way with major brands as their grandparents and parents did.

“We’re going to see a move from rampant consumerism to a more selective consumerism,” says Anagnost.

This means markets are going to be far more volatile as the brand loyalty erodes in the face of a demanding customer. You’re only as good as the last conversation you had with your customer and if they aren’t happy they’ll go elsewhere.

Connected devices

The final factor Anagnost sees is the world of connected devices, increasingly consumers will demand products that have online functionality built in.

Increasingly we’re seeing this with motor cars and in the near future we’ll be seeing devices as diverse as motorcycle helmets and light bulbs being shipped with networked capabilities.

“Everything in your home is going to be connected in some way and people are going to have that expectation they will be,” says Anagnost. “Sensors are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. There’s an assumption of connectivity.”

What Anagnost and Autodesk are flagging is business is changing, barriers we thought were unsurmountable are increasingly falling. For every industry, easily accessible computing and manufacturing power is changing the competitive landscape.

Paul travelled to San Francisco as guest of Salesforce.

Project Ara starts looking lonely

It may be Google’s Project Ara is about to become the latest victim of the company’s attention deficit disorder.

Two years ago this site interviewed New Deal Design’s Gadi Amit about Google’s Project Ara.

Project Ara is an experiment in creating a modular phone where users can customise their devices by adding or removing components.

PC World now reports the mooted soft launch for the Project Ara phone in Puerto Rico has been cancelled.

While Google aren’t saying the project has been shut down, the sporadic and cryptic messages around Ara don’t bode well given the way the company loses interest in and then abandons products.

If it is being abandoned, it will be interesting to see where the intellectual property from the project ends up.

The need for an IoT manifesto

As the internet of things rolls out, more care in the design of products and services will be needed

Last May at the ThingsCon conference in Berlin a group of European designers came together to form the IoT Manifesto.

Now vendors have the ability to put a chip into almost anything companies and designers are tempted to add connectivity simply for the sake of doing so.

In many cases this is opens up a range of security risks ranging from the screaming baby monitor to the hackable jeep.

Coupled with the security risks of your intimate devices being hacked there’s the related privacy risks as millions of devices collect data ranging from how hard you press your car’s brake pedal through to last time you burned your breakfast toast.

In an era where governments and businesses are seeking to amass even more information about us, there are genuine concerns about what that data is going to be used for and why it is being collected in the first place.

The IoT manifesto looks to manage these problems facing the sector through ten guiding design principles;

Don’t believe the hype around the IoT
Only design useful things
Deliver benefits to all stakeholders
Keep everything secure
Promote a culture of privacy
Gather only a minimal amount of data
Be transparent about who that data will be shared with
Give users control over their data
Design durable products
Use the IoT and its design to help people

All of the principles are laudable and it’s not hard to think that meeting the guidelines would make devices and services that aren’t just useful and safe but also simpler, cheaper and more effective.

There’s many ethical, business and safety issues facing the Internet of Things as connected devices rollout across almost every industry. The IoT Manifesto may well be a good framework in which to design them and the cloud services they’ll depend upon.

Prefabricating change in the construction industry

Prefabrication and 3D printing promise to radically change the construction industry.

One of the industries being dramatically reinvented by China is the construction sector as the nation’s demand on labor and materials puts stresses on the economy.

An answer local developers and builders have found to these constraints has been to turn to prefabricated construction.

While prefab building isn’t new, Chinese builders are pushing the techniques of designing, manufacturing and assembling the structures.

In Changsha, the capital of southern China’s Hunan Province, local construction company Broad Group built a 57-story building using 1200 in 19 days.

Coupled with large scale 3D printing and computerised design tools, the Chinese builders are redefining the construction industry with methods that are far more efficient and less labor intensive.

For companies, and countries, that depend upon the construction industry for employment and profit these techniques could be another disruption.

Again we’re seeing there are few industries immune from major disruption as technology changes business.

Navigating a platform shift

Technology had dramatically changed the design industry, how does a company like Autodesk adapt?

One of the companies that defined the desktop computing revolution in the 1990s was Autodesk.

The company’s AutoCAD program bought Computer Aided Design to the masses and probably was the single main reason for the extinction of the drawing board in design offices.

In the post-PC world Autodesk itself is having to deal with a dramatically changed market as software moves onto the cloud, workplaces become more collaborative and the computing world becomes based upon mobile devices rather than static desktop computers.

As Autodesk’s Asia Pacific Senior Vice President, Pat Williams, described at the Autodesk University Extension in Sydney today there are three major disruptions happening to industry in general; to production, consumption and connections.

Disrupting design

“Technology and expectations are empowering users and disrupting how things are made,” Williams told the audience as he demonstrated Autodesk’s range of design, simulation and rendering tools that the company hopes will keep it ahead of a rapidly changing marketplace.

“How we make things and bring them to market is changing,” says Williams. “We simply don’t design, manufacture or even imagine the as-built environment as we have in the past.”

“The other thing that’s changing is how we connect and share ideas, which changes the way we create. No longer is the lone designer a reality we can live with any more.”

Along with connections between workers changing production and consumers sharing their experiences creating new consumption patterns, Williams also sees the connectivity between devices and materials as changing the way things are designed and manufactured.

“The way things connect with each other interconnect and relate is deeper than ever before. It’s getting easier to create complex systems that talk to each other and the design and physical use depends upon their interconnectivity.”

Williams echoes the ideas of designer Gadi Amit and materials engineer Skylar Tibbits on how smart materials are going to change manufacturing and design.

3D printing drives change

One of the big drivers of change in the design industry is 3D printing that allows both more complex components to be manufactured and will change some industries — most notably the construction industry as bricklaying, concrete pouring and formwork can be done by large scale printing.

Given the influence of the 3D printing, it’s not surprising that Autodesk have launched a hundred million dollar investment fund to help startups leverage the new technologies.

As one of the companies that benefited from the desktop PC revolution, Autodesk are finding themselves having to adapt to a very different marketplace. Their cloud based products will need to be nimble to succeed to in a very demanding and volatile marketplace.

iPhone ME — Apple risks becoming the new Microsoft

Is Apple’s current inattention to detail a worrying trend?

It’s been a tough week for Apple, after the spectacular launch of the iPhone 6 the company has had two humiliating and worrying setbacks that indicate standards may be slipping at the once untouchable giant.

The iPhone 6 Plus should have been a triumph, and for a while it was, but the news the phones bend and distort has tarnished the product.

Compounding the bendable phone problem are the claims users are being charged to replace their damaged handsets.

On its own this problem might have been manageable like the iPhone4’s antenna problems in 2010, however today’s news that the latest iOS8 has had to be withdrawn after user complaints indicates a sloppiness has crept into the company.

Both problems, or all three problems if it turns out the stories of Genius Bars charging to replace damaged phones, show Apple isn’t paying attention to detail to the degree they’ve become known for.

The botched iOS8.0.1 rollout is sloppy work while the bendable phone is very much an uncharacteristic lapse in design.

For a premium brand with a large dose of arrogance, shipping defective products is both an embarrassment and damages the company’s name.

This inattention to detail is horribly reminiscent of Microsoft’s horror days at the turn of the Century where the company repeatedly rushed incomplete products to market — Windows ME being the most notorious example.

So maybe we are seeing Apple become the new Microsoft and the iPhone 6 Plus as the Windows ME of our time.

That doesn’t mean we’ll see the end of Apple, Microsoft is still a huge corporation, but it may be the tech industry’s most iconic business is beginning to lose its edge.

Image of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates via Wikipedia

Making the case for engineers

Engineers need to start arguing the case for their profession

“It’s important to keep the engineers under control as they don’t understand costs,” a tech industry commentator said to me last week.

That was an interesting view and one that’s at odds with the core role of engineers – engineering is applied science where the job description is to create something within the sponsor’s scope, time and cost requirements.

It’s rare that a project doesn’t have cost constraints and it’s a very junior engineer who won’t be aware of those and how expenses are tracking against forecasts during the assignment. It’s a core role of the job.

Engineers as financial naifs

How this view of engineers being financial naïfs has developed is interesting in itself; there’s three factors that drove that commentator’s view.

The first factor is the financiers and accountants have hijacked project planning and management – sort of like how marketers have overrun the social media sector – so it is in their interest to portray their professions as being the only people who can be trusted to watch the books.

Giving the power of managing projects to the financiers has tragic results for many projects; invariably the money men misunderstand the costs required to meet a project’s scope resulting in a substandard result or, paradoxically, the project running massively over budget.

IT industry failures

The IT industry’s behaviour is a second factor which in itself can be split into two; the startup community’s model and the ‘rob the client’ mentality of the major outsourcing companies.

One of the greatest business failures of the last thirty years has been IT outsourcing where enterprises have essentially written blank cheques to the global outsourcing firms to save computing costs.

Because most of those projects have been run by moneymen with little understanding – despite their hubris – of either the business’ needs or the role of information technology in the organisation the results have often been catastrophic for shareholder or taxpayers, although very good for the salespeople and managers of the global outsourcing companies.

Usually a good indicator of project doomed to failure is when a CEO or minister announces the scheme with the justification it will save an improbably large amount of money for the organisation; tears usually follow.

The startup community’s attitude to project management has also twisted the engineer’s role. While there are some ventures that keep a very canny eye upon costs and deliverables – these are often the successful ones – many of the high profile, big funded companies take the attitude that engineers should focus on code while costs are a concern for founders and financiers.

In that view, the software engineers don’t have to worry about costs – it is none of their business.

Finally there’s a cultural element and it’s notable that the commentator speaking to me was Australian.

Australian mediocrity

One of the traits of modern Australian management is the culture of mediocrity and unaccountability that has crept into the nation’s business leadership from the early 1990s onwards. Tolerance of over budget or failed projects has become the cultural norm.

Probably the best example of this was the deeply troubled National Broadband Network currently struggling to stay alive in the face of a restructured management, government hostility and community indifference. Both the previous and current management have shown themselves to be particularly unsuited to meeting the engineering and contractual challenges of the project.

Interestingly, the engineers get blamed for the management’s hapless inability to deliver the project on time, budget or within the project scope.

The perverse, and tragic, thing about the NBN is had managers listened to wise voices from the engineering and construction communities in the early days the scheme would have had a chance of succeeding despite the political incompetence and bastardry that surrounded it.

Squandered resources

As the western world and developed economies move into more constrained times squandering resources on poorly thought out or badly managed projects is becoming an unaffordable luxury.

Engineers need to make the case they are not just a bunch of technology obsessed geeks implementing unrealistic and uneconomic solutions. Getting projects built properly is too important to be left to the accountants.

Image from Seattle municipal archives image of Engineers planning a freeway through Flickr

Spreading the good news – Canva’s Guy Kawasaki

The tools for building new businesses have never been more accessible says Canva’s Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki

“My job is to spread good news,” says Guy Kawasaki of his role as Canva’s Chief Evangelist.

Kawasaki was speaking to Decoding the New Economy about his role in popularising the online design tool which he sees as democratising force in the same way that Apple was to computers and Google to search.

Democratisation is a theme consistently raised by startups and businesses disrupting existing industries and Kawasaki continues this theme.

“The world is becoming a meritocracy; it’s not about your pedigree, it’s about your competence,” states Kawasaki.

Falling barriers to entry

What excites Kawasaki about the present business climate are the falling barriers to starting a venture. “Things are getting cheaper and cheaper, in technology you had to buy a room full of servers, have IT staff in multiple cities. Today you call Amazon or Rackspace and host it in the sky.”

“Before you had to buy advertising for a concert, now if you’re adept at using social media – with Google Plus, Facebook,Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram – you have a marketing platform that fast, ubiquitous and cheap.”

“What excites me is there are going to be more technologies, more products and more services because the barriers are so low.”

Creating a valued and viable product

For those businesses starting into this new environment, Kawasaki believes the most important thing a startup should focus on is getting a prototype to market; “at that point you will know you’re truly onto something.”

“If you build a prototype that works you may never have to write a business plan,” says Kawasaki. “You’d never have to make a Powerpoint, you may never have to raise money as you could probably bootstrap.”

Kawasaki view is the MVP – Minimum Viable Product – model of lean product development should have another two ‘V’s added for ‘Valuable’ and “Validated’.

“You can create a product that’s viable, ie you could make money, but is it valuable in that it changes the world?”

“Is your first product going to validate your vision? If it’s not then why are doing it?”

The story Kawasaki tells is the tools to deliver valued and viable products are more accessible than ever before; that’s good news for entrepreneurs and consumers but bad for stodgy incumbents.

Startups as a dream job

Canva co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins describes the design service’s journey

“It’s my absolute dream job” says Melanie Perkins of her role as CEO and co-founder of online design app Canva in the latest Decoding the New Economy video.

Since being set up ten months ago, Canva has grown to over a half a million people using the tool to create graphics for applications such as books, marketing banners and website logos.

The idea for Canva came out of the difficulties Melanie found in using design software while lecturing at university and it’s growth has been as a result of the idea catching the imagination of investors like Lars Rasmussen, one of the driving forces behind Google Maps, and Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s original Mac evangelist.

“We’ve got some great things coming in the next few months,” says Perkins. “So stay tuned.

The high cost of failing fast

There can be real human costs to failing fast as the history of Twentieth Century aircraft shows

It’s fashionable to talk about innovation and failing fast but exploring new technologies has always carried a great deal of risk as a BBC feature on failed aircraft design shows.

Aviation, like automobiles, was a wonderful opportunity for early Twentieth Century tinkerers. With the added impetuous of two world wars, the development of aircraft saw some strange experiments.

One of the things that drove aviation innovation was the evolution of materials science and manufacturing methods, sometimes with tragic results as we saw with the Comet jet liner’s fuselage failures and the DC-10s defective cargo door latches.

In many ways, the early days of airliners was not dissimilar to today’s experiments with smart materials and 3D printing.

Tragedies like the Comet and DC-10 should remind us that in some field the cost of failure is high.When a widget breaks, people can get hurt.

As we experiment with new materials and manufacturing processes, we will make mistakes just as the aviation pioneers did. It’s an ethical aspect of innovation we need to keep in mind, there can be real costs to failing fast.

Image of De Havilland Comet by Clinton Groves through Wikipedia