Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: design

  • 4D printing and the next generation of design – ABC Sydney

    4D printing and the next generation of design – ABC Sydney

    I’ll be on ABC Sydney this morning discussing 4D printing and the future of design as the Sydney Vivid Festival swings into gear.

    Some of the areas we’ll be looking at in the spot that should start around 10.20am is what exactly is 4D printing, how can materials build themselves and how designers are creating more sustainable devices like Google’s Project Ara.

    One particularly interesting Vivid session is the Electric Dreams to Reality session that will feature local entrepreneurs and makers explaining how they are using the internet of things and new design.

    We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.

    If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.

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  • Gadi Amit – the designer as a contrarian

    Gadi Amit – the designer as a contrarian

    Gadi Amit, founder of San Francisco’s New Deal Design, has been on the forefront of designing  many of today’s wearable devices including the Fitbit, Lytro Camera and Google’s modular Ara phone.

    Ahead of his visit to Sydney to speak at the Vivid Festival last June, Gadi spoke about his philosophy on design and the future of wearable technologies.

    “As a matter of method we always try to look for the contrarian point of view,” Gadi says about his approach to a new project.

    “The initial point of view is better served by being tested against a contrary point of view, in about fifty percent of the cases we find the contrarian point of view actually wins.”

    Cherishing sustainable devices

    One of the key challenges facing designers today is creating sustainable product and Gadi sees the answer lying in developing durable, adaptable products.

    “I’m focusing most of my work on maintaining the usage of the object for as long as we can and extending its meaningful life to people.”

    “This way we make sure that that it’s usuable, it’s beautiful, it’s loved and it’s cherished.”

    project-ara-google-phone

    Google’s Project Ara is an example of Gadi’s philosophy of extending a mobile phone’s life by building the device up from modular units that allow handsets to adapt to users’ needs.

    Rejecting big data

    One of the effects of wearable and smart devices is the explosion of big data, Gadi sees this as problem for users and the result of a mismatch between the development of software and hardware.

    “The hardware design is actually ahead of the software design. Software is still lagging behind and still spewing data all over the screen.”

    “I think people don’t want more data, they want less data. They want meaningful cues that will be served with very little fanfare. You don’t need to know you walked 10,000 steps, you need to know if you’ve walked enough or not enough.”

    Gadi cites the early design of the Fitbit where the software showed a flower blooming to indicate the wearer was meeting the fitness objectives as an example of a simple and elegant way to convey complex information.

    Moving to a world of unlimited screens

    One of the opportunities Gadi sees with wearable devices is how methods of conveying complex information are going to change radically.

    “There’s greater understanding that we have to distil user interfaces into something more basic,” Gadi explains. “It’s a new design process that involves a lot of experimentation with the human body and hardware.”

    Escaping the boxes of design

    What excites Gadi about the design industry today is the diversity of opportunities.

    “Ten years ago an industrial designer dealt with maybe four or five types of boxes – you might design a mobile phone, which was a small level box, you might design a laptop which was a mid level box and you might design a PC which was a bigger box.”

    “I remember one executive describing the world to me as ‘we have four screens; there is the large TV screen, there is the PC screen, the notebook and the mobile. That was the grand unifying theory of the universe.”

    “What we have now in the studio are objects the size of a human finger that are made of soft material and have amazing kinematics and we have objects the size of a fingernail that are still interactive with humans.”

    “I’m really excited about it.”

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  • Three screens, four screens, infinite screens

    Three screens, four screens, infinite screens

    This morning I had the opportunity to interview designer of the Fitbit, Gadi Amit, ahead of his visit to Sydney next month.

    I’ll have the full interview written up in the next couple of days, but Gadi made an interesting point about not being in a ‘four screen world’ anymore, but in one where there’s infinite screens ranging from wearable glasses and watches through to smartphones and intelligent signage.

    A few years ago the concept of the ‘third screen’ came into use when we started talking about the smartphone supplementing the PC and the TV, it quickly morphed into four screens as the tablet computer appeared.

    Now the five year old idea of limiting ourselves to three screens seems quaint when there doesn’t seem to be any limits in the way we can view information.

    The end of the three screen theory is an interesting illustration on how quickly technology is moving, it also shows how rapidly business is changing.

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  • Building a house with 3D printing

    Building a house with 3D printing

    Much of the discussion around 3D printing has focused on making your own coffee cups, toys and small mechanical parts, but what if we start thinking about using these devices to build houses?

    University of Southern California spin off Contour Crafting received attention at the CES over the bold claim by the program’s director, Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis, that it will be soon possible to build a house in 24 hours.

    That’s an audacious claim although it doesn’t include site works or fitting out, much less the design of the structure.

    Contour Crafting isn’t the only university spin off experimenting with 3D printing to build structures; Freeform Construction, part of the UK’s University of Loughborough, has also been working on developing the technology.

    The British team haven’t been as audacious as their US colleagues and, rather than see whole buildings being constructed, they see potential applications being in fabricating specialised parts including cladding panels and complex structural components.

    Like all robotic applications working in hazardous environments is another aspect touted for the technology.

    The British team is almost certainly right in their view, 3D printing is unlikely to fabricate entire buildings onsite but it will have applications in the building industry which will have ramifications for tradesmen, architects and project managers.

    For architects this technology could prove to liberating as it gives designers the opportunity to create structures that haven’t been feasible or possible with existing materials and techniques.

    Some trades though may not fare so well should this technology appear on building sites, it certainly doesn’t look like good news for bricklayers and form workers.

    It will probably take sometime for this technology and it’s still very much under development, Contour Crafting itself won awards in 2006 and the machines are still under development.

    Bill Gates famously pointed out that in the short term we over-estimate the effects of technology while in the long term we underestimate them and that’s almost certainly the case with using 3D printing to build structures.

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  • Crowdsourcing jet engines

    Crowdsourcing jet engines

    Crowdsourcing, harnessing the wisdom of crowds, has been a buzzword for probably the last five years.

    It’s often cited as a way for companies and entrepreneurs to access skills that have been largely unattainable in the past.

    Much of the talk about crowdsourcing has revolved around consumer or marketing projects, say designing logos, and all too often the conversation revolves around getting people to do creative projects for free – the real opportunity though may well lie in the industrial sector tapping into that group wisdom.

    Open innovation and jet engines

    An example of how the industrial sector is using crowdsourcing is GE’s Open Innovation project where the company is offering prizes for the best ideas in developing jet engine parts and advanced 3D printing techniques.

    Like the Kaggle data analysis platform, GE’s project shows that crowdsourcing isn’t just about getting a cheap logo or comparing shoe designs, it can be used to develop high tech equipment.

    Another example of high level crowdsourcing is the DARPA Robotics Challenge where the US military research agency found that enthusiastic amateurs, motivated students and wily entrepreneurs were able to get results that decades of consulting from major defense contractors could achieve as a New Yorker story on Google’s robotic cars describes;

    In one year, they’d made more progress than DARPA’s contractors had in twenty. “You had these crazy people who didn’t know how hard it was,” Thrun told me. “They said, ‘Look, I have a car, I have a computer, and I need a million bucks.’ So they were doing things in their home shops, putting something together that had never been done in robotics before, and some were insanely impressive.” A team of students from Palos Verdes High School in California, led by a seventeen-year-old named Chris Seide, built a self-driving “Doom Buggy” that, Thrun recalls, could change lanes and stop at stop signs. A Ford S.U.V. programmed by some insurance-company employees from Louisiana finished just thirty-seven minutes behind Stanley. Their lead programmer had lifted his preliminary algorithms from textbooks on video-game design.

    The maturing of various technologies like 3D printing, big data and collaboration software are making it easier to democratise and open the innovation process, as DARPA found this can also save costs and accelerate development cycles.

    Balancing crowdsourcing

    GE’s Chief Economist Marco Marco Annunziata sees engineering crowdsourcing as an opportunity to move faster and harness skills even companies as big as his struggle to find, “how much of the innovation process do you keep in house?” He asks.

    That’s a balance many managers are going to consider as they find their markets evolving faster than the capabilities of their own designers and development processes. It may well be that many will find their future innovations come from outside their organisations.

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