Tag: design

Small business and the importance of design

For most small businesses and founders hiring a professional designer could be a very good investment indeed.

One thing the iPhone era has taught us is the importance of good design.

In a piece for Fairfax Small Business this week, I had a look at some small businesses that had used compelling design to launch their products.

As part of the research for this I interviewed Murray Hunter, founder of Sydney’s Design + Industry, about what businesses should be looking for when taking a product to market.

One of the interesting points about the story was the two businesses featured, Elanation and Pod Tracker, didn’t use professional designers as the founders of both had expertise in that field themselves.

But it is clear, good design matters to users and it will avoid problems down the track with manufacturers shippers and possibly regulators so for most small businesses and founders hiring a professional could be a very good investment indeed.

When startups should think like designers

Design, funding and research are critical parts of getting a product successfully to market says Design + Industry’s Murray Hunter

Thinking about design and getting to market should be a priority for startup businesses says Murray Hunter, founder of Sydney’s Design + Industry.

Having won over 160 design awards during 30 years of running Design + Industry and employing 50 specialist designers and engineers in his Sydney and Melbourne offices, Murray has many insights in what makes a successful product.

“Some of those companies have gone on to become world leaders, it’s a hell of ride and it’s a fabulous relationship where 15 or 20 years later you have a client relationship that’s dominating the world.” he recalls.

Thinking like designers

The current startup scene in Australia provides an opportunity for the country, Murray believes.

“We’re losing manufacturing industry but there’s a whole new wave of businesses and startups based around new technologies, particularly around IoT”

Cyclone pruning shears

“The world wants to think like designers and lead by innovation, which is a really interesting line. You have the American government that wants to design think and you have all these large accounting firms that want to be design thinkers as well.”

“But everyone wants to be innovative and provide a better experience to the customer and we have all these new technologies that are giving us the ability to have a lot more information, be more informative.”

“It started with Apple with the iPod and then the iPhone and it’s led right through so we now have high expectations of what we want for products and services.”

Finding funding

His advice to startups is blunt, “the first thing you need is funding, If you don’t, start the process of development sufficient to develop collateral which enables you to gain investors.”

The development process itself starts with knowing the market.

“Products should be designed to suit the market, not on a hunch,” he says. “So you start with what the market wants and you go backwards. You don’t get dressed and say ‘where are we going’, you find out where you’re going and then get dressed.”

“The intelligent and qualified entrepreneur will have a lot of the problems solved, they’ll have done research, they’ll have knowledge of the market, they’ll know the segments it’s aimed at and quite often they’ll have route to market realised.”

BlueAnt Pump HD earbuds

“Crowdfunding makes a big difference as entrepreneurs can run a crowdfunding campaign, get initial sales and worldwide recognition for it. If it isn’t successful, that could be the end of it. Others know people who can fund it.”

“They may not have funding or they may, we have quite a few suppliers around us who will help with the funding process. We also know private individuals with deep pockets who are interested in investing.”

Changing the design industry

Over the past few years, the design industry has changed dramatically with the rise of Computer Aided Design, 3D printing along with new materials and manufacturing methods. Medical devices are one area that’s seen a rapid change.

“Thirty years ago medical products were low volume,” Murray recalls. “In Australia typically we’d make them out of sheet metal. Now the volumes have increased because the world is more easily accessed so we’re designing for higher volumes.”

CliniCloud non contact thermometer

“We’ve also got low cost manufacturing sources to provide solutions so we can develop a more sophisticated product that will be better received worldwide.

“The biggest change I think has been CAD (Computer Aided Design), the Internet and 3D printing.”

“CAD because we went from 2D drawing to 3D models, the internet because we no longer send DVDs or CAD files to our manufacturing partners and it means we can access manufacturers all over the world.”

“We’re working on a 3D printer that can make biomatter, in other words skin, there’s talk of doing teeth with the rigid externals and soft nerves. So where we go I can only think of organs, prosthetics, replacing cartilage which is a big thing for the elderly.”

The age of the curious business

Researching, experimenting and paying attention will be the keys to business survival during the coming technological wave

Last year the Committee for Economic Development, Australia (CEDA) warned over 40% of the nation’s jobs were at risk from automation over the next 15 years.

While that focus was on the risks to workers, it’s equally threatening for small business. Many companies and sole traders are facing the same disruptions from technological change.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, in the Twentieth century the motor car displaced thousands of small businesses that catered to the horse drawn economy and family run corner stores were displaced by the arrival of supermarkets in the 1950s.

Beyond the personal computer era

At the end of the last century the personal computer’s arrival revolutionised small businesses as suddenly tools that were previously only in the reach of big organisations were suddenly accessible to the most modest venture.

One of the early beneficiaries of that shift to desktop computers in 1990s was the bookkeeping industry which took off as a legion of home based contractors catered for local small businesses.

As the internet and smartphones came along, the bookkeeping market changed as features like bank feeds and receipt apps automated many previously manual tasks.

Despite those challenges the bookkeeping industry has survived and continues to grow with IBIS World estimating the overall accounting industry, which includes bookkeepers, grew 2.6% per year over the past five years.

Close to customers

The success of bookkeepers and accountants in navigating change is probably due to industry being close to their clients along with being early adopters of new technology, two things that caught the taxi industry out when Uber arrived.

Uber’s success in upturning the taxi industry illustrates just how important understanding emerging technologies is for smaller businesses. One industry currently facing massive disruption from robots is the construction sector.

The trades were thought to be relatively immune from automation – after all, who’s going to build a robot plumber? But now robots are moving into trades like bricklaying, as Australian startup Fastbrick Robotics shows.

Fastbrick are building a commercial bricklaying machine, Hadrian X, that automates the trade’s physical work and integrates with 3D printing technology.

In one respect the robot bricklayers are bad for the trade’s employment prospects but for older brickies with bad backs having a machine to help you is a godsend while for employers it improves productivity and reduces workplace accidents. It won’t be the end of the trade but the contractors who survive will have adapted to a very different construction industry.

Restructuring industries

That Fastbrick integrates with design software shows how the dynamics of the construction are changing. In 2014 Chinese company Winsun demonstrated how they can build ten houses in a day with large scale 3D printers.

While we may not see that particular technology in Australia, aspects of it will be used and they are going to change all the trades and professions related to the building industry.

Architects are one building industry group that have long dealt with technological change. Like bookkeepers, the arrival of personal computers completely changed their profession and those who adapted thrived.

Now with cloud computing services plugging into builders’ supply chains like Winsun and machines like Fastbrick’s, architects are closer than ever to the worksite and their customers. The ones who are adapting are the earlier adopters who are getting into these technologies further.

Disrupting the professions

Accountants and architects aren’t the only professions being affected, lawyers are facing a new wave of services using artificial intelligence to do many legal tasks ranging from a chatbot that appeals traffic fines to a program that predicts US Supreme Court decisions.

Like other sectors, it’s the early adopters in the legal sector who are adapting to a very different industry with much of the manual, lower level work being automated out.

The wave of technology we’re now seeing appear – including robots, autonomous vehicles, machine learning and artificial intelligence – are going to change our industries and workplaces dramatically in the next few years.

What the accounting industry and the architecture profession teach us is the businesses closest to their customers and those adopting technology early will be the ones who thrive in a very different industries. Researching, experimenting and paying attention will be the keys to business survival.

An open mindset

Even for the trades, survival during this wave of technological change will be a matter of watching the marketplace closely while being open to new methods and technologies.

Assuming it won’t happen to your industry is probably one of the riskiest things of all. Ten years ago the idea of smartphones revolutionising the taxi business or that robots could replace bricklayers was unthinkable. Now it’s almost expected.

The forces that are changing the workplace are also changing industries and markets, so small businesses will also be affected. It’s going to pay to be smart and curious.

Inside Samsung’s exploding batteries

It’s not easy to design a safe and affordable portable device as Samsung found with the exploding Note7

One of the most humiliating corporate crises of recent history has to be last year’s recall of the Galaxy Note.

Airlines around the world started telling passengers that the devices were banned during their pre flight briefings, causing untold damage for the Samsung brand.

Now Samsung have completed a review into what happened including an infographic illustrating the exact problem with the batteries.

That review shows the design and manufacturing errors that resulted in the batteries bursting into flames. How Samsung are fixing it or putting in systems to prevent that happening again isn’t discussed.

What the infographic does show is how complex the design, engineering and manufacturing is in modern technology – something that is often overlooked by many technologists.

Battery technologies are particularly fraught as a lot of energy is compressed into a small space and the chemistry of Lithium Ion batteries makes them particularly dangerous should they be damaged or incorrectly used, as Boeing found with the early models of the 787 Dreamliner.

Modern life and the devices that we take for granted are complex and that complexity though can easily come back to bite us. As Samsungs’ exploding batteries show, sometimes that complexity is difficult to manage.

 

Creating a Silicon Brain

Should we be rethinking how computers are designed? The co-founder and CEO of chip designer Nervana, Naveen Rao, believes we should look to the brain.

Should we be rethinking how computers are designed? The co-founder and CEO of chip designer Nervana, Naveen Rao, believes so as artificial intelligence applications change the way systems work.

“A brain only uses 20 watts of power to do far more than a laptop,” observes Naveen Rao at a breakfast following Intel’s Artificial Intelligence Day in San Francisco last week.

“Presumably the brain is doing more computation than your laptop,” he continues. “What are we missing? Why is there such a big difference between what a computer can do and a brain can do. Let’s try to understand that and maybe what we learn can change how we design computers.”

A lifetime passion

Rao, whose company was acquired by Intel for over four hundred million dollars last August, was discussing the quest to make computers operate more like brains and less like adding machines.

For Rao this has been a lifetime passion, having graduated as an electrical engineer and spending most of his career designing computer chips at Sun Microsystems and various startups he quit his job to do a PhD in neuroscience, “after ten years, I wanted to return to my passion of trying to use biology to better understand computers.”

From that combination of study and experience Nervana was founded in 2014 and raised twenty million dollars from investors before being acquired by Intel.

Replicating the bird, not the feathers

The key part in creating a computer that acts more like a brain is to get the individual CPUs to be working together in a network similar to the mind’s neural paths, “look at a bird compared to a plane.” Rao says,” we don’t replicate the feathers, but we do the function.”

Doing this meant rethinking how processors are designed, “there are tried are true methods of chip architecture that we basically questioned.”

“We don’t need high levels of generality. We don’t need this to work on energy or weather simulations. We removed some of that baggage.”

Paring back the processor

So the Nervana team stripped down the individual processor and removed many functions, such as a cache, that are built into today’s advanced CPUs. Those lighter weight, and less power hungry, units can then be combined into neural networks more suited to artificial intelligence functions than today’s computers.

“Nvidea, this sort of fell into their laps,” observes Rao of Intel’s key competitor in the AI, graphics and gaming space. “It just so happens the graphics functions on their chips are suited to Artificial Intelligence applications.”

Without the more complex functions of modern CPUs, Rao and the Nervana team see the opportunity to build more flexible computers better suited to artificial intelligence applications.

Intel focuses on AI

That focus on AI has seen Intel branding its AI initiatives under the Nervana brand name as the iconic Silicon Valley company tries to move ahead with more nimble competitors like Qualcomm and NVidea.

For the computer industry, artificial intelligence promises to be the next major advance, something necessary if we are ever going to make sense of the masses of data being collected by smart devices and the reason why Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook are all making massive investments in the field.

Regardless of whether Intel and Nervana are successful in the AI marketplace, Rao sees the entire field of neural computing as a great opportunity. “It’s exciting, there’s lots of chances to innovate.”

Paul travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Intel

 

Autodesk and the China manufacturing challenge

China’s focus on R&D is changing the country’s manufacturing outlook which has major consequences for the rest of the world.

At the recend Autodesk University event in Sydney I had the opportunity to talk with Pat Williams, the company’s senior vice president for Asia Pacific.

Williams’ beat covers all of Asia and he’s based out of Shanghai where he’s been based for the last eight years and prior to that he spent a decade in Japan.

Having spent so much time in North East Asia, and heading to the PRC the following week myself, it was interesting to hear Williams’ views on how industry is changing in China and ther country’s attitude to American software companies.

“There’s a lot of noise that gets made in China about their local IP and the local vendors and what I say is ‘the Chinese companies are competing in a global market and they are under the same competitive pressures as everybody else in the world so when they find a better tool they use it. Despite all the noise, business is quite good there.”

For the Chinese economy, the aging and increasingly expensive workforce presents a problem, something addressed by the China Manufacturing 2025 plan which sees the country increasingly competing in high tech sectors such as aerospace, telecommunications and biotech fields.

“China’s kind of an anomaly,” says Williams of the country’s immense growth rates. “From a government perspective there’s a lot of horsepower behind the things that they do – China 2025, their manufacturing initiative, you’ve got what they’ve been doing with Building Information Modelling (BIM) and our architectural tools.”

They’ve really kind of spearheaded what we’ve been talking about on things like 3D printing of houses. China on its own is just this mushroom that’s happening.”

While the industrial shift in China and the rest of Asia is promising opportunities to companies like Autodesk, that change is affecting their workforce as well with the company announcing plans to lay off ten percent of their workforce earlier this year.

Those cutbacks are part of the adjustment to a new market reality says Williams, “it was part of right sizing the business.” He observed “we realised our margins were going to be compressed as we move to a subscription model.”

Autodesk’s shifts illustrate how the opportunities in the new economy don’t come without costs even for the companies that seem to be winners in a shifting marketplace.

In China, American companies are finding they have to a unique proposition – companies like Apple and Autodesk are good examples – and as the country moves its economy further up the value chain all foreign businesses are going to have to show how they add value.

Succeeding in a changing economy isn’t without uncertainty. And it certainly isn’t without risks.

Seizing the collective insanity: Secrets of the happy creative

Ignore the money and make people happy is how to be a happy creative worker believes the designer behind Twitter’s Fail Whale, Yiying Lu

For a moment Yiying Lu seems a bit sheepish about her title of ‘Unicorn Whisperer’ at 500 startups. “It was Dave’s idea,” she smiles referring to the tech accelerator’s founder, Dave McClure.

Yiying – whose more conventional title at 500 Startups is Creative Director and says her name translates to ‘happy creative’ in English – doesn’t do bashful very well, particularly when discussing the importance of design.

“If content is king, engagement is queen.” Yiving says when we interviewed her at 500 Startup’s San Francisco office in May, “if you look at the Bay Area community they look at the content rather than the design.”

Getting magic

“When you put them together that’s when you get magic,” says the designer who’s best known for creating Twitter’s Fail Whale and now counts companies ranging from Disney and Microsoft through to Mashable and a range of startups as clients for her design practice.

Captivating people with good design is the key to successful business, Yiying believes. “At the end of the day, it’s the engagement,” she says. “If you remember Google Wave, it was a great concept but it failed and look today – it’s Slack! Google Wave failed because there was no engagement. They didn’t really look at what the user wants.”

As someone who now spends most of her time in the Bay Area having shifted from her Sydney base several years ago, Yiying laughs while describing her belief that the entire region has been gripped by a mania. “98 percent of startups won’t survive, but everyone in the Bay Area wants to do it. They’re collectively insane,” she says. “Everybody is giving it their best shot.”

Seizing the collective insanity

When she arrived in the city, Yiying embraced that collective madness, “When I first came to San Francisco, I immediately thought I was home” and cites the city’s small size but dense community of talented, committed people as the main reason for the region’s success.

For areas wanting to copy the Bay Area’s success the key lies in getting all of the industry’s players improving their game. “If you want an awesome ecosystem then anyone should work. It shouldn’t be just one part of the ecosystem working,” she states. “Investors should get better as well.”

One of the many things Yiying is passionate about is not focusing on money and her advice to those intending to make the move is to look beyond the cash, “A dollar exchange is a narrow view,” she states. “We have a lot of real smart people coming here to TechCrunch Disrupt and South by South West thinking about finding investors. That’s not the way to to it.”

Looking beyond money

“Don’t think about finding investors, that’s a fear based model.” Is Yiying’s advice, “look at putting things into the community. You can only become really successful if you’re prepared to let other people be successful.”

For Yiying herself her priorities are a long way from cash. “When I make people happy, that’s more important than money,” she explains. “You can only become really successful if you’re willing to let others be happy and successful.”

Having made the jump to the Bay Area, she’s philosophical about where home is, having been born in Shanghai and spending much of her life in Sydney, Australia. “Home is where your heart is, but if your heart is big enough you can live anywhere.”

Seize the opportunity is Yiying’s advice to those looking at making the move, “a lot of things are in your head and things are more difficult if you let them worry you so it’s best to just do it,” she says. “Make it happen. Do stuff. There is no time to hesitate.”

For the creative worker, it seems ignoring the money and not hesitating is the way to stay happy. For tech business, getting engagement in a noisy world is everything.

Introducing Singapore’s driverless pod

Singapore starts to roll out driverless ‘autonomous pods’ for its public transport system

A while back we speculated on what the autonomous vehicle would look like, given that having a dashboard, steering wheel and even forward facing seats were no longer necessary if a car no longer has a driver.

It seems almost certain that the future driverless cars will take a very different form the vehicles we travel in today.

Now the Singaporean mass transit agency has unveiled its trial autonomous ‘pod’ that’s designed to carry 32 passengers.

How the pod integrates with other transport modes and interacts with general road users will be interesting to watch, but illustrates why thinking about the future of public transit has to look beyond apps.

The big question is how will these technologies change the economics of public transit and the behaviour of users. It seems we’re about to find out.

Coming to the end of Moore’s law

Moore’s law may be reaching its limits, but that only means things could be getting more interesting for the chip industry.

One constant in the modern computer industry is Moore’s law, the rule described by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a microprocessor will double every two years.

Nature magazine reports chip makers are now about to abandon Moore’s law as they reach the physical limits of etching an ever increasing number of transistors onto silicon.

This doesn’t mean the microprocessor industry is about to stagnate however as the demand for more mobile and energy efficient chips is expected to boom as the Internet of Things evolves and wearable technologies become commonplace.

 

Keeping the IoT simple and safe

Making the IoT simple and safe is the most important tasks facing Internet of Things vendors

Ten years ago a joke going around was “what if Microsoft built cars?” The answer summed up the frustrations users had with personal computers and the differences in engineering standards between traditional industries and that of the IT sector.

As we enter the Internet of Things era, that tension between consumer devices and good engineering continues as shown by a software bug that rendered Nest thermostats useless.

That poor software would drain the battery without warning the user, illustrates how poorly designed many of these devices are.

Ironically Nest’s owners, Google, held a conference earlier this week where the company’s leaders flagged the importance of standards, security and privacy.

In a call to action for the IoT industry, Google’s lead advocate Vint Cerf, also known as one of the “fathers of the Internet,” warned that compatibility, security, and privacy could be obstacles to the IoT’s success.

Reliability is also important, particularly when talking about safety and security – Nest also make carbon monoxide detectors – where a device crashing or failing can have terrible consequences.

At present most of the Internet of Things is about the gimmick of connecting devices to the cloud and controlling them from your mobile phone. Consumers are not going to embrace IoT products if they add cost, complexity and risk to their lives.

Keeping it simple and safe are probably the most important things designers of IoT devices can do.

The limits of today’s technologies – day two of Autodesk University

The second day of Autodesk University gave more insights into the future of design and manufacturing but it also showed the limits

The second day of Autodesk University 2015 in Las Vegas continued the focus on innovation and changing industries, the afternoon innovation session was particularly focused on some of the opportunities being realised in drones, pre-fabricated buildings and lampshades made out of fungus.

Brooklyn based designer Danielle Trofe gave a great demonstration of how she’s using fungus to create a range of sustainable light shades. Interestingly in a conversation earlier in the day with Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski the topic of growing products out of Mycelium, the vegetative part of a fungus that Trofe uses, was discussed in terms of smart packaging and biodegradable products.

Growing products out of organic material is one of the themes explored in Mercedes Benz’s Biome concept car which proposes to grow the chassis out of seeds. While realising that concept is some way off, Trofe’s Mush-Lume idea shows some products are already at that stage.

Rethinking prefab buildings

Following Trofe was Jos Mulkens, the CEO of Dutch building company Voorbij Prefab, who described how by using sophisticated design tools and 3D printing to make prefabricated building panels they had reduced to the time to fabricate elements from days to hours.

Mulkens gave a good insight into how design and production workflows are being accelerated with modern technology, particularly in replacing manual form makers to make the moulds for the precast panels. Voobij Prefab are flagging a lot of disruption heading for the building industry.

At one the media breakout sessions a group of senior Autodesk managers discussed the trends in design and materials engineering. This turned out to be an interesting session on the limits of current technologies.

Composite technologies

Max Moruzzi, Autodesk’s Principal Research Scientist, is a passionate believer in composite materials and the benefits they promise. However he conceded when challenged by his colleague Steve Hobbs, who joined Autodesk last year with the acquisition of  UK based Computer Aided Manufacturing company Delcam, about the structural properties of composites that we still have a lot to understand about how they behave and fail.

Bringing a touch of English scepticism to the panel, Hobbs pointed out almost all metallic components made by 3D printing require some sort of mechanical, subtractive finishing such as milling or polishing.

Hobbs went onto warn that we risk introducing a “hairball of complexity” into the design and manufacturing industries as people experiment with developing products with materials and techniques they don’t fully understand.

All the panel, which also included Carl White – Autodesk’s senior director of marketing for advanced manufacturing – and Benjamin Schrauwen who leads the company’s Spark 3D printing division, agreed that applying current design and manufacturing methods need to be rethought in the light of new methods being developed.

The limits of 3D printing

It was notable in the panel Q&A around the revelation that 70% of 3D printing projects fail, the panel put this down to the relative immaturity of software and machinery along with the technologies currently being poorly understood. Hobbs observed that for GE to 3D print their jet engine parts they rebuild and reprogram the printers they buy to their own higher specifications.

For the final session CEO Carl Bass and CTO Jeff Kowalski faced a Q&A from analysts and the media, that session was interesting in exploring some of the directions Autodesk sees industry and business heading and I’ll write more about that tomorrow.

Overall, the Autodesk University has been an interesting insight into the future of design and manufacturing along with the effects this has on other industries. With these technologies at an early stage, it’s a field that is going to evolve rapidly.

Paul Wallbank travelled to Autodesk University in Las Vegas as a guest of Autodesk.

The future of making things – Autodesk University Day One

Autodesk University is a glimpse into the future of design and making things

“With technology I’m free,” says Hugh Herr of MIT Media Lab in the finishing segment of the Autodesk University 2015 opening keynote.

Herr was describing how he overcame losing both his legs to frostbite at age 17 after being caught in a blizzard. Determined to continue his passion for climbing he started developing better prosthetics, studied mechanical engineering and became the leader of MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics Group.

Prosthetic design is one of the aspects highlighted by Autodesk in their San Francisco Demonstration Gallery with good reason given the life transforming potential along with the imperatives of designing and manufacturing durable devices.

Design and manufacturing are naturally the key things for Autodesk with CEO Carl Bass outlining some of the possibilities in the opening keynote for the Autodesk University conference in Las Vegas yesterday.

Bass had some thoughts on the current buzzword of innovation, “it’s not one dramatic improvement of everything that came before, it’s most often combination of pragmatic improvements combining and refixing things in really new ways.”

“It’s about doing the really hard work, the often unsexy work, of packaging it all up and making it successful.”

The McGyver IoT

Bass illustrated this view of innovation with a story of  troubleshooting his home lathe by duct taping his smartphone to the machine and using the microphone and gyroscope to detect when the cutting tip was becoming blunt.

As Bass pointed out, his “McGyver concoction” of a phone and duct tape is a good example of a basic Internet of Things application where sensors, this time built into the smartphone, detect the state of a machine. It’s a small step from there to developing lathes that change their own cutting tools when required.

Combining the IoT into design where a product’s design changes on feedback from its environment was a key part of the day’s discussions and touched upon Skylar Tibbit’s work on intelligent materials.

Autodesk CTO Jeff Kowalski took the longer view of how the shift from passive to generative design methods will change the way we work stating boldly, “in the next twenty years we’ll see more change in the nature of work than we’ve seen in the last two thousand.”

Rethinking manufacturing

Kowlaski pointed out how the way of working where a craftsman has to point a tool at materials to form them is now being left behind as we start to see materials, and machines, that can manufacture themselves.

For the present design and manufacture by humans remains the way we do things and in the media sessions one of the case studies was Airbus’ bionic partition where the company’s Bastian Schaefer and Autodesk’s David Benjamin described the process of redesigning a basic aircraft part.

The results of a combination of 3D printing – in this case laser sintering of a metal alloy – and generative design resulted in a partition 45% lighter and eight percent thinner, savings not insubstantial when every kilo in an airliner costs its operator 106Kg of kerosene each year.

An age of reduced consumption

Reducing the resources being used was a key part of Andrew Mcafee’s keynote presentation where he describes a ‘dematerialising’ economy where a modern society is using less in the way of resources and energy while still improving living standards.

 

Overall, the first day of the Autodesk University conference was an interesting exploration into how design and technology is changing lives both on the societal level and for individuals, as Hugh Herr’s story attests.

Paul travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Autodesk