design | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Mixing brains, bravery and magic

Gadi Amit on designing things that matter to people

A few weeks ago I interviewed Gadi Amit, principle of New Deal Design ahead of his visit to Sydney for the Vivid festival.

Tonight his public talk for Vivid – Designing the Things We Love – didn’t disappoint, particularly his disdain for designing luxury goods.

“I believe we should design things that help people live their lives; a $50,ooo watch doesn’t do that,” he told the audience.

Through his presentation he showed his best known projects including the FitBit and Project Ara along with discussing some of his failures and why sometimes it’s best to part with a client should their philosophy differ with the designer.

Gadi’s view is a refreshing take from the design and tech industries that are often fixated with celebrity and bling. The view also ties into the manifesto of New Deal Design – “We mix brains, bravery and magic.”

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

The future of design and 4D printing are the topics of today’s 702 Sydney segment with Linda Mottram

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.

Gadi Amit – the designer as a contrarian

Gadi Amit sees being contrary as important at a time when industrial design is changing radically

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.”

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.”

Three screens, four screens, infinite screens

The three screens idea of media consumption that was cutting edge five years ago now seems rather quaint.

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.

Building a house with 3D printing

Will 3D printing deliver on its promises to disrupt the building industry?

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.

Crowdsourcing jet engines

How high tech collaboration can drive industrial innovation

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.

Breaking the break-fix business model

Fixing broken products was a profitable business for many companies, the Internet of Everything is changing that industry model.

One of the most profitable areas for many companies has been in fixing broken products, now the internet of everything promises to put an end to that business model.

‘Break-fix’ has always been a good profit earner with business ranging from construction companies to washing machine manufacturers making good money from fixing failed products.

Speaking at a lunch in Sydney earlier today GE’s CEO of Global Growth and Operations, John Rice, described how the Internet of Everything is changing in the industrial landscape.

One of the big business changes Rice sees is in the ‘break-fix’ model of many industrial suppliers.

“We grew up in companies with a break fix mentality,” Rice says. “We sold you equipment and if it broke, you paid us more money to come and fix it.”

“Your dilemma was our profit opportunity,” Rice pointed out. Now, he says engineering industry shares risks with their customers and the break-fix business is no longer the profit centre it was.

Goodbye to the TV mechanic

This is true in many other industries as products become both more reliable and less economical to repair – the local TV repairman has largely vanished and the backyard computer support businesses are going the same way.

For many businesses, this means a change to how they service their customers and the nature of their operations. For many, it means close monitoring of their products will be essential to manage risk.

Rice also flagged how grid computing will improve the reliability of equipment and networks citing how giant wind turbine talk to each other.

“Every wind turbine has an anemometer on top that’s used to judge wind speed and direction,” says Rice. “If you had a problem with the anemometer the wind turbine shut down until someone could come out – maybe a week later – to climb to the top of the turbine, diagnose the problem and start the thing back up.”

“Today the technology is such that the wind turbines talk to each other so if you’re in a wind field of thirty turbines you don’t rely on one anemometer,” points out Rice. “This is a very simple example of machine to machine interface.”

Wind turbines and the road toll

Rice’s example of wind turbines talking to each other is similar to Cisco’s scenario of using the internet of everything to reduce the road toll where cars communicate with road signs, traffic lights and each other to monitor conditions on the highway ahead.

Those machines talking together also give early warnings of problems which reduces downtime and risk for industrial users, it also means less money for businesses who’ve made money from those problems.

Fashion’s move to digital commerce

The fashion and retail industries are undergoing radical change as ‘digital commerce’ takes hold according to Dasault Systemes’ Susan Olivier.

How does 3D design change the fashion industry? Susan Olivier of Dassault Systemes sees ‘digital commerce’ driving fundamental changes to fashion and retail businesses.

For slower retailers and fashion houses, this move to digital commerce threatens their very existence.

‘Digital commerce’ is more than just e-commerce in the view of Olivier, Vice President of Consumer Goods and Retail of the French 3D design software house, it’s a bringing together of technologies that alter the relationship between customers, retailers and designers along with the manufacturing and logistics companies that bring the products to market.

Retail’s two big challenges

Olivier sees the two biggest challenges to the retail industry as being the 2009 downturn of the global economy and the rise of the connected consumer.

The downturn forced manufacturers and retailers to examine their supply chains, product design and manufacturing to squeeze out inefficiencies along with understanding consumer sentiment better.

Designing for inner beauty

“They found they could work differently with suppliers, how do I design for cost?” Asks Olivier, “how do I work on designing for what we call for ‘inner beauty’ and maybe change the inner design to take out costs without hurting performance or visual performance?” Olivier asked.

“Those brands who survived are those who learned to do both things very well – work better with consumers and work better with their supplier base.”

Who has the power?

“Consumers on the other hand found ‘we have the power’ coming out of the down global economy,” says Olivier. “When consumers buy on price then brand loyalty gets strained.”

The connected consumer also adds further risks for retailers as customers are now better informed than ever before.

“If retailers aren’t careful, she knows more about the product than the poor staff on the floor does and she knows which stores have it in inventory than the poor staff on the floor does.”

Bringing together the digital continuum

One of Olivier’s areas of expertise is in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) – planning the design, manufacturing, marketing and retirement of various products.

A notable feature of modern the modern consumer goods industry is the compressed life cycle of products, “it used to be a life cycle was 18 months,” says Olivier. “The goal was to get it below 12 months, for many brands it’s now 12 weeks.”

A scenario Olivier gives is the design process where a rapid virtual prototype can be shared across manufacturers, store managers and focus group.

“I can create models in 3D and look at different options,” says Olivier. “How’s the outsoul of this shoe going to perform with this upper? Is it comfortable if I make changes? I might send a sample to a 3D printer before I make the mould.”

“I can share it with my visual display teams and my store managers and I can share it before I commit to production and get feedback from my stores and I can share it with my consumer focus groups. ”

“Now I have the power to do that weeks or months in advance before having to put the knife to the goods.” States Olivier, “that’s a completely different way of connecting the way companies think about product, bring it to life and bring it to market.”

“Those are the kinds of things we’re enabling when I talk about bringing together the different points of the digital continuum.”

“Now I’m in store I want to take the same images to educate my sales staff. I want them to take a tablet device and show the consumer what is in inventory, not just in this store, and I can have it shipped to their home within 24 hours.”

“So that’s why I’m saying ‘digital commerce’,” says Olivier. “It could be online, it could be a kiosk in the store, it could be an iPad the sales assistant has in front of them.”

Susan Olivier’s digital commerce model is the present day reality of retail – today’s merchant has to be across consumers’ sentiment along with working closely with suppliers to get products to get products to the customer quickly. The old ways of selling goods, particularly fashion, are over.

How form factors evolve as tech affects design

Technology often dictates design. As tech evolves, we can rethink the design of many things we take for granted.

While out helping a friend shop for computers this morning, it occurred to me how the keyboards of laptop PCs have changed.

For many years, notepad keyboards were restricted to roughly 80 characters as the 4 x 3 ratio of screens have dictated the dimensions of of the keys. Here’s an example.

In recent times though the wider screen dimensions of laptops has seen the resurrection of an older layout — the 102 key layout with an added numerical pad.

What’s interesting about this is how technology form factors evolve.

Not so long ago mobile phone manufacturers were competing to create the smallest handset. Cellphones like the Motorola Razr pushed the limit on how small phones could be.

With the arrival of the smartphone, the size and shape of mobile phones changed. Now the limiting factor was a screen big enough to read the internet on and display a thirty key keyboard.

Now reliable handwriting recognition software means that some phones can eliminate the use of keyboards at all, which means we may start to see the race to create smaller cellphones restarting.

The layout of all of the items we use, from cars to computers, is largely determined by technology limitations. As the tech evolves, we can start to rethink how a device is designed, just as the laptop and iPhone designers did.

With whole new display, input and sensing technologies being developed, there are many household items that may well look different in the near future.

Towards the social media enabled jet engine

General Electric’s GEnx engine illustrates how social media is changing business

“What if my jet engine could talk to me and what would it say?” Asked Beth Comstock, General Electric’s Chief Marketing Officer, at the Dreamforce 2012 conference.

The idea of social media connected jet engine is strange, but the idea that a key piece of technology can talk to engineers, pilots, salespeople and management makes sense.

At the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com were showing how their Chatter social communications tool can be applied to more than just salesteams, in GE’s case by giving their new GEnx engine the opportunity to talk to its support teams.

In flight telemetry is nothing new to the aviation industry, ACARS – Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting Systems – have allowed airlines to monitor the performance of their aircraft over high frequency radio or satellite links during flight since 1978.

The difference today is the sheer amount of data that can be collected and who it can be shared with. If relevant data is being shared with the right people it makes managing these complex systems far easier.

More importantly, it helps teams collaborate. The GEnx engine is a new design that’s fitted to Boeing’s latest airlines including the troubled and late Dreamliner 787 so streamlining the design process of a new, high performance piece of technology pays dividends quickly.

Although things can still go wrong – one wonders what the final tweet from this engine would have been.

We’ve been talking for a long time about how social media and cloud computing services improve collaboration in a work place, the GEnx jet engine illustrates just how fundamental the changes these technologies are bringing to organisations.

If an industrial jet engine can be using social media it begs the question why service based companies and workforces aren’t. It’s where the customers and staff are.

These tools are radically changing the way we work right now – the question is are we, and the organisations we work for, prepared for these changes?

Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2012 courtesy of Salesforce.com

Making business accessible

Making your business website easier to use helps everyone, particularly your customers.

Internet payments giant Paypal yesterday released a survey showing how businesses with a website grow faster than those without an online presence.

There’s surprise to anyone paying attention that a business website is essential, but what happens if a business’ site isn’t accessible to those with impaired eyesight or a disability?

We tend not to think about accessibility issues when building websites and that oversight might be hurting the effectiveness of our online marketing efforts.

Access iQ was launched two weeks about by Media Access Australia, a not for profit organisation that works to improve disabled access to the media which was formed out of the sale of the Australian Caption Centre in 2005.

Federal Disability Commissioner Graeme Innes pointed out at the Access iQ launch that accessibly makes life easier for everyone – making shopping centres and footpaths easier for wheelchairs to navigate also made those places more accessible for parents with prams, the elderly and able bodied people. Everybody, particularly the shopkeepers, won by making things easier for everybody.

What’s true in the physical world has even more effect online, as the features which accessibility programs use are the same ones the all important search engines use when ranking websites.

Titles, headings and metadata – the descriptions of the site, pages and images built into websites – are important as they let search engines and accessibility programs understand what a site is actually about.

Getting your metadata right is a basic part of Search Engine Optimization and it’s key to having an accessible website as well.

A good tool for checking how well metadata is being used on your website is the Australian diagnostic site BuiltWith, whose free service gives you a basic report on how a page is using SEO best practices.

While how well a site uses headings and metadata is important, its also important that the site works properly. Problems with a website’s design make it run slower and can affect how it works in some browsers. So minimising design errors on a page matters as well.

The best tool for checking a website’s underlying code is the W3C’s Markup Validation Service. This checks your site is complying with web standards and picks up an errors that might have crept into the design. Eliminating as many errors as possible means the site runs quicker while improving the SEO and accessiblity aspects.

For checking accessiblity issues, the Web Accessibility Evaluation tool (WAVE), shows you where problems might lie in your site and steps through each part of a page highlighting potential issues.

While a web site’s code isn’t something business managers and owners should spend a lot of time worrying about, the accessibility and SEO does matter so it’s good practice to use these tools to check how your site is performing.

Once you’ve run these tests, sit down with your website developer and see where you can improve. The more accessible a web site is, the more it will help your customers.

Competing in a high cost world

Business can compete when costs are high and currencies are strong

It’s often said that Australian businesses can’t compete and the nation can no longer can support manufacturing or high tech industries.

With the high Australian dollar, many economists, business leaders and politicians have said industries have to adapt to being an expensive economy. Interestingly, few of these experts explain how businesses should, or can, adapt.

At the recent Kickstart forum I had the opportunity to meet two Australian companies succeeding with high tech products and using the high dollar to their advantage.

David Jackman of Pronto Software, a thirty year old business intelligence company, is proud of the fact the business he leads does most of its development in Australia. As business owned by it’s employees – Pronto had an employee buy out in the late 1990s – he sees his role as building the business to last centuries like some European businesses.

Linus Chang developed his Melbourne based business, Backup Assist, when he discovered the data backup tools built into Microsoft Windows weren’t very good. Taking the basic Microsoft products, he added the features that made these tools usuable at a fraction of the cost of bigger companies’ data backup software.

Today Backup Assist is sold in 124 countries with the US as the biggest market.

Both Backup Assist and Pronto find keeping the bulk of the software development in house in Australia makes sure they are producing high quality, effective products.

Software development isn’t the only sector dealing with the high cost evironment, David Jackman says Pronto has many customers in the Australian manufacturing industry who have adapted to a high cost environment with niche and high value added products.

Identifying these opportunities is where the challenge lies; what do our businesses do well that customers in international markets are prepared to pay for?

We also have an advantage in being a relatively open economy with first world standards. This is another reason why investment in new infrastructure like the National Broadband Network is important.

One thing is for sure, selling low priced commodity products with small margins is not where the future lies, even if the Aussie dollar collapses.

We have success stories and businesses adapting to being a high cost economy, it’s a matter of understanding how our industries can add value while do this.