Video: youtube.com/watch?v=eN05B7dDsFY Picture a world where Amazon.com is a factory. Products are made in small quantities, as needed, based on direct input from users to designers and developers. Consumption directly drives product creation, and data informs design. Consumer products are made locally, with local materials and workers, while at the same time using design and engineering talent from anywhere on earth. It simultaneously looks exactly like our world, but is totally different. It’s almost here, and you know more about it than anyone else.
(SEE SLIDE NOTES FOR COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT)
Imagine a world 8 years from now where instead of a warehouse, Amazon is a factory. Products are made in small quantities, as needed, based on direct input from users to designers and developers. In this world design directly drives product creation, and data informs design. Consumer products are made locally, with local materials and workers, while at the same time being able to use design and engineering talent from anywhere on earth. It simultaneously looks exactly like our world, but is totally different.
Designing Smart Things: User Experience Design for Networked Devices (UX-LX W...Mike Kuniavsky
How do you design experiences that transcend a single device, or even a family of devices? How do you create experiences that exist simultaneously in your hand and in the cloud?
Using plentiful examples drawn from cutting edge products and the history of technology, this workshop describe underlying trends, show the latest developments and ask some broader questions.
The New Product Development Ecosystem (Sketching in Hardware 2012 presentation)Mike Kuniavsky
(look at slide notes for full talk transcript)
Imagine a world 8 years from now where instead of a warehouse, Amazon is a factory, where products are made in small quantities based on direct input from users to designers. In this world design directly drives product creation, and where data informs design.
(special thanks to Joel Truher for many of the ideas and Alex Chaffee for the Amazon example)
ow do you design experiences that transcend a single device, or even a family of devices? How do you create experiences that exist simultaneously in your hand and in the cloud?
Using plentiful examples drawn from cutting edge products and the history of technology, this workshop describes underlying trends, shows the latest developments and asks some broader questions.
How Web Design will reinvent manufacturingMike Kuniavsky
Picture a world where Amazon.com is a factory. Products are made as needed, based on direct input from users to designers and developers. Consumption directly drives production, and data informs design. If we weren't talking about physical products, this would sound a lot like Web/app interaction design, but the worlds of making atoms and bits are quickly colliding, and the implications are profound. By mapping what we have learned creating analytics-driven digital design to the physical world, we can change how everything is made, for the better.
An overview of the rise of the maker movement, by Sam Wurzel, CEO and co-founder of Octopart, the vertical search engine for electronic components and industrial products.
Second day of the week two of lectures at Aalto University School of Economics’ ITP summer programme’s Strategy and Experience. https://itp.hse.fi/
Contents: Interaction design, designing for flow, prototyping
(SEE SLIDE NOTES FOR COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT)
Imagine a world 8 years from now where instead of a warehouse, Amazon is a factory. Products are made in small quantities, as needed, based on direct input from users to designers and developers. In this world design directly drives product creation, and data informs design. Consumer products are made locally, with local materials and workers, while at the same time being able to use design and engineering talent from anywhere on earth. It simultaneously looks exactly like our world, but is totally different.
Designing Smart Things: User Experience Design for Networked Devices (UX-LX W...Mike Kuniavsky
How do you design experiences that transcend a single device, or even a family of devices? How do you create experiences that exist simultaneously in your hand and in the cloud?
Using plentiful examples drawn from cutting edge products and the history of technology, this workshop describe underlying trends, show the latest developments and ask some broader questions.
The New Product Development Ecosystem (Sketching in Hardware 2012 presentation)Mike Kuniavsky
(look at slide notes for full talk transcript)
Imagine a world 8 years from now where instead of a warehouse, Amazon is a factory, where products are made in small quantities based on direct input from users to designers. In this world design directly drives product creation, and where data informs design.
(special thanks to Joel Truher for many of the ideas and Alex Chaffee for the Amazon example)
ow do you design experiences that transcend a single device, or even a family of devices? How do you create experiences that exist simultaneously in your hand and in the cloud?
Using plentiful examples drawn from cutting edge products and the history of technology, this workshop describes underlying trends, shows the latest developments and asks some broader questions.
How Web Design will reinvent manufacturingMike Kuniavsky
Picture a world where Amazon.com is a factory. Products are made as needed, based on direct input from users to designers and developers. Consumption directly drives production, and data informs design. If we weren't talking about physical products, this would sound a lot like Web/app interaction design, but the worlds of making atoms and bits are quickly colliding, and the implications are profound. By mapping what we have learned creating analytics-driven digital design to the physical world, we can change how everything is made, for the better.
An overview of the rise of the maker movement, by Sam Wurzel, CEO and co-founder of Octopart, the vertical search engine for electronic components and industrial products.
Second day of the week two of lectures at Aalto University School of Economics’ ITP summer programme’s Strategy and Experience. https://itp.hse.fi/
Contents: Interaction design, designing for flow, prototyping
One of the great irony of successful companies is how easily they can fail. New companies are founded to take advantage of some new technology. They become highly successful and but when the technology shifts, something new comes along, they are unable to adapt and fail. This is the innovator’s dilemma.
Then there are companies that manage to survive. For example, Kodak survived two platform shift, only til fail the third. IBM has survived over 100 years. What do successful companies do differently?
In the early days of product development, the technology is inferior and lacking in performance. The focus is very much on the technology itself. The users are enthusiast who like the idea of the product, find use for it, and except the lack of performance. Then as the product becomes more mature, other factors become important, such as price, design, features, portability. The product moves from being a technology to become a consumer item, and even a community.
In this lecture we explore the change from technology focus to consumer focus, and look at why people stand in line overnight to buy the latest gadgets.
Présentation du Keynote du jeudi 20 octobre 2016 - M. Paul RamseyACSG Section Montréal
Présentation du Keynote du jeudi 20 octobre 2016 - M. Paul Ramsey dans le cadre de Géomatique 2016
Très actif dans le domaine de l’Open Source, il a mis sur pied une entreprise spécialisée dans le développement de logiciels de géomatique. Il nous a exposé son expérience concernant la symbiose de la technologie et de la culture. Location Omniscience, Free data, Free software, free machine et Utility computing, un discours sur les tendances technologiques accompagné d’un peu de philosophie. Il nous a exposé à quel point la convergence de l’accessibilité des technologies, l’abondance des données et les faibles coûts des services de traitement ouvrent la porte à un univers infini de possibilités. Il a également amené l’auditoire à réfléchir sur le fait que nous sommes épiés en tout temps, que ce soit par des caméras, des drones, des algorithmes ou autres, nous sommes surveillés en permanence.
There is no doubt that technology and industry will continue to evolve in many forms. Many futuristic sectors are currently being developed. Initiatives such as the robotic and the internet of things are becoming more and more of a factor.
Disruptive innovation, smartphones and the decline of NokiaChris Sandström
Apple’s IPhone was first revealed in January 2007. Out of curiosity I pondered through Nokia’s quarterly presentation slides in the years 2007-2010 in order to get a better idea about how they related to the ongoing shift from feature phones to smartphones. While such a brief and shallow review will not give the full picture of Nokia’s response, it might still reveal something.
Making Money From Open Source HardwareDavid Mellis
A discussion of the business models around open-source hardware. Discusses the value chain in the manufacturing and distribution of Arduino boards and other products. Draws some broader implications and raises general questions about the topic.
As a professor in “Revolution in the Manufacturing Industry”, Peter examines the impact of new, direct digital manufacturing technologies and methods ( such as Fab Labs and 3D printing) for design and manufacturing.
The Future Of Media Gerd Leonhard Media Futurist @ Plugg 2009Gerd Leonhard
Futurist Gerd Leonhard talks about the new data-content-advertising economy. Monolog to conversation, dominance to collaboration, ownership to access. More at www.mediafuturist.com
The Internet of Things to Come: elements of a ubiquitous computing innovation...Mike Kuniavsky
The pieces of the innovation ecosystem for the Internet of Things and Ubicomp are in place. They're: Object Oriented Hardware,
Cheap Assembly,
Anchors in the Cloud,
Social Design Collaboration Tools,
The Arduino,
Low Volume Sales Channels
One of the great irony of successful companies is how easily they can fail. New companies are founded to take advantage of some new technology. They become highly successful and but when the technology shifts, something new comes along, they are unable to adapt and fail. This is the innovator’s dilemma.
Then there are companies that manage to survive. For example, Kodak survived two platform shift, only til fail the third. IBM has survived over 100 years. What do successful companies do differently?
In the early days of product development, the technology is inferior and lacking in performance. The focus is very much on the technology itself. The users are enthusiast who like the idea of the product, find use for it, and except the lack of performance. Then as the product becomes more mature, other factors become important, such as price, design, features, portability. The product moves from being a technology to become a consumer item, and even a community.
In this lecture we explore the change from technology focus to consumer focus, and look at why people stand in line overnight to buy the latest gadgets.
Présentation du Keynote du jeudi 20 octobre 2016 - M. Paul RamseyACSG Section Montréal
Présentation du Keynote du jeudi 20 octobre 2016 - M. Paul Ramsey dans le cadre de Géomatique 2016
Très actif dans le domaine de l’Open Source, il a mis sur pied une entreprise spécialisée dans le développement de logiciels de géomatique. Il nous a exposé son expérience concernant la symbiose de la technologie et de la culture. Location Omniscience, Free data, Free software, free machine et Utility computing, un discours sur les tendances technologiques accompagné d’un peu de philosophie. Il nous a exposé à quel point la convergence de l’accessibilité des technologies, l’abondance des données et les faibles coûts des services de traitement ouvrent la porte à un univers infini de possibilités. Il a également amené l’auditoire à réfléchir sur le fait que nous sommes épiés en tout temps, que ce soit par des caméras, des drones, des algorithmes ou autres, nous sommes surveillés en permanence.
There is no doubt that technology and industry will continue to evolve in many forms. Many futuristic sectors are currently being developed. Initiatives such as the robotic and the internet of things are becoming more and more of a factor.
Disruptive innovation, smartphones and the decline of NokiaChris Sandström
Apple’s IPhone was first revealed in January 2007. Out of curiosity I pondered through Nokia’s quarterly presentation slides in the years 2007-2010 in order to get a better idea about how they related to the ongoing shift from feature phones to smartphones. While such a brief and shallow review will not give the full picture of Nokia’s response, it might still reveal something.
Making Money From Open Source HardwareDavid Mellis
A discussion of the business models around open-source hardware. Discusses the value chain in the manufacturing and distribution of Arduino boards and other products. Draws some broader implications and raises general questions about the topic.
As a professor in “Revolution in the Manufacturing Industry”, Peter examines the impact of new, direct digital manufacturing technologies and methods ( such as Fab Labs and 3D printing) for design and manufacturing.
The Future Of Media Gerd Leonhard Media Futurist @ Plugg 2009Gerd Leonhard
Futurist Gerd Leonhard talks about the new data-content-advertising economy. Monolog to conversation, dominance to collaboration, ownership to access. More at www.mediafuturist.com
The Internet of Things to Come: elements of a ubiquitous computing innovation...Mike Kuniavsky
The pieces of the innovation ecosystem for the Internet of Things and Ubicomp are in place. They're: Object Oriented Hardware,
Cheap Assembly,
Anchors in the Cloud,
Social Design Collaboration Tools,
The Arduino,
Low Volume Sales Channels
Somatic Data Perception: Sensing Information ShadowsMike Kuniavsky
Get notes and the full transcript here: http://orangecone.com/archives/2011/05/somatic_data_pe.html
Augmented reality is the extension of our senses into the realm of information shadows where physical objects have data representations that can be manipulated digitally as we manipulate objects physically. To me this goes further than putting a layer of information over the world, like a veil. It’s about enhancing the direct experience of the world, not to replace it, and to do it in a way that’s not about being completely in the background, like ambient data weather, or about taking over our attention.
I’m advocating a change in language away from “augmented reality” to something that’s more representative of the whole experience of data in the environment. I’m calling it “Somatic Data Perception.”
Unintended Consequences: design [in|for|and] the age of ubiquitous computingMike Kuniavsky
Every technology’s most profound social and cultural changes are invisible at the outset. Cheap information processing and networking technology is a brand new phenomenon, culturally speaking, and quickly changing the world in fundamental ways. Designers align the capabilities of a technology with people’s lives, so it is designers who have the power and responsibility to think about what this means.
The Internet of People: Integrating IoT Technologies is Not a Technical Probl...Mike Kuniavsky
(FULL TRANSCRIPT IN SLIDE NOTES)
The technologies underlying most current Internet of Things visions are not particularly revolutionary. That of course doesn't mean that the visions are not compelling, just that the challenges in creating these visions have little to do with building new technologies. The challenge is to identify what people want and need, and how -- or if -- automatic identification, distributed processing, and pervasive networking can help address those needs and desires. We need to think about how we’re going to create the Google of Things, the Facebook of Things, the Foursquare of Things, the PayPal of Things, the Farmville of Things. It's not about the infrastructure, it's about the applications, and the applications are about people.
Designing Smart Things: user experience design for networked devicesMike Kuniavsky
In this workshop Mike Kuniavsky, author of "Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design" introduces concepts of user experience design for the post-PC/post-phone world.
How do you design experiences that transcend a single device, or even a family of devices? How do you create experiences that exist simultaneously in your hand and in the cloud?
Using plentiful examples drawn from cutting edge products and the history of technology, the workshop describes underlying trends, shows the latest developments and asks broader questions.
This presentation introduces fundamental concepts of ubiquitous computing user experience design and specific techniques for designing services and interfaces.
Topics include:
- Design for multiple scales
- Design for services used by multiple devices
- Rethinking everyday objects and experiences
- Understanding use context
Lean hardware startups: elements of a ubiquitous computing innovation ecosystemMike Kuniavsky
(Look at slide notes for full transcript)
How can digital hardware startups be more like Github and less like General Motors?
The pieces that fell together to create the ecosystem of tools and business models that lead to the creation of Eric Ries' Lean Startup model for online products are now falling into place in the hardware sector. We're about to see an explosion of hardware startups based on the same ideas. Technological, social and financial changes are coming together to allow entrepreneurs to rapidly iterate new digital devices focused on customer needs. These core elements create a new way to conceptualize the development of digital hardware products. This talk will examine the components that are creating this change and suggest some directions we can expect things to go, and how we can take advantage of it.
RESS - Responsive Web Design + Serverside componentsAnders Andersen
Responsive Web Design is basically a series of techniques where we adapt content based on the capabilities of the browser. This adaption is mostly done client side, but not all browsers, and especially not mobile browsers, are capable of doing this. Another approach is to do most of the adaption server side. In this talk we will see how we can combine the best of both worlds by combining client side techniques with server side components. We will also have a look at how we use these techniques to solve some of the difficult tasks in responsive design: responsive images and video.
Among all the excitement for the Internet of Things and the resurgence of hardware as an investable category, venture capitalists, many of whom new to the space, have been re-discovering the opportunities and challenges of working alongside entrepreneurs to build hardware companies. Combined with a rapid evolution of the venture financing path across categories over the last couple of years, the increasing importance of crowdfunding and a certain frothiness in the market, this leads to a certain confusion, as both entrepreneurs and VCs try to figure out the best way of financing and scaling hardware startups. Some patterns emerge, however: for example, VCs are mostly interested in opportunities that include a strong software and data component; and they are increasingly demanding when it comes to seeing the product actually shipping and gaining early traction.
BIMA Breakfast Briefing | Making the most of the 'maker revolution.' Speakers slides.
If consumers are on their way to producing products quickly and cheaply from home thanks to new technologies, what does this mean for agencies and brands?
Andy Huntington (Interaction Designer & Hardware Producer at BERG) slides accompanied his talk with his approach to the topic – ‘The maker movement puts power in to the hands of the people.’
Ubiquity: smart people, smart places, smart organisationsDaisy Group
BBC futurist, Tom Cheesewright, talks ubiquitous computing and how it is affecting people, places and organisations across the world. This is the speech Tom gave at Daisy Communications' flagship event 'Daisy Wired? 2014'.
The presentation is about the latest and new disruptive innovation around the world which have revolutionize the way we used to live in the modern world.
2015 International CES - What I learned at CES and what brands have to knowMatt Doherty
For the past three years I’ve attended International CES. Each year I break down the show into larger thematic takeaways and trends that every brand should know. I look for the bigger picture and implications of technology moving forward and unveil the opportunities at hand over the course of the four day conference. Give it a read. Get inspired by something. And if you have any questions give me a shout out on Twitter (@themattdoh). [Written and designed by Matt Doherty]
The latest edition of the Endava Quarterly Innovation Report.
Traditionally, businesses competed with others in the same industry, but now modern businesses
compete with new digital competitors, as well as those who work in different market sectors.
This report serves to show our customers what is going on beyond their traditional competitors.
This edition is packed with contributions from people across Endava and covers many industries. It contains really cool, innovative projects that span robotics, business intelligence,
security and payments. These projects are the cutting edge of the industry and we often use these as inspiration for clients who are embarking on a Digital Transformation programme.
Key Highlights:
#1 Google's new home personal assistant
#2 Fully interactive advertising
#3 Turn your hand into a touchscreen with this smartwatch
#4 A bank staffed by chat bots
#5 New business models through smart clothing
An old presentation of mine from 2011 about the need for more hackable banking products, open data access and APIs. Frustratingly a lot of this is still valid now.
In this Interview, Published in Electronic Business Asea, the Founder, President, Chairman Mr. Alan Shugart talks about a business strategy in a fast changing technology scenario. The relevance of the fundamentals he preached in 1994 seems valid even today. Today in year 2017 we can retrospect how accurate his plans were way back in 1994! One may like to see this more from business strategy point of view, if not from technology itself. Unfortunately, like Steve Jobs (Apple) and Lee Iacocca (Ford), he was too ousted by Seagate Board.
Design in Research: How do you use design to support and shape R&D? October 1...Mike Kuniavsky
[This is an updated version of an earlier presentation with some of the images, but none of the content, removed] Corporate Research and Development is evolving, and it increasingly incorporates user experience design, design research, and service design into the earliest stages. The historical separation between basic research, applied research and productization erodes as research horizons shorten, technology diffuses more rapidly, and companies want to take bigger risks sooner. When this changing market is coupled with rapidly changing technology that blurs the boundaries between hardware, software, materials and processes, the role of design fundamentally changes. Design influences technology research earlier in the creation of a novel technology, whether it’s a new application of artificial intelligence, or a new material. In this PARC Forum, Mike Kuniavsky and other members of PARC’s Innovation Services Group will present how they participate in early-stage research and development, and discuss the methods they developed when working alongside PARC’s researchers in developing printed sensors, AI-enabled IoT services, and deep learning computer vision products. We will show how we systematically explore the impact of technologies before they exist and how we try to look beyond hype and our own excitement to see how a new technology can actually solve business and human problems.
Our Future in Algorithm Farming (Long Now Interval 5/17/16)Mike Kuniavsky
The software running much of our world today, from consumer apps to industrial infrastructures, is increasingly built on systems that learn and try to predict the future, our future. They’re increasingly sophisticated and profoundly different than technologies we’ve ever lived with before, and they're not particularly good in their predictions. This talk is about what we—the intended beneficiaries of these products and services—will do, and how our lives will change, as the algorithms that are supposed to understand us are on what is likely a slow learning curve.
Experience Probes for Exploring the Impact of Novel ProductsMike Kuniavsky
This presentation includes an overview of PARC, of Innovation Services at PARC and our use of social science, and a description of a process we use, experience probes, to reduce the risk of adopting novel technologies while still making breakthrough innovations.
The UX of Predictive AI in the IoT (Rosenfeld To Be Designed)Mike Kuniavsky
This talk explores the potential, and the challenge of designing predictive artificial intelligence-enabled, user experiences for the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things promises that by analyzing data from many IoT devices our experience of the world becomes better and more efficient. The environment predicts our behavior, anticipates problems, and intercepts them before they occur. However, we don’t have good examples for designing user experiences of predictive AI. This talk gives examples of several different systems, lists UX challenges to creating behavioral systems, and potential approaches to addressing those challenges.
Hardware without Hardware, minimal explorations of novel product ideas (O'Rei...Mike Kuniavsky
One of the biggest challenges in designing novel connected hardware is knowing whether the final experience will be successful, and minimizing the investment in developing the wrong product. Building fully-functional hardware to evaluate an idea is a significant investment, and slow. We believe it’s possible to manage risk and still explore big, potentially transformative, ideas for products and services. Our approach looks at novel digital product systems (broadly in the Internet of Things, but not exclusively) with the explicit goal of building the minimum amount of technology as is necessary to answer questions about the value and impact of a new product or service.
Our Future in Algorithm Farming (Long Now Interval 5/17/16)Mike Kuniavsky
The software running much of our world today, from consumer apps to industrial infrastructures, is increasingly built on systems that learn and try to predict the future, our future. They’re increasingly sophisticated and profoundly different than technologies we’ve ever lived with before, and they're not particularly good in their predictions.
This talk is about what we—the intended beneficiaries of these products and services—will do, and how our lives will change, as the algorithms that are supposed to understand us are on what is likely a slow learning curve.
The UX of Predictive Behavior for the IoT (2016: O'Reilly Designing for the IOT)Mike Kuniavsky
This presentation identifies challenges to the user experience design of smart devices (such as the Nest Thermostat, the Amazon Echo, the Edyn water monitor, etc.) that use machine learning to anticipate the needs of people and environments and adapt in response, and point to some potential design patterns to help address those challenges. The Internet of Things promises that by analyzing data from many sensors over time our experience of the world becomes better and more efficient. Our environment can predict our behavior, anticipate problems and needs, and maximize the chances of a desirable end result.
Though this notion of effortless automation is seductive (espresso machines that start just as you’re thinking it’s a good time for coffee; office lights that dim when it’s sunny and power is cheap), we don’t have good examples for designing user experiences of predictive systems. As a result, today it’s much easier to create such systems that are confusing, unpredictable and uncontrollable.
Products are Services, how ubiquitous computing changes designMike Kuniavsky
As more products, from tablets to bathroom scales to washing machines go online, our relationship to them changes. We start to think of them as representatives of online services, and to think of services as represented by products. Ubiquitous computing changes our understanding of where the boundaries of a hardware product and a service stop, and fundamentally challenges how we design both.
Life in the Pre-Pre-Cambrian: a presentation for the MS Social Computing Symp...Mike Kuniavsky
We’re about to see a precambrian explosion of device-types that span uses, scales, and continents as we collectively stumble around and try to figure out what it means when many people have many devices and they’re telling many interwoven stories with them simultaneously.
Information is a Material (Mobile Monday talk transcript)Mike Kuniavsky
We have passed the era of Peak MHz. The race in CPU development is now for smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry processors. As the price of powerful CPUs approaches that of basic components, how information processing is used—and how to design with/for it—fundamentally changes. When information processing is this cheap, it becomes a material with which to design the world, like plastic, iron, and wood. This vision argues that most information processing in the near future will not be in some distant data center, but immediately present in our environment, distributed throughout the world, and embedded in things we don't think of as computers (or even as "phones").
This talk will discuss what it means to treat information as a material, the properties of information as a design material, the possibilities created by information as a design material, and approaches for designing with information. Information as a material enables The Internet of Things, object-oriented hardware, smart materials, ubiquitous computing, and intelligent environments.
Information is a Material. Products are Services.Mike Kuniavsky
We have passed the era of Peak MHz. The race in CPU development is now for smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry processors. As the price of powerful CPUs approaches that of basic components, how information processing is used--and how to design for/with it--fundamentally changes. When information processing is this cheap, it becomes a material with which to design the world, like plastic, iron, and wood. This vision argues that most information processing in the near future will not be in some distant data center, but immediately present in our environment, distributed throughout the world, and embedded in things we don't think of as computers (or even as "phones").
This talk discusses what it means to treat information as a material, the properties of information as a design material, the possibilities created by information as a design material, and approaches for designing with information. Information as a material enables The Internet of Things, object-oriented hardware, smart materials, ubiquitous computing, and intelligent environments, and services.
(talk given at the University of Michigan's School of Information on 11/1/10 and at Stanford's HCI Group)
Service Avatars (Mobilize 2010 presentation)Mike Kuniavsky
We are entering a new phase of the internet, one in which connected devices will be the new end points for services. This represents a seismic shift, one where the service is represented as a dedicated hardware device. We now need to understand better how to design product experiences for that scenario.
Device Design Day: Information is a MaterialMike Kuniavsky
This talk will discuss what it means to treat information as a design material: its properties, the possibilities it creates, approaches to design, and why its important to differentiate between appliance-like devices and terminal-like devices.
We have passed the era of Peak MHz. The race in CPU development is now for smaller, cheaper, and less power-hungry processors. As the price of powerful CPUs approaches that of basic components how information processing is used fundamentally changes. When information processing is this cheap, it becomes a material with which to design the world, like plastic, iron, and wood.
This talk discusses: What it means to treat information as a material; The properties of information as a design material; The design possibilities created by information as a material; How information as a material enables The Internet of Things, object oriented hardware, smart materials, ubiquitous computing, and intelligent environments.
When bits meet atoms: Making things in a Read-Write worldMike Kuniavsky
According to Lawrence Lessig, the 20th century is a brief period of Read-Only culture in a world that in the past has been Read-Write. He draws his examples from media, but the same ideas apply to other products. The definitions of "producer" and "consumer" change when information is cheaper to move than objects. Thus production becomes less centralized as knowledge is shared in an open and standardized way.
Modern digital tools for making things bring the flexibility of digital media to the creation of everyday physical objects. This change powerfully challenges 20th century manufacturing processes that depended on centralizing knowledge while transporting products cheaply. Today, atoms are getting more expensive to move, while bits are getting ever cheaper. Read-Write culture is returning to the processes of making things, bringing the end of Read-Only objects.
Ubiquitous computing has been here since at least 2005, but we may not have noticed it. Computers are rapidly fragmenting from expensive general-purpose devices to cheaper specialized networked tools (phones, netbooks, desktop RFID readers, MP3 players, running shoe sensors, etc.). These tools bridge the physical world and the Internet in new ways, often using Web 2.0-style interaction to create unexpected ways to work and play in the real world while simultaneously having the power of the Net available to us. This talk will discuss how mashups between meatspace and the Net have already happened, what the emerging patterns are, and how widgetization is about to jump from social networks to devices and then disappear altogether.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
In his public lecture, Christian Timmerer provides insights into the fascinating history of video streaming, starting from its humble beginnings before YouTube to the groundbreaking technologies that now dominate platforms like Netflix and ORF ON. Timmerer also presents provocative contributions of his own that have significantly influenced the industry. He concludes by looking at future challenges and invites the audience to join in a discussion.
SAP Sapphire 2024 - ASUG301 building better apps with SAP Fiori.pdfPeter Spielvogel
Building better applications for business users with SAP Fiori.
• What is SAP Fiori and why it matters to you
• How a better user experience drives measurable business benefits
• How to get started with SAP Fiori today
• How SAP Fiori elements accelerates application development
• How SAP Build Code includes SAP Fiori tools and other generative artificial intelligence capabilities
• How SAP Fiori paves the way for using AI in SAP apps
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
Le nuove frontiere dell'AI nell'RPA con UiPath Autopilot™UiPathCommunity
In questo evento online gratuito, organizzato dalla Community Italiana di UiPath, potrai esplorare le nuove funzionalità di Autopilot, il tool che integra l'Intelligenza Artificiale nei processi di sviluppo e utilizzo delle Automazioni.
📕 Vedremo insieme alcuni esempi dell'utilizzo di Autopilot in diversi tool della Suite UiPath:
Autopilot per Studio Web
Autopilot per Studio
Autopilot per Apps
Clipboard AI
GenAI applicata alla Document Understanding
👨🏫👨💻 Speakers:
Stefano Negro, UiPath MVPx3, RPA Tech Lead @ BSP Consultant
Flavio Martinelli, UiPath MVP 2023, Technical Account Manager @UiPath
Andrei Tasca, RPA Solutions Team Lead @NTT Data
Elevating Tactical DDD Patterns Through Object CalisthenicsDorra BARTAGUIZ
After immersing yourself in the blue book and its red counterpart, attending DDD-focused conferences, and applying tactical patterns, you're left with a crucial question: How do I ensure my design is effective? Tactical patterns within Domain-Driven Design (DDD) serve as guiding principles for creating clear and manageable domain models. However, achieving success with these patterns requires additional guidance. Interestingly, we've observed that a set of constraints initially designed for training purposes remarkably aligns with effective pattern implementation, offering a more ‘mechanical’ approach. Let's explore together how Object Calisthenics can elevate the design of your tactical DDD patterns, offering concrete help for those venturing into DDD for the first time!
Enhancing Performance with Globus and the Science DMZGlobus
ESnet has led the way in helping national facilities—and many other institutions in the research community—configure Science DMZs and troubleshoot network issues to maximize data transfer performance. In this talk we will present a summary of approaches and tips for getting the most out of your network infrastructure using Globus Connect Server.
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
Dev Dives: Train smarter, not harder – active learning and UiPath LLMs for do...UiPathCommunity
💥 Speed, accuracy, and scaling – discover the superpowers of GenAI in action with UiPath Document Understanding and Communications Mining™:
See how to accelerate model training and optimize model performance with active learning
Learn about the latest enhancements to out-of-the-box document processing – with little to no training required
Get an exclusive demo of the new family of UiPath LLMs – GenAI models specialized for processing different types of documents and messages
This is a hands-on session specifically designed for automation developers and AI enthusiasts seeking to enhance their knowledge in leveraging the latest intelligent document processing capabilities offered by UiPath.
Speakers:
👨🏫 Andras Palfi, Senior Product Manager, UiPath
👩🏫 Lenka Dulovicova, Product Program Manager, UiPath
Removing Uninteresting Bytes in Software FuzzingAftab Hussain
Imagine a world where software fuzzing, the process of mutating bytes in test seeds to uncover hidden and erroneous program behaviors, becomes faster and more effective. A lot depends on the initial seeds, which can significantly dictate the trajectory of a fuzzing campaign, particularly in terms of how long it takes to uncover interesting behaviour in your code. We introduce DIAR, a technique designed to speedup fuzzing campaigns by pinpointing and eliminating those uninteresting bytes in the seeds. Picture this: instead of wasting valuable resources on meaningless mutations in large, bloated seeds, DIAR removes the unnecessary bytes, streamlining the entire process.
In this work, we equipped AFL, a popular fuzzer, with DIAR and examined two critical Linux libraries -- Libxml's xmllint, a tool for parsing xml documents, and Binutil's readelf, an essential debugging and security analysis command-line tool used to display detailed information about ELF (Executable and Linkable Format). Our preliminary results show that AFL+DIAR does not only discover new paths more quickly but also achieves higher coverage overall. This work thus showcases how starting with lean and optimized seeds can lead to faster, more comprehensive fuzzing campaigns -- and DIAR helps you find such seeds.
- These are slides of the talk given at IEEE International Conference on Software Testing Verification and Validation Workshop, ICSTW 2022.
The Metaverse and AI: how can decision-makers harness the Metaverse for their...Jen Stirrup
The Metaverse is popularized in science fiction, and now it is becoming closer to being a part of our daily lives through the use of social media and shopping companies. How can businesses survive in a world where Artificial Intelligence is becoming the present as well as the future of technology, and how does the Metaverse fit into business strategy when futurist ideas are developing into reality at accelerated rates? How do we do this when our data isn't up to scratch? How can we move towards success with our data so we are set up for the Metaverse when it arrives?
How can you help your company evolve, adapt, and succeed using Artificial Intelligence and the Metaverse to stay ahead of the competition? What are the potential issues, complications, and benefits that these technologies could bring to us and our organizations? In this session, Jen Stirrup will explain how to start thinking about these technologies as an organisation.
Why You Should Replace Windows 11 with Nitrux Linux 3.5.0 for enhanced perfor...SOFTTECHHUB
The choice of an operating system plays a pivotal role in shaping our computing experience. For decades, Microsoft's Windows has dominated the market, offering a familiar and widely adopted platform for personal and professional use. However, as technological advancements continue to push the boundaries of innovation, alternative operating systems have emerged, challenging the status quo and offering users a fresh perspective on computing.
One such alternative that has garnered significant attention and acclaim is Nitrux Linux 3.5.0, a sleek, powerful, and user-friendly Linux distribution that promises to redefine the way we interact with our devices. With its focus on performance, security, and customization, Nitrux Linux presents a compelling case for those seeking to break free from the constraints of proprietary software and embrace the freedom and flexibility of open-source computing.
Why You Should Replace Windows 11 with Nitrux Linux 3.5.0 for enhanced perfor...
Designers and-geeks 2012-presentation_0.2
1. THE NEW PRODUCT
DEVELOPMENT ECOSYSTEM
HOW DESIGN WILL REINVENT
MANUFACTURING
Mike Kuniavsky
October 18, 2012
Designers and Geeks SF
2. First, let me tell you a bit about my background.
I’m a user experience designer. I was one of the
first professional Web designers in 1993, where I
was lucky enough to be present for the birth of
such things as the online shopping cart and the
search engine. This is the navigation for a hot
sauce shopping site I designed in 1994.
3. I’m proud of the fact that 16 years later
they were still using the same visual
identity. These were some of the oldest
pixels on the Web.
4. Here’s one of my UI designs
for the advanced search for
HotBot, an early search
engine, from 1997. If you’re
wondering why Google’s
front page is no minimal, I
think it was because we were
doing this.
5. Since then I’ve consulted on
the user experience design of
dozens, maybe hundreds of
web sites. Here’s one for
credit.com, who were
fantastic clients a couple of
years ago.
6. I sat out the first dotcom crash
writing a book based on the work I
had been doing. It’s a cookbook of
user research methods. It came out
in 2003 and the second edition just
came out last month. Buy a copy for
everyone on your team!
7. And 2001 I co-founded a design and
consulting company called Adaptive
Path.
8. I left the Web behind in
2004 and founded a
company with Tod E. Kurt
called ThingM in 2006.
9. ThingM is a micro-OEM and an R&D lab. We design and
manufacture a range of smart LEDs for architects, industrial
designers and hackers. Our products appear on everything from
flying robots to Lady Gaga’s stage show. This is an RFID wine
rack that we did about four years ago. The different light colors
represent different facets of information that’s pulled down from a
cloud-based service, such as current market price. This is a
capacitive sensing kitchen cabinet knob we did two years ago. It
glows when you touch it to creates a little bit of magic in your
everyday environment and was an exploration in making a digital
product that would still be useful 20 years after it was made.
10. In 2010 I wrote a book on the user
experience design of ubiquitous
computing devices, which I define as
things that do information processing
and networking, but are not
experienced as general purpose
computing or communication
devices.
11. I also organize an
annual summit of
people developing
hardware design tools
for non-engineers.
12. However, ThingM, books and
conferences are not my day job.
They’re entertaining sidelines. My
primary day job is as an
innovation and user experience
design consultant focusing on the
design of digital consumer
products. Here are some I’ve
worked on for Yamaha, Whirlpool
and Qualcomm.
13. The last couple of years my
clients have been large
consumer electronics
companies. I’ve worked
with them to design new
products and services and
to help them create more
user centered and company
cultures. I can’t give you
any details, but I’ll tell you
that big data analytics, real-
time image recognition,
distributed processing, and
machine learning are pretty
awesome.
14. This spring I finally got to do a project I
can talk about. I worked with Sifteo, the
game company, to design all of the non-
game UX of their second generation
platform. It was a great project. Stock up
on these for Christmas.
16. Let me start with a little history of manufacturing efficiency. Now this is only barely history, since I’m not a historian, but
I’ve been reading about the history of technology for a couple of years and I came up with this model for understanding
several trends in manufacturing, and I think it has some face validity.
If you look at how many things you could produce from one unit of work, you see an interesting curve. For most of the last ten
# of things from 1 unit of work
thousand or however many years, when you put one unit of work into a project, you got roughly one thing out of it. I realize
etc
“a unit of work” is somewhat imprecise, but bear with me. During this period you see some gains in efficiency through tools
like the potter’s wheel, the plow, the horse, the lever, fire, but those efficiencies were, roughly speaking linear. No one had
the capability to make 10,000 cooking pots in a day. Then this thing happens. James Watt’s patent on the improvement to
Newcomen’s steam engine expires in 1800. Boom. The Industrial Revolution. Exponential growth in the efficiency of
10K
production. 10,000 cooking pots a day is easy. That’s followed by steady increases in efficiency until we get to today’s
industrial society.
OK, that’s fairly familiar. Now, let’s look at a related curve, the number of units of work to make the FIRST thing. Making
1000
the first thing of any set is hard. You become efficient later on, but the first time is not efficient. For most of history, that’s
about one unit of work. And the funny thing about the Industrial Revolution is that as it made it much easier to make many
things, it made it much harder to make that first thing. Mass produced objects are really complex, they require you to make
100
the tools that make the tools that make the end product. It’s no longer a process that a single person, or even a small
workshop, can even afford to do time, money, or knowlege-wise. It requires a lot of expertise to be acquired and then
consolidated into a single geographic location. Here is our familiar experience of manufactured products: pick nearly
everything you own or see and it’s almost impossibly complex for you to make one.
10
And then this other thing happens. In October 2009 Stratasys’ core patent on computer controlled additive manufacturing
expires. Boom. The cost of making the first thing starts to plummet while the cost of making lots of things stays the same.
1
The relationship between these two trends is what makes what I’m about to tell you about possible.
# units of work to make the first thing
1800
Watt’s patent
expires
Anitquity
patent
expires
2009
y
Toda
Stratasys
17. That’s where
this comes
from.
THE NEW PRODUCT
DEVELOPMENT ECOSYSTEM
18. AMAZON 2020
Imagine Amazon 8 years from now. It looks
like this. Yes, it looks exactly like the
Amazon today. It has all of the familiar ways
to discover new products, to compare them,
to see what people think of them, to see what
goes with what. It has wish lists, Gold Boxes,
the whole thing. But there’s a crucial
difference. Instead of Amazon being the front
end to a fulfillment system, as it is today, the
Amazon of 2020 is the front end to a set of
factories.
19. The back end doesn’t look like UPS, but Ford Motor
Company. When you click on on buy you start a
manufacturing process at the factory nearest you,
instead of a delivery process from a warehouse far
away.
20. I know what you’re thinking: “Mike just saw a MakerBot and got all
excited. We’ve heard this all before, it’s called mass customization, and
it’s never worked out.” Why talk about this again? Because I think that the
presentation of mass customization as “configurators for everything” (such
as this 1998 project from Levi’s) missed the point. That totally gets the
user motivation wrong: most people don’t want to be designers of
everything, they want to design a couple of things, but be consumers of the
rest. Some people want to make their own clothes, but those people
typically don’t build their own cars, and vice versa. Most people have
better things to do than figure out what colors and patterns look good
together, what makes them look sexy or powerful, how much firmware will
fit into the onboard memory. They’re busy. They want someone who is a
MASS CUSTOMIZATION IS
professional to do that research, to think really hard about what they need,
to be really fluent in the tools that make it good, then to create a solution.
SO 1996!
21. I’m also not talking about desktop
manufacturing. As much as all us
geeks want a Star Trek replicator,
it’s not that useful in practice. We
just don’t need that much new stuff
all the time. Paper printers are
useful because they represent high
density information that fits into a
rich existing culture of information
use, and even they’re not used
nearly as much as ecommerce sites.
Outside of work, people probably
shop a lot more than they print.
COPY SHOPS FOR 3D AND
DESKTOP MANUFACTURING?
22. I think more importantly, both mass customization and
2020? fabrication imagine a new world that’s different
desktop
than ours. I have nothing against envisioning new worlds
and working toward their creation—that’s one of the
things I do for my clients—but my experience has taught
me that creating new worlds, changing the behavior of
millions of people, is really hard and takes a really long
time. If we look to a world 8 years into the future, odds
are that it’s not going to have changed that much, the
odds are that most of us are not going to have a whole
bunch more time on our hands to become mechanical
engineers, electrical engineers, software engineers, and
material scientists, as much as we’d like to.
Makerbot photo by Scott Beale
23. 2020
2020 will actually probably look and works
exactly like our world today, when seen
from the outside. It’ll still be driven by the
thrill of finding something awesome when
you’re bored surfing the Internet and then
making it yours by buying it. The
relationship between the consumer and
designer will remain intact. Designers still
design, ecommerce sites still help people
find stuff they like, people still buy.
24. However, there will be a crucial
difference behind the scenes, and
it will be this difference that
changes our world from one of
centralized warehouses to a
world of distributed factories.
25. ANALYTICS The difference is analytics. When you order
from the Amazon of 2020 a counter is
incremented that registers that you, a human
being with a set of well-known behaviors
and a demographic background, decided to
buy this specific version of this specific idea.
Moreover, since the world of 2020 is a world
of ubiquitous computing, every product has a
small bit of digital hardware in it that tracks
how the product is used and, with your
implicit permission, sends that information
back to a central server, which aggregates
and anonymizes the results.
This is of course exactly how large-scale
Web design works, but now we will map it to
all products.
26. FEEDBACK LOOPS
When you have rapid, cheap, distributed low-
volume manufacturing capability AND real-
time analytics you have a new way of designing
1957 products. You can take those Industrial Age
design processes that took years to test
hypotheses, and you can speed them up by
orders of magnitude.
1958 Image:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tailfin
s-evolution-1957-1959.jpg
1959
27. Tight loop iteration between an idea and
Blank’s Customer discovery
market validation of that idea is the core of
Eric Ries’ Lean Startup approach. This is a
slide from Steve Blank, who is the patron
saint of Lean Startup, that illustrates this
basic idea.
My vision--MY hypothesis--is that it’s
possible to do this with ANYTHING by
applying the ideas, practices and
technologies we developed for the Net to
everything else.
28. LOW Volume MANUFACTURING and Assembly
Let’s start by assuming we have low volume
digital manufacturing, such as this Form1
printer that just got funded through
Kickstarter. We know that’s coming.
29. LOW VOLUME piece is hypothesis testing. How do you
The next SOCIAL COMMERCE
validate your idea without investing a lot in
manufacturing? Well, that component is also coming
online.
Even though they sometimes deny it, Kickstarter is a
catalog for products that don't exist yet. It gives
developers feedback about the popularity of their
idea and teaches them how to position it for a market
before they’ve made a single final product. It
provides two kinds of hypothesis testing: do people
even want your idea? and what do they say they want
it for?
30. LOW VOLUME SOCIAL COMMERCE
Etsy allows very small run electronic products (as long as
they’re made of felt).
31. LOW VOLUME SOCIAL COMMERCE
Even fab.com, which sells limited-edition high design
products like rugs and backpacks, sells small run
electronics.
32. LoW volume social commerce
Here’s a new store opening on Valencia in about a month called Dijital
Fix. They are a New York-based boutique specializing in limited-run
electronics.
These channels are immature, but they’re becoming increasingly
popular. In effect, they’re doing an end run around the traditional
consumer electronic sales channels--at the same time that Dijital Fix is
opening new stores Best Buy is struggling—and giving developers
direct access to their customers so they can test their product
hypotheses directly.
This is bringing product development closer to what we’ve become
accustomed to when deploying software on the Web.
33. COLLABORATIVE DESIGN TOOLS
The key missing piece we still need to borrow from software is
distributed collaborative design tools. To make better hypotheses
we need to be able to take advantage of all of those specialized
skills—all the different kinds of engineering—wherever they are,
and to work together to create a shared understanding of what that
hypothesis, that product, is.
For purely digital products we have Github, Basecamp, WebEx,
Balsamiq and similar products, but the physical world is way
behind. Commercial CAD systems are huge and incredibly
difficult to learn. Product Lifecycle Management systems assume
that you’re always building a commercial airplane, and are also
insanely complex.
34. COLLABORATIVE DESIGN TOOLS
We are getting new tools, Autodesk’s 123D, Ponoko has
publishing tools, you can kind of fork projects on Thingiverse.
But these tools are really immature.
Sunglass just pivoted a couple of weeks ago from being an online
CAD system to being a “Github for 3D.” When these products
mature, this is going to open creative possibilities immensely.
But it’s going to take time. Github got to where it is through an
evolution of tools and practices that began with makefiles. The
physical world isn’t even at the makefile stage.
35. To me, the whole ecosystem looks like this. Here come the buzz words, so excuse me in advance.
•Digital fabrication, we know what that is. It will allow us to make all kinds of things in small batches.
DIGITAL FABRICATION
•Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things is leading to everyday objects that send a stream of telemetry when we bring them home.
They have an information shadow in the cloud that can be data mined.
+
•Big Data Analytics crunches all of that data to create information about people’s behavior.
•Social commerce creates sales channels that sell small numbers of products by finding niche markets and letting them market to each other
•And finally, cloud-based design tools will allow designers and engineers to collaborate on the distributed development of physical products.
UBICOMP/IOT
This is my ecosystem vision: a world where design directly drives product creation, and where data informs design. This is a world where
products are made in small numbers only when they are requested. They are made locally, with local materials and workers, while at the same
+
time being able to use design and engineering talent from anywhere on earth. In other words, they use the best qualities of both atoms and bits:
atoms are available everywhere, bits travel fast. Designers in this vision add hypotheses testing against the actual market to their toolbox of
design methods.
BIG DATA ANALYTICS
In the full pipe dream, this means we use fewer natural resources, take full advantage of talented people wherever they are, create only products
+
in large quantities that people need and want, meet the needs of tiny niche audiences, while still taking advantage of the infinite variety implicit
in digital manufacturing technologies. Whew!
SOCIAL COMMERCE
+
CLOUD-BASED DESIGN TOOLS
=
THE NEW PRODUCT
DEVELOPMENT ECOSYSTEM
36. I intend to make this vision my next focus as a designer and
CONCLUSION
entrepreneur. At ThingM we just did the first iteration on Kickstarter
of a product we hope will become different and more interesting as
we iterate on it. It’s the world’s best indicator light. It’s a highly
configurable USB LED and it gives you peripheral awareness of
things that are happening on the Net and your local machine. You
can pre-order one from us today.
However, I don’t expect that we will be able to do all of this by
ourselves.
I need your help: tell me what I don’t know, where I’m wrong. Tell
me who I should talk to and where the opportunities are.
I think this will change the world. I want to change the world.
Pre-order at shop.thingm.com
Interested? Talk to me.
Thank you Joe for inviting me tonight. As soon as I saw your logo, I knew I had to participate.
First, let me tell you a bit about my background. I ’m a user experience designer. I was one of the first professional Web designers in 1993, where I was lucky enough to be present for the birth of such things as the online shopping cart and the search engine. This is the navigation for a hot sauce shopping site I designed in 1994.
I’m proud of the fact that 16 years later they were still using the same visual identity. These were some of the oldest pixels on the Web.
Here’s one of my UI designs for the advanced search for HotBot, an early search engine, from 1997. If you’re wondering why Google’s front page is no minimal, I think it was because we were doing this.
Since then I’ve consulted on the user experience design of dozens, maybe hundreds of web sites. Here’s one for credit.com, who were fantastic clients a couple of years ago.
I sat out the first dotcom crash writing a book based on the work I had been doing. It ’s a cookbook of user research methods. It came out in 2003 and the second edition just came out last month. Buy a copy for everyone on your team!
And 2001 I co-founded a design and consulting company called Adaptive Path.
I left the Web behind in 2004 and founded a company with Tod E. Kurt called ThingM in 2006.
ThingM is a micro-OEM and an R&D lab. We design and manufacture a range of smart LEDs for architects, industrial designers and hackers. Our products appear on everything from flying robots to Lady Gaga’s stage show. This is an RFID wine rack that we did about four years ago. The different light colors represent different facets of information that’s pulled down from a cloud-based service, such as current market price. This is a capacitive sensing kitchen cabinet knob we did two years ago. It glows when you touch it to creates a little bit of magic in your everyday environment and was an exploration in making a digital product that would still be useful 20 years after it was made.
In 2010 I wrote a book on the user experience design of ubiquitous computing devices, which I define as things that do information processing and networking, but are not experienced as general purpose computing or communication devices.
I also organize an annual summit of people developing hardware design tools for non-engineers.
However, ThingM, books and conferences are not my day job. They’re entertaining sidelines. My primary day job is as an innovation and user experience design consultant focusing on the design of digital consumer products. Here are some I’ve worked on for Yamaha, Whirlpool and Qualcomm.
The last couple of years my clients have been large consumer electronics companies. I’ve worked with them to design new products and services and to help them create more user centered and company cultures. I can’t give you any details, but I’ll tell you that big data analytics, real-time image recognition, distributed processing, and machine learning are pretty awesome.
This spring I finally got to do a project I can talk about. I worked with Sifteo, the game company, to design all of the non-game UX of their second generation platform. It was a great project. Stock up on these for Christmas.
Let me start with a little history of manufacturing efficiency. Now this is only barely history, since I’m not a historian, but I’ve been reading about the history of technology for a couple of years and I came up with this model for understanding several trends in manufacturing, and I think it has some face validity. If you look at how many things you could produce from one unit of work, you see an interesting curve. For most of the last ten thousand or however many years, when you put one unit of work into a project, you got roughly one thing out of it. I realize “a unit of work” is somewhat imprecise, but bear with me. During this period you see some gains in efficiency through tools like the potter’s wheel, the plow, the horse, the lever, fire, but those efficiencies were, roughly speaking linear. No one had the capability to make 10,000 cooking pots in a day. Then this thing happens. James Watt’s patent on the improvement to Newcomen’s steam engine expires in 1800. Boom. The Industrial Revolution. Exponential growth in the efficiency of production. 10,000 cooking pots a day is easy. That’s followed by steady increases in efficiency until we get to today’s industrial society. OK, that’s fairly familiar. Now, let’s look at a related curve, the number of units of work to make the FIRST thing. Making the first thing of any set is hard. You become efficient later on, but the first time is not efficient. For most of history, that’s about one unit of work. And the funny thing about the Industrial Revolution is that as it made it much easier to make many things, it made it much harder to make that first thing. Mass produced objects are really complex, they require you to make the tools that make the tools that make the end product. It’s no longer a process that a single person, or even a small workshop, can even afford to do time, money, or knowlege-wise. It requires a lot of expertise to be acquired and then consolidated into a single geographic location. Here is our familiar experience of manufactured products: pick nearly everything you own or see and it’s almost impossibly complex for you to make one. And then this other thing happens. In October 2009 Stratasys’ core patent on computer controlled additive manufacturing expires. Boom. The cost of making the first thing starts to plummet while the cost of making lots of things stays the same. The relationship between these two trends is what makes what I’m about to tell you about possible.
That’s where this comes from.
Imagine Amazon 8 years from now. It looks like this. Yes, it looks exactly like the Amazon today. It has all of the familiar ways to discover new products, to compare them, to see what people think of them, to see what goes with what. It has wish lists, Gold Boxes, the whole thing. But there’s a crucial difference. Instead of Amazon being the front end to a fulfillment system, as it is today, the Amazon of 2020 is the front end to a set of factories.
The back end doesn’t look like UPS, but Ford Motor Company. When you click on on buy you start a manufacturing process at the factory nearest you, instead of a delivery process from a warehouse far away. River Rouge photo by Lotus Carroll, creative commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/thelotuscarroll/6695794423/
I know what you’re thinking: “Mike just saw a MakerBot and got all excited. We’ve heard this all before, it’s called mass customization, and it’s never worked out.” Why talk about this again? Because I think that the presentation of mass customization as “configurators for everything” (such as this 1998 project from Levi’s) missed the point. That totally gets the user motivation wrong: most people don’t want to be designers of everything, they want to design a couple of things, but be consumers of the rest. Some people want to make their own clothes, but those people typically don’t build their own cars, and vice versa. Most people have better things to do than figure out what colors and patterns look good together, what makes them look sexy or powerful, how much firmware will fit into the onboard memory. They’re busy. They want someone who is a professional to do that research, to think really hard about what they need, to be really fluent in the tools that make it good, then to create a solution.
I’m also not talking about desktop manufacturing. As much as all us geeks want a Star Trek replicator, it’s not that useful in practice. We just don’t need that much new stuff all the time. Paper printers are useful because they represent high density information that fits into a rich existing culture of information use, and even they’re not used nearly as much as ecommerce sites. Outside of work, people probably shop a lot more than they print.
I think more importantly, both mass customization and desktop fabrication imagine a new world that’s different than ours. I have nothing against envisioning new worlds and working toward their creation—that’s one of the things I do for my clients—but my experience has taught me that creating new worlds, changing the behavior of millions of people, is really hard and takes a really long time. If we look to a world 8 years into the future, odds are that it’s not going to have changed that much, the odds are that most of us are not going to have a whole bunch more time on our hands to become mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, software engineers, and material scientists, as much as we’d like to. Makerbot photo by Scott Beale
2020 will actually probably look and works exactly like our world today, when seen from the outside. It’ll still be driven by the thrill of finding something awesome when you’re bored surfing the Internet and then making it yours by buying it. The relationship between the consumer and designer will remain intact. Designers still design, ecommerce sites still help people find stuff they like, people still buy.
However, there will be a crucial difference behind the scenes, and it will be this difference that changes our world from one of centralized warehouses to a world of distributed factories.
The difference is analytics. When you order from the Amazon of 2020 a counter is incremented that registers that you, a human being with a set of well-known behaviors and a demographic background, decided to buy this specific version of this specific idea. Moreover, since the world of 2020 is a world of ubiquitous computing, every product has a small bit of digital hardware in it that tracks how the product is used and, with your implicit permission, sends that information back to a central server, which aggregates and anonymizes the results. This is of course exactly how large-scale Web design works, but now we will map it to all products.
When you have rapid, cheap, distributed low-volume manufacturing capability AND real-time analytics you have a new way of designing products. You can take those Industrial Age design processes that took years to test hypotheses, and you can speed them up by orders of magnitude. Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tailfins-evolution-1957-1959.jpg
Tight loop iteration between an idea and market validation of that idea is the core of Eric Ries’ Lean Startup approach. This is a slide from Steve Blank, who is the patron saint of Lean Startup, that illustrates this basic idea. My vision--MY hypothesis--is that it’s possible to do this with ANYTHING by applying the ideas, practices and technologies we developed for the Net to everything else.
Let’s start by assuming we have low volume digital manufacturing, such as this Form1 printer that just got funded through Kickstarter. We know that’s coming.
The next piece is hypothesis testing. How do you validate your idea without investing a lot in manufacturing? Well, that component is also coming online. Even though they sometimes deny it, Kickstarter is a catalog for products that don't exist yet. It gives developers feedback about the popularity of their idea and teaches them how to position it for a market before they’ve made a single final product. It provides two kinds of hypothesis testing: do people even want your idea? and what do they say they want it for?
Etsy allows very small run electronic products (as long as they’re made of felt).
Even fab.com, which sells limited-edition high design products like rugs and backpacks, sells small run electronics.
Here’s a new store opening on Valencia in about a month called Dijital Fix. They are a New York-based boutique specializing in limited-run electronics. These channels are immature, but they’re becoming increasingly popular. In effect, they’re doing an end run around the traditional consumer electronic sales channels--at the same time that Dijital Fix is opening new stores Best Buy is struggling—and giving developers direct access to their customers so they can test their product hypotheses directly. This is bringing product development closer to what we’ve become accustomed to when deploying software on the Web.
The key missing piece we still need to borrow from software is distributed collaborative design tools. To make better hypotheses we need to be able to take advantage of all of those specialized skills—all the different kinds of engineering—wherever they are, and to work together to create a shared understanding of what that hypothesis, that product, is. For purely digital products we have Github, Basecamp, WebEx, Balsamiq and similar products, but the physical world is way behind. Commercial CAD systems are huge and incredibly difficult to learn. Product Lifecycle Management systems assume that you’re always building a commercial airplane, and are also insanely complex.
We are getting new tools, Autodesk’s 123D, Ponoko has publishing tools, you can kind of fork projects on Thingiverse. But these tools are really immature. Sunglass just pivoted a couple of weeks ago from being an online CAD system to being a “ Github for 3D. ” When these products mature, this is going to open creative possibilities immensely. But it’s going to take time. Github got to where it is through an evolution of tools and practices that began with makefiles. The physical world isn’t even at the makefile stage.
To me, the whole ecosystem looks like this. Here come the buzz words, so excuse me in advance. Digital fabrication, we know what that is. It will allow us to make all kinds of things in small batches. Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things is leading to everyday objects that send a stream of telemetry when we bring them home. They have an information shadow in the cloud that can be data mined. Big Data Analytics crunches all of that data to create information about people’s behavior. Social commerce creates sales channels that sell small numbers of products by finding niche markets and letting them market to each other And finally, cloud-based design tools will allow designers and engineers to collaborate on the distributed development of physical products. This is my ecosystem vision: a world where design directly drives product creation, and where data informs design. This is a world where products are made in small numbers only when they are requested. They are made locally, with local materials and workers, while at the same time being able to use design and engineering talent from anywhere on earth. In other words, they use the best qualities of both atoms and bits: atoms are available everywhere, bits travel fast. Designers in this vision add hypotheses testing against the actual market to their toolbox of design methods. In the full pipe dream, this means we use fewer natural resources, take full advantage of talented people wherever they are, create only products in large quantities that people need and want, meet the needs of tiny niche audiences, while still taking advantage of the infinite variety implicit in digital manufacturing technologies. Whew!
I intend to make this vision my next focus as a designer and entrepreneur. At ThingM we just did the first iteration on Kickstarter of a product we hope will become different and more interesting as we iterate on it. It’s the world’s best indicator light. It’s a highly configurable USB LED and it gives you peripheral awareness of things that are happening on the Net and your local machine. You can pre-order one from us today. However, I don’t expect that we will be able to do all of this by ourselves. I need your help: tell me what I don’t know, where I’m wrong. Tell me who I should talk to and where the opportunities are. I think this will change the world. I want to change the world. Interested? Talk to me.