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New product ecosystem_2013_0.1
- 1. THE NEW PRODUCTDESIGN ECOSYSTEM: HOW DESIGN WILL REINVENT MANUFACTURING Mike Kuniavsky January 22, 2012
- 10. THE NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENTECOSYSTEM
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- 18.
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- 20. STEVE BLANK’S CUSTOMERDISCOVERY
- 21. LOW VOLUME SOCIALCOMMERCE
- 22. LOW VOLUME SOCIALCOMMERCE - ANALYTICS
- 23. LOW VOLUME SOCIALCOMMERCE - ANALYTICS
- 25. LOW VOLUME SOCIALCOMMERCE
- 26. LOW VOLUME SOCIALCOMMERCE
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- 28. WHAT THIS ISNOT
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- 30. COPY SHOPS FOR3D AND DESKTOP MANUFACTURING?
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- 32. WHAT WE NEEDTO DO
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- 36. DIGITAL FABRICATION + UBICOMP/IOT + BIG DATAANALYTICS + SOCIAL COMMERCE + CLOUD-BASED DESIGN TOOLS = THE NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT ECOSYSTEM
- 37. EPILOGUE: PUTTING MY MONEYWHERE MY MOUTH IS
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Editor's Notes
- #3 Let me begin by telling you a bit about my background. I’m a user experience designer. That designation didn’t exist when I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan in the late 80s, but that’s where my degrees in computer science and film got me. I was one of the first professional Web designers. I’ve now been designing Web sites for nearly 20 years. This is the navigation for a hot sauce shopping site I designed in 1994.
- #4 I’m proud of the fact that16 years later they were still using the same visual identity. These were some of the oldest pixels on the Web.I had the privilege of designing the UI of some of the first ecommerce sites, online chat systems, and search engines. I also got to watch two dotcom crashes and saw many of my clients fail, with years of the work disappearing nearly overnight.The experience of watching a technology mature from its earliest stages through hype, then collapse, then rebirth, then exploration and differentiation has given me a perspective on all technology development.
- #6 ThingM is an R&D lab and a micro-manufacturer. We design and manufacture smart LEDs for architects, industrial designers and hackers. Our products appear on everything from flying robots to Lady Gaga’s stage show. Here are some projects that have used them.
- #7 We also do projects to explore the potential uses of embedded computing as a design material.This is an RFID wine rack that’s faceted classification browser to a cloud-based service. This is a capacitive sensing kitchen cabinet knob that glows when you touch it. This was an exploration in making a digital product that would still be useful 20 years after it was made.
- #8 Today ThingM is not my day job. My primary job is as an innovation and user experience design consultant for digital consumer products. Here are some I’ve worked on for Yamaha, Whirlpool and Qualcomm.
- #9 The last couple of years my clients have been large consumer electronics companies. I can’t give you any details.
- #10 I recently got to work extensively on Sifteo’s next generation game platform, which was totally fun.
- #11 But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I want to talk about how I believe the practices of product development pioneered by Web design will change the world of physical products. That the way we design for the Web is not only relevant, but deeply transformative to manufacturing.
- #12 Let’s start by imagining 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.
- #13 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.Let’s pause for a second and think about what could have caused such an enormous transformation? It’s not unthinkable. River Rouge photo by Lotus Carroll, creative commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/thelotuscarroll/6695794423/q
- #14Â I watched two such transformations in my life. My freshman year of college was the year after the Apple Laserwriter came out, and I watched desktop publishing take over and remake traditional printing in just a couple of years. New professions were created, and communication methods changed as the cost of creating perfect documents, then the atomic unit of communication, dropped by orders of magnitude. Older technologies that had been used for a hundred years were thrown out almost overnight.
- #15 Desktop publishing was of course the dry run.The Web, and the internet in general, changed all information consumption and production.I believe that another major transformation is coming, which continues this trajectory to everything else, all physical products.This is how I think it’s going to happen.
- #16 It starts with digital manufacturing technologies, such as CNC machines, the MakerBot and this Form1 printer that just got funded through Kickstarter. What digital manufacturing creates is simultaneoushigh flexibilityand large scale in one piece of inexpensive equipment. The machine you use to prototype with can be the machine you produce with. The cost of making the first one and making the 1000th one are about the same, unlike something like injection molding where the cost of the first one is enormous relative to the cost of all subsequent ones. Thus, with digital manufacturing the cost of making design changes is small. That’s fantastic and transformative, but it’s not the only thing required for the change. Rapid, distributed manufacturing is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the widespread transformation I imagine. These printers have been around for a long time—so long that the patents started expiring in 2009, which is why MakerBot exists. If that’s all that was necessary, we would have had this revolution earlier.
- #17Â No, the major change is going to be analytics, as pioneered by the Web.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.
- #18Â 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.
- #19 This allows designers to create multiple versions of an idea, and see how each version performs in the marketplace and in actual use.That should seem familiar, because it’s how much of Web design currently happens.Rather than depending solely on experience and intuition, as product design does right now, this process will give designers information about which product variation is preferred, who prefers it and how people use it when they get it.Those of you who have ever designed like this know how enormously powerful quantitative feedback on the user experience of a product can be. Designers can now make and testhypotheses about people’s behavior, preferences and interestsby creating designs, then observing actual behavior with those designs.
- #20 Understanding why people buy things and how they use them was always a goal of traditional product design, but one that was very hard to reach. Traditional product development is where we get techniques such as test marketing, focus groups, and conjoint analysis. These are all in essence user-centered techniques designed to short circuit the long and complex Industrial Revolution manufacturing process, but it’s incredibly hard to really put a dent in it. In practice, the annual mass release of a completely finished product IS the primary form of user research in most manufacturing, but it’s such a multivariate problem that it’s almost impossible for designers to see the signal through the noise to understand what makes a product successful, and what doesn’t. This noisy feedback mechanism when it’s coupled with the high cost of failure we get the ultraconservative product design of today, which moves so slowly and is so prone to disruption from small players.However, 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
- #21 Tight loop iteration between an idea and inexpensive market validation of that idea is the core of Eric Ries’ and Steve Blank’s Lean Startup approach. The coregoal of the Lean Startup approach is to rapidly identify WHO your customers are, and what they find valuable, useful or interesting, so that if your assumptions are wrong—which they usually are—you can find that out quickly and change course, and when they’re right, you can follow them and expand on them.The Lean Startup approachhas produced an enormous amount of product innovation in both Web services and apps.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.
- #22 So how do you test your product hypothesis? On the Web manufacturing and distribution are pretty easy: in the most basic smoke test, you put up some marketing copy, buy some keywords and see how many people sign up for your nonexistant beta. How do you validate your idea without investing a lot in manufacturing? Well, that component is also coming online very quickly.People talk about crowdfunding as a kind of investment vehicle, but I think it’s just as much a kind of commerce.Even though they sometimes deny it, Kickstarter is a catalog for products that don't exist yet that works along the same line as other kinds of social commerce sites like fab.com and Woot, but will if enough people want them, which is exactly the kind of signal you want when you’re doing a Lean Startup. It gives developers feedback about the popularity of their idea and makes them think about howto position it for a market before they’ve made a single final product
- #23 They’re even starting to understand the value of the signal they’re creating.Kickstarter understands the value of the signal that they produce for helping project creators plan the publicity for their projects better, but if we see a project as a hypothesis about the utility and desirability of a project, these metrics speak to much more than which blog is responsible for the highest conversion.
- #24Â Sites are appearing that provide more nuanced analytics, such as Kicktraq here, which does an interesting job of helping people predict how many they will sell based on the velocity of their sales and the possibility cone of end results.
- #25 Here’s another product called the Kickback Machine that logs all Kickstarter projects so that you can see not just what was successful, but—to some extent—how it was successful.
- #26 And then of course there’s this. For those who don’t recognize it, it’s Facebook’s new button. Straight up signal with no implied promise of fulfillment. We’ll see if Facebook actually manages to become a genuine commerce site, but it’s a very interesting play, since it makes your social network a discovery platform, and everything that’s a discovery platform is also a hypothesis testing and analytics platform.
- #27 There’s a store in my neighborhood in San Francisco that’s opening in about a month. It’s called Dijital Fix. They are a boutique specializing in limited-run electronics. The notions of small run manufactured products is starting to take hold. Right now, it’s a novelty, but what if it becomes the norm?These sales and signal channels are immature, but they’re becoming increasingly popular. In effect, they’re doing an end run around the traditional consumer electronic sales channelsand giving developers 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.
- #28 So 2020 will look and work exactly like our world today, when seen from the outside. It will be driven by the same motivations. You’ll still have the thrill of finding something awesome when you’re bored surfing the Internet and then making it yours by buying it. However, behind the scenes nearly everything will have changed. The power shift will mean that design and production cycles will be tight, and led by designers working with analytics as one core tool and rapid manufacturing as the other. Like the flurry of apps we have today, discovery and positioning—how you get people to find your idea, not just what the idea is—will become important. It’ll be a new, complex, dynamic and ultimately profoundly different environment that shift how we think about products in the same way that the Web has changed how we think about information.
- #30 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, we heard about it 15 years ago and it 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. MakieLab’s doll configurator is fun, but you’re not going to do that for everything. 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.
- #31 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.
- #32 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. I fully support the maker movement, but I think that opening manufacturing technologies doesn’t just democratize access, it also demonstrates how complex the craft of designing a product really is.Makerbot photo by Scott Beale
- #34 There are probably many steps to getting momentum for this vision, but as I compare Web software to what we have in the manufacturing world, one piece stands out: 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.
- #35 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. Think about how people use these products right now: they share and expand basic building blocks, they collaborate remotely, they track what worked and what didn’t. Moreover, these tools have moved through several generations, from primitive, to over-complex, to differentiated for different tasks and different ways of collaborating.Nothing like that exists for the physical world, as far as I know.And I realize 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.
- #36 Hello, Autodesk. You have an opportunity here. It’s a fantastic opportunity to empower designers by creating an ecosystem, rather
- #37 So, let me pull all this together. 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 otherAnd 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!
- #38Â Now, an epilogue. After that grandiose vision, I felt I should show some of my personal experience with these ideas.
- #39 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.
- #40 We just shipped 4000 units this week, and we intend to iterate on the design of the software, the hardware and the service in the next quarter, collecting as many metrics as we can.However, we’re still poking around in the dark and I don’t expect that we will be able to do 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.