future of product design

The Future of Product DesignJonathan Follett A Product Design Renaissance The world is changing.. The lines between software and hardware blur; fresh approaches to manufacturing reduce t

The Future of Product Design

Jonathan Follett

The Future of Product Design

by Jonathan Follett

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Chapter 1 The Future of Product Design

Jonathan Follett

A Product Design Renaissance

The world is changing The lines between software and hardware blur; fresh approaches to

manufacturing reduce the time from idea to market; and new smart objects and systems herald ourconnected future.1

A product design renaissance might be on its way, but despite all this potential and promise—or

maybe because of it—the ride could well be a bumpy one The human aspect of the equation remains

the x-factor And, how we work together as participants in this product revolution, both as people and

as organizations, will play a key role in the outcome

There’s never been a better time to be a product designer, although there’s also perhaps never been amore confusing time, either Today, the combination of emerging technologies and powerful newresources and methods—from open source reference designs to crowdfunding—are democratizinginnovation, compressing the design cycle, and reshaping the relationship between consumer and

product If the amalgam of user experience (UX), software, industrial, material, and engineering

design had a name, it would probably be product design—although it’s likely that product designersthemselves wouldn’t agree on it

In this report, we’ll examine from a product designer’s perspective the ways in which these changesare disrupting design and the product lifecycle as well as considerations for people and companies

looking at new ways of approaching product innovation and creation This is not an all-encompassing

overview; rather, it’s a snapshot of a rapid evolution, as seen from the trenches of product design

Is This the Third Industrial Revolution?

Twenty-first century product design is being disrupted by factors both cultural and technological Theconfluence of crowdsourcing, new manufacturing methods, and other emerging technologies has setthe stage for what we might call a Third Industrial Revolution In a prescient article2 on the next wave

manufacturing phenomenon, The Economist postulated the following:

the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored

precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling The factory of the future will focus on mass

customization and may look more like weavers’ cottages than Ford’s assembly line.

In this new revolution, economies of scale and the mass production required to reach these are

replaced by the efficiency and leverage of highly targeted, rapidly developed, and, hopefully, lesswasteful products that retain an artisanal value for the consumer

Manufacturing for the mass market will no doubt remain for the many products that have a universalappeal, but for those items that truly intersect with our unique needs—that seem to have our personalimprint in them—these individualized products will grow and flourish in a new period of

craftsmanship at scale

In this burgeoning new era, the designer’s understanding of the user will be paramount—an in-depth

comprehension that goes beyond typical use cases, workflows, or trite personas and begins to

resemble something more like a relationship that grows over time

This understanding of the user DNA will drive product personalization And we’re not talking

personalization in a trivial way, such as printing a child’s name on a toy, or a family’s photo on acoffee mug; this new personalization will be the creation of objects that fit into our daily lives withimpeccable ease For example, for the busy parent perhaps a set of connected home appliances thathelp to measure the overall nutrition, caloric intake, from freezer to refrigerator, to oven for eachfamily member’s meals; or for the avid athlete, custom training gear that adheres to changing bodymeasurements and adjusts over time

The “return to craftsmanship” will be transformative economically, as well Research from

McKinsey Global Institute indicates that by 2025, additive fabrication alone could have an impact of

$550 billion3 as it changes forever the manufacturing industry Add this to the trillions of dollars ofmarket disruption for the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and so on, and we can begin to appreciatethe scale of change that is coming

Reshaping the world

If past is indeed prologue, we must come to terms with the fact that although the emerging

technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution—from the automobile to electric power—reshapedthe world, they did so in many ways that were negative as well as positive From rampant pollution tothe abuse of our planet’s natural resources, the environmental consequences that are the Second

Industrial Revolution’s legacy remain critical areas with which we must contend

Fast forward to the twenty-first century: If we consider the massive number of new objects that aproduct renaissance—propelled by the IoT and 3D printing—could bring, introducing millions ofnew things into our world, it’s clear we must also consider design not just for mass adoption, but alsofor mass decline and return to the stream of natural resources

Everyone can sketch on a napkin

How are new products imagined, created, tested, and produced? Generally speaking, this was oncethe purview of specialized professionals, backed by large companies, who had the resources andknowledge to invest in time-consuming R&D cycles, complex manufacturing lines, long supply

chains, and expensive marketing and distribution And even though there were certainly plenty ofupstart startups and disruptors, these were far from the norm

Emerging technologies are not just changing what’s being made or how fast it’s being developed,

they’re also changing who is capable of making it The ambitious entrepreneur who understands an

audience—the young mother who has an idea for improving products for her baby or the coffee

fanatic who can see the future of specialized brewing—are enabled to move their ideas from mind toreality, from napkin sketch to use by an appreciative audience And, as these technologies evolve andmature, we can expect more democratization to come

The Evolution of Product Design

The powerful interplay between innovative use of new technologies and creative methods for

working collaboratively is transforming product design

New Ways of Working

Sometimes, we forget that we are still, relatively speaking, in the first moments of the informationage, saddled with the legacy structures of the industrial past These structures continue to govern andguide our interactions—from societal to organizational to interpersonal—despite being relics of abygone era As such, we are still discovering how to organize our efforts together when it comes to

knowledge work, whether that be scientific discovery, engineering, design, or otherwise But we are

making progress

As the creative class discovers and implements new forms of collaboration around ideas and

information, it opens new opportunities for building objects in both the digital and physical worlds

And, if building on the work of others is crucial to innovation and human advancement, the speed at which this work is disseminated and re-used is also a critical factor What the age of information

has given us is the ability to stand on the shoulders of others, taking advantage of their efforts, to buildnew work, ideas, and even funding in real time

Preparing for a new product lifecycle

A product typically moves from design, to prototype, then into the marketplace, through growth andmaturity, and finally into decline For decades, this model has given business stakeholders, designers,and engineers alike a way to understand and contextualize the interactions between a product and themarketplace, and ultimately between the product and the many people who use it It is on this

foundation that the practice of product lifecycle management (PLM) has optimized the financing,

development, manufacturing, and marketing for companies

Today, this familiar model is being upended by emerging technologies that are not only reinvigoratingexisting categories but creating entirely new ones, as well We can already see that the lines betweensoftware and hardware products disappearing as the many variants of the IoT—from connected

objects such as wearables and automated appliances to sensor laden environments like Smart Cities

—begin to take hold Perhaps sooner than we think, the lines between biological and mechanicalproducts will follow suit Not only must companies contend with the difficulties of introducing

emerging tech into their product portfolio, they must negotiate a labyrinth of complex factors as theproduct lifecycle itself is remade Within this new product lifecycle, as designers, we must be

concerned with the myriad of development and production considerations, which will vary at every

stage.

Part 1 Hello, Market!

At the market introduction stage of the product lifecycle, the cost of designing, prototyping, andvalidating with users continues to drop precipitously due to advances in 3D printing, open sourcedesigns for mechanical and electrical engineering, and of course, crowdfunding

A Tale from the Trenches: Prototyping at iRobot

For a decade, Scott Miller was an engineering lead at iRobot where he contributed to the creation ofthe seminal in-home service robot: the Roomba automated vacuum cleaner He is currently the CEO

at Dragon Innovation, a hardware innovation and manufacturing consultancy

Scott reflects on his experiences with prototyping the original Roomba and contrasts that with theprototyping process of today:

“Mechanically, we wanted to get a working prototype to be able to understand how the robot behaved in unstructured environments We would create the files and build $25,000 models of stereolithography, or SLA, which was incredibly brittle There are all sorts of examples of us turning off the cliff detectors and having the robot just drive off the end of the table and shatter itself to pieces.

Today, you could pick MakerBot for FDM [Fused Deposition Modeling] or Formlabs for SLA, for a much cheaper price In fact, for a couple thousand bucks, you can actually buy your own machine and be able to create models that work even better than what we had 10 or 15 years ago, at a fraction of the price, and a much quicker iteration cycle Rather than having to wait a week or two weeks to get your parts back, you can even have them back in the morning And this lets you go much faster.

On the electrical side at iRobot, when we wanted to build the first circuit board to spin the

wheel modules, we had to get down to the bare metal and design our own H-bridge with flyback diodes and transistors, figure out what components to pick, and actually do the hardcore

engineering It took probably a month between designing it, sending the board out, getting the board back, and writing the code just to get a simple motor to spin Whereas today, literally in

20 minutes, my 7-year-old son can grab an Arduino, copy and paste some sample code, adjust the key variables, and he’s spinning motors.

There’s been a really interesting abstraction from the complexity of how the thing actually works to much more of a, ‘Let’s focus on getting the product working and not worrying as much about the details.’ I think that’s incredibly enabling for the prototype.”

Software and the Speed of Sharing

The speed, agility, and open ethos of the software world have made inroads into product design andengineering, as well In the past, software systems for design and engineering were entirely closed,which limited sharing across big teams; even more significant, it discouraged it across the industry.But that is beginning to change as the sharing of mechanical and electrical designs means that suchelements are reusable

In the realm of software development, services such as GitHub make it easy to keep track of and

share code—creating a virtuous cycle in which designers and engineers can build upon the

foundations of open source libraries and contribute back to the larger community Electrical engineersare starting to take a similar approach using services such as Upverter, where they can share

reference designs Although still in its early stages, Upverter has made the leap from an initial userbase of hobbyists and hackers to enterprise clients Similarly, on the mechanical side, GrabCADmakes it possible for engineers to share models so that they don’t need to design a product from theground up

The move to cloud-based software is also helping to accelerate product design In the past, something

as essential as CAD software could be a barrier to entry for a startup CAD software can be

expensive, especially if you’re an early-stage company with a great idea for a product and not muchelse Enter the next generation of CAD in the cloud, with less-expensive alternatives to traditionalseat licenses, like subscription pricing and even free versions CAD software is being reinventedwith the nimble startups, makers, and hackers in mind In this realm, both established players likeAutodesk, with its Fusion 360 offering, and newcomers like Onshape, a company started by the

former founders of SolidWorks, are competing to become the product designer’s choice

Design, engineering, and project management techniques are beginning to cross-pollinate across thedomains of software and hardware, with a focus on modularity of design and quick iteration Thetimeline from the napkin sketch to the works-like/looks-like model has become incredibly

compressed, making it possible now for designers to get something in a customer’s hands quickly.Although the first prototype version might well be unrefined and buggy, designers and engineers areable to learn much from quick iteration cycles, as opposed to trying to make that perfect initial

product—an ethos not all that much different from that practiced by their counterparts in software.And, on the business and finance side, crowdfunding is wrapping test marketing, promotion, and

preliminary sales into a convenient package Early adopters from Kickstarter or IndieGoGo becomeyour core test audience, giving startups a critical initial market for their new product ideas

Crowdfunding also limits the amount of money you need to recoup from R&D, or, at least, it givesyou the opportunity to find that initial capital

Part 2 Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume

When you’ve proven there’s a product/market fit for your prototype and validated the features andprice point, the next great challenge for product companies comes with the shift to manufacturing involume Not only do larger product runs require an equally large financial investment, but qualitycontrol becomes increasingly difficult

If all goes well on the market side, the adoption rate for your product will accelerate—represented bythe so-called growth “hockey stick” on the graph—as the product’s audience moves from early

adopters to more general acceptance

Unlike the initial design and prototyping phases of the product lifecycle, change in manufacturingprocesses has been slower in coming, and for good reason Factories still use steel molds to createinjection-molded parts, which is by far the fastest and most reliable process for manufacturing runs ofplastic parts in volume But steel, of course, can’t be easily changed after it’s created, so the penaltiesfor generating an incorrect mold can be substantial

At least for the time being, you can’t 3D print a new steel mold And, even though 3D printing usingmetal is indeed an emerging technology, the low surface quality of the print makes for a poor mold.However, as these processes are refined, it seems clear that the next evolutionary phase of the

product renaissance could be on the volume manufacturing side Looking even farther out, we can seehow the advances in emerging technologies like robotics will make greater automation of

manufacturing not only possible, but likely

A Tale from the Trenches: Technical Machine and the

Prototype-to-Production Problem

Technical Machine is a hardware startup headquartered in Berkeley, California, that has found a

niche selling boards that interactive product designers can use from prototype into production

Technical Machine’s Tessel 2, shown in Figure 1-1, appeals to those entrepreneurs who find

themselves caught in that awkward production middle ground where a startup could be supported bythousands of crowdfunding backers, but lack the tens of thousands of early adopters necessary to

ensure the economies of scale that make volume manufacturing sensible

Figure 1-1 The Tessel 2 board (Photo courtesy Technical Machine)

The team at Technical Machine realized that because most existing prototyping products on the markettoday weren’t designed to scale for production, it could help product designers and engineers takethat next step The popular Raspberry Pi board, for instance, was designed to be a learning tool; try toput it into your production product, though, and you’ll find that the sourcing costs at volume make itprohibitive to use Tessel 2 fills that gap, serving not just as a development board, but also as a pathfrom development into production

“If you’re generating the first batches of a product for early adopters, the volumes needed can be inthe low thousands With these kinds of numbers, it’s very possible that using an off-the-shelf partmakes more sense financially than building your own custom hardware,” says Jon McKay, CEO ofTechnical Machine With the Tessel 2, Technical Machine is taking advantage of the economies ofscale for off-the-shelf parts while still allowing for some lightweight customization to match its

customers’ specific needs As Figure 1-2 illustrates, this gives product designers a looking offering, at an acceptable volume “If [customers] are not using the Ethernet, or USB ports,[or] some of the ten-pin module ports, let’s just take those ports off and save them money on their bill

professional-of materials That’s relatively easy to do We’re trying to find these creative ways to make customization possible at this median-level scale for people who are trying to build products,” Jonexplains

pseudo-Figure 1-2 Tessel 2 modules (Photo courtesy Technical Machine)

“We came from a web development background, and we just wanted to be able to make hardware atthe same sort of iteration speed that we made software Obviously it’s not going to be entirely

possible because there’s shipping physical goods involved in that, but there’s a lot of room forimprovement.”

A Tale from the Trenches: Dragon Innovation and the Challenge of

Going from One to Many

Dragon Innovation is a manufacturing services firm that helps both startups and established