The future of product design

The lines between software and hardware blur; freshapproaches to manufacturing reduce the time from idea to market; and newsmart objects and systems herald our connected future.1 A produ

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; freshapproaches to manufacturing reduce the time from idea to market; and newsmart objects and systems herald our connected 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’salso perhaps never been a more confusing time, either Today, the

combination of emerging technologies and powerful new resources and

methods — from open source reference designs to crowdfunding — are

democratizing innovation, compressing the design cycle, and reshaping therelationship between consumer and product If the amalgam of user

experience (UX), software, industrial, material, and engineering design had aname, it would probably be product design — although it’s likely that

product designers themselves wouldn’t agree on it

In this report, we’ll examine from a product designer’s perspective the ways

in which these changes are 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 The confluence of crowdsourcing, new

manufacturing methods, and other emerging technologies has set the stage forwhat we might call a Third Industrial Revolution In a prescient article2 on

the next wave manufacturing phenomenon, The Economist postulated the

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, less wasteful 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 universal appeal, but for those items that truly intersectwith our unique needs — that seem to have our personal imprint 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 arelationship that grows over time

This understanding of the user DNA will drive product personalization Andwe’re not talking personalization in a trivial way, such as printing a child’sname on a toy, or a family’s photo on a coffee mug; this new personalizationwill be the creation of objects that fit into our daily lives with impeccableease For example, for the busy parent perhaps a set of connected home

appliances that help to measure the overall nutrition, caloric intake, fromfreezer to refrigerator, to oven for each family member’s meals; or for the

avid athlete, custom training gear that adheres to changing body

measurements and adjusts over time

The “return to craftsmanship” will be transformative economically, as well.Research from McKinsey Global Institute indicates that by 2025, additivefabrication alone could have an impact of $550 billion3 as it changes foreverthe manufacturing industry Add this to the trillions of dollars of market

disruption for the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and so on, and we canbegin to appreciate the scale of change that is coming

Reshaping the world

If past is indeed prologue, we must come to terms with the fact that althoughthe emerging technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution — from theautomobile to electric power — reshaped the world, they did so in manyways that were negative as well as positive From rampant pollution to theabuse of our planet’s natural resources, the environmental consequences thatare 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 a product renaissance — propelled by the IoT and 3Dprinting — could bring, introducing millions of new things into our world,it’s clear we must also consider design not just for mass adoption, but also formass decline and return to the stream of natural resources

Everyone can sketch on a napkin

How are new products imagined, created, tested, and produced? Generallyspeaking, this was once the purview of specialized professionals, backed bylarge companies, who had the resources and knowledge 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 of upstart startups and disruptors, these were far from thenorm

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 motherwho has an idea for improving products for her baby or the coffee fanaticwho can see the future of specialized brewing — are enabled to move theirideas from mind to reality, from napkin sketch to use by an appreciativeaudience And, as these technologies evolve and mature, we can expect moredemocratization to come.

The Evolution of Product Design

The powerful interplay between innovative use of new technologies andcreative 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 information age, saddled with the legacy structures of theindustrial past These structures continue to govern and guide our interactions

— from societal to organizational to interpersonal — despite being relics of abygone era As such, we are still discovering how to organize our effortstogether 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 collaborationaround 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 build new 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 and maturity, and finally into decline For

decades, this model has given business stakeholders, designers, and engineersalike a way to understand and contextualize the interactions between a

product and the marketplace, and ultimately between the product and themany people who use it It is on this foundation that the practice of productlifecycle management (PLM) has optimized the financing, development,manufacturing, and marketing for companies

Today, this familiar model is being upended by emerging technologies thatare not only reinvigorating existing categories but creating entirely new ones,

as well We can already see that the lines between software and hardwareproducts disappearing as the many variants of the IoT — from connectedobjects 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 mechanical products will follow suit.Not only must companies contend with the difficulties of introducing

emerging tech into their product portfolio, they must negotiate a labyrinth ofcomplex factors as the product lifecycle itself is remade Within this newproduct lifecycle, as designers, we must be concerned with the myriad ofdevelopment and production considerations, which will vary at every stage

Part 1 Hello, Market!

At the market introduction stage of the product lifecycle, the cost ofdesigning, prototyping, and validating with users continues to dropprecipitously due to advances in 3D printing, open source designs formechanical 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 of the seminal in-home service robot: the Roombaautomated vacuum cleaner He is currently the CEO at Dragon Innovation, ahardware innovation and manufacturing consultancy

Scott reflects on his experiences with prototyping the original Roomba andcontrasts that with the prototyping 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, orSLA, which was incredibly brittle There are all sorts of examples of usturning off the cliff detectors and having the robot just drive off the end ofthe 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 tocreate 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 thanhaving to wait a week or two weeks to get your parts back, you can evenhave 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 circuitboard to spin the wheel modules, we had to get down to the bare metal anddesign our own H-bridge with flyback diodes and transistors, figure outwhat components to pick, and actually do the hardcore engineering It tookprobably a month between designing it, sending the board out, getting theboard 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, andhe’s spinning motors

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

Software and the Speed of Sharing

The speed, agility, and open ethos of the software world have made inroadsinto product design and engineering, as well In the past, software systems fordesign and engineering were entirely closed, which limited sharing across bigteams; even more significant, it discouraged it across the industry But that isbeginning to change as the sharing of mechanical and electrical designs

means that such elements 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 engineers arestarting to take a similar approach using services such as Upverter, wherethey can share reference designs Although still in its early stages, Upverterhas made the leap from an initial user base of hobbyists and hackers to

enterprise clients Similarly, on the mechanical side, GrabCAD makes it

possible for engineers to share models so that they don’t need to design aproduct from the ground 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 anearly-stage company with a great idea for a product and not much else Enterthe next generation of CAD in the cloud, with less-expensive alternatives totraditional seat licenses, like subscription pricing and even free versions.CAD software is being reinvented with the nimble startups, makers, and

hackers in mind In this realm, both established players like Autodesk, withits Fusion 360 offering, and newcomers like Onshape, a company started bythe former founders of SolidWorks, are competing to become the productdesigner’s choice

Design, engineering, and project management techniques are beginning tocross-pollinate across the domains of software and hardware, with a focus onmodularity of design and quick iteration The timeline 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 handsquickly Although the first prototype version might well be unrefined andbuggy, designers and engineers are able to learn much from quick iterationcycles, as opposed to trying to make that perfect initial product — an ethosnot 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 Earlyadopters from Kickstarter or IndieGoGo become your 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 fromR&D, or, at least, it gives you 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 and price point, the next great challenge for productcompanies comes with the shift to manufacturing in volume Not only dolarger 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 willaccelerate — represented by the 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 manufacturing processes has been slower in coming, and for goodreason Factories still use steel molds to create injection-molded parts, which

is by far the fastest and most reliable process for manufacturing runs of

plastic parts in volume But steel, of course, can’t be easily changed after it’screated, so the penalties for generating an incorrect mold can be substantial

At least for the time being, you can’t 3D print a new steel mold And, eventhough 3D printing using metal is indeed an emerging technology, the lowsurface quality of the print makes for a poor mold However, as these

processes are refined, it seems clear that the next evolutionary phase of theproduct renaissance could be on the volume manufacturing side Lookingeven farther out, we can see how the advances in emerging technologies likerobotics 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 startupcould be supported by thousands of crowdfunding backers, but lack the tens

of thousands of early adopters necessary to ensure the economies of scale thatmake 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 market today weren’t designed to scale for

production, it could help product designers and engineers take that next step.The popular Raspberry Pi board, for instance, was designed to be a learningtool; try to put it into your production product, though, and you’ll find thatthe sourcing costs at volume make it prohibitive to use Tessel 2 fills that gap,serving not just as a development board, but also as a path from developmentinto production

“If you’re generating the first batches of a product for early adopters, thevolumes needed can be in the low thousands With these kinds of numbers,it’s very possible that using an off-the-shelf part makes more sense

financially than building your own custom hardware,” says Jon McKay, CEO

of Technical Machine With the Tessel 2, Technical Machine is taking

advantage of the economies of scale 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 theEthernet, or USB ports, [or] some of the ten-pin module ports, let’s just takethose ports off and save them money on their bill of materials That’s

professional-relatively easy to do We’re trying to find these creative ways to make

pseudo-customization possible at this median-level scale for people who aretrying to build products,” Jon explains

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

“We came from a web development background, and we just wanted to beable to make hardware at the same sort of iteration speed that we madesoftware Obviously it’s not going to be entirely possible because there’sshipping 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 startupsand established companies negotiate the difficult terrain of outsourced

production and the challenge of moving from prototype to volume “Youhave to pick a great contract manufacturer or factory to work with you If youget this right, you can build a really strong foundation and create a successfulcompany But, if you get it wrong, then it’s like death by a thousand cuts, andit’s very, very difficult to recover,” says Scott Miller, Dragon’s CEO

Dragon is on the forefront of manufacturing service innovation, making theprocess as transparent as possible and helping companies select factoriesfrom a comprehensive network of service providers, such as the one shown in

Figure 1-3

Figure 1-3 Factory workers in China assemble circuit boards (Photo courtesy Dragon Innovation)