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Jonathan FollettThe Future of Product Design... [LSI] The Future of Product Design by Jonathan Follett Copyright © 2015 O’Reilly Media, Inc... 1 For a fabulous overview and vision of thi

Jonathan Follett

The Future of Product Design

[LSI]

The Future of Product Design

by Jonathan Follett

Copyright © 2015 O’Reilly Media, Inc All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

1 The Future of Product Design 1

A Product Design Renaissance 1

The Evolution of Product Design 4

Part 1 Hello, Market! 5

Part 2 Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume 8

Part 3 Product as Dialogue 16

Part 4 Design for End-of-Life 20

Conclusion 22

Companies, Products, and Links 23

vii

1 For a fabulous overview and vision of this universe and the technical trends driving it, check out the report “Building a Solid World” by O’Reilly editors Mike Loukides and Jon Bruner.

CHAPTER 1 The Future of Product Design

Jonathan Follett

A Product Design Renaissance

The world is changing The lines between software and hardwareblur; fresh approaches to manufacturing reduce the time from idea

to market; and new smart objects and systems herald our connectedfuture.1

A product design renaissance might be on its way, but despite allthis potential and promise—or maybe because of it—the ride couldwell 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, althoughthere’s also perhaps never been a more confusing time, either Today,the combination of emerging technologies and powerful newresources and methods—from open source reference designs tocrowdfunding—are democratizing innovation, compressing thedesign cycle, and reshaping the relationship between consumer andproduct If the amalgam of user experience (UX), software, indus‐trial, material, and engineering design had a name, it would proba‐

1

2http://www.economist.com/node/21553017 (accessed April 20, 2015)

bly 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 perspectivethe ways in which these changes are disrupting design and the prod‐uct lifecycle as well as considerations for people and companieslooking at new ways of approaching product innovation and cre‐

ation This is not an all-encompassing overview; rather, it’s a snap‐

shot of a rapid evolution, as seen from the trenches of productdesign

Is This the Third Industrial Revolution?

Twenty-first century product design is being disrupted by factorsboth cultural and technological The confluence of crowdsourcing,new manufacturing methods, and other emerging technologies hasset the 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 productionrequired to reach these are replaced by the efficiency and leverage ofhighly targeted, rapidly developed, and, hopefully, less wastefulproducts that retain an artisanal value for the consumer

Manufacturing for the mass market will no doubt remain for themany products that have a universal appeal, but for those items thattruly intersect with our unique needs—that seem to have our per‐sonal imprint in them—these individualized products will grow andflourish 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 beyondtypical use cases, workflows, or trite personas and begins to resem‐ble something more like a relationship that grows over time

This understanding of the user DNA will drive product personaliza‐tion And we’re not talking personalization in a trivial way, such as

3 Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business and the global economy.

printing a child’s name on a toy, or a family’s photo on a coffee mug;this new personalization will be the creation of objects that fit intoour daily lives with impeccable ease For example, for the busy par‐ent perhaps a set of connected home appliances that help to measurethe overall nutrition, caloric intake, from freezer to refrigerator, tooven for each family member’s meals; or for the avid athlete, customtraining gear that adheres to changing body measurements andadjusts 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 bil‐lion3 as it changes forever the manufacturing industry Add this tothe trillions of dollars of market disruption for the Internet ofThings (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 thatalthough the emerging technologies of the Second Industrial Revo‐lution—from the automobile to electric power—reshaped the world,they did so in many ways that were negative as well as positive.From rampant pollution to the abuse of our planet’s natural resour‐ces, the environmental consequences that are the Second IndustrialRevolution’s legacy remain critical areas with which we must con‐tend

Fast forward to the twenty-first century: If we consider the massivenumber of new objects that a product renaissance—propelled by theIoT and 3D printing—could bring, introducing millions of newthings into our world, it’s clear we must also consider design not justfor mass adoption, but also for mass decline and return to thestream of natural resources

Everyone can sketch on a napkin

How are new products imagined, created, tested, and produced?Generally speaking, this was once the purview of specialized profes‐sionals, backed by large companies, who had the resources andknowledge to invest in time-consuming R&D cycles, complex man‐

A Product Design Renaissance | 3

ufacturing lines, long supply chains, and expensive marketing anddistribution And even though there were certainly plenty of upstartstartups 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 audi‐ence—the young mother who has an idea for improving productsfor her baby or the coffee fanatic who can see the future of special‐ized brewing—are enabled to move their ideas from mind to reality,from napkin sketch to use by an appreciative audience And, as thesetechnologies evolve and mature, we can expect more democratiza‐tion to come

The Evolution of Product Design

The powerful interplay between innovative use of new technologiesand creative methods for working collaboratively is transformingproduct design

New Ways of Working

Sometimes, we forget that we are still, relatively speaking, in the firstmoments of the information age, saddled with the legacy structures

of the industrial past These structures continue to govern and guideour interactions—from societal to organizational to interpersonal—despite being relics of a bygone era As such, we are still discoveringhow to organize our efforts together when it comes to knowledgework, whether that be scientific discovery, engineering, design, or

otherwise But we are making progress.

As the creative class discovers and implements new forms of collab‐oration around ideas and information, it opens new opportunitiesfor building objects in both the digital and physical worlds And, ifbuilding 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 realtime

Preparing for a new product lifecycle

A product typically moves from design, to prototype, then into themarketplace, through growth and maturity, and finally into decline.For decades, this model has given business stakeholders, designers,and engineers alike a way to understand and contextualize the inter‐actions between a product and the marketplace, and ultimatelybetween the product and the many people who use it It is on thisfoundation that the practice of product lifecycle management (PLM)has optimized the financing, development, manufacturing, and mar‐keting for companies

Today, this familiar model is being upended by emerging technolo‐gies that are not only reinvigorating existing categories but creatingentirely 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 automa‐ted appliances to sensor laden environments like Smart Cities—begin to take hold Perhaps sooner than we think, the lines betweenbiological and mechanical products will follow suit Not only mustcompanies contend with the difficulties of introducing emergingtech into their product portfolio, they must negotiate a labyrinth ofcomplex factors as the product lifecycle itself is remade Within thisnew product lifecycle, as designers, we must be concerned with themyriad of development and production considerations, which willvary 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 designsfor mechanical and electrical engineering, and of course, crowd‐funding

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 Roomba automated vacuum cleaner He is currently the CEO atDragon Innovation, a hardware innovation and manufacturing con‐sultancy

Part 1 Hello, Market! | 5

Scott reflects on his experiences with prototyping the originalRoomba and contrasts 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,

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 vari‐

ables, 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 madeinroads into product design and engineering, as well In the past,software systems for design and engineering were entirely closed,which limited sharing across big teams; even more significant, it dis‐couraged it across the industry But that is beginning to change asthe 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 inwhich designers and engineers can build upon the foundations ofopen source libraries and contribute back to the larger community.Electrical engineers are starting to take a similar approach usingservices such as Upverter, where they can share reference designs

Although still in its early stages, Upverter has made the leap from aninitial user base of hobbyists and hackers to enterprise clients Simi‐larly, on the mechanical side, GrabCAD makes it possible for engi‐neers to share models so that they don’t need to design a productfrom the ground up.

The move to cloud-based software is also helping to accelerate prod‐uct design In the past, something as essential as CAD softwarecould be a barrier to entry for a startup CAD software can beexpensive, especially if you’re an early-stage company with a greatidea for a product and not much else Enter the next generation ofCAD in the cloud, with less-expensive alternatives to traditional seatlicenses, like subscription pricing and even free versions CAD soft‐ware is being reinvented with the nimble startups, makers, andhackers in mind In this realm, both established players like Auto‐desk, with its Fusion 360 offering, and newcomers like Onshape, acompany started by the former founders of SolidWorks, are compet‐ing to become the product designer’s choice

Design, engineering, and project management techniques are begin‐ning to cross-pollinate across the domains of software and hard‐ware, with a focus on modularity of design and quick iteration Thetimeline from the napkin sketch to the works-like/looks-like modelhas become incredibly compressed, making it possible now fordesigners to get something in a customer’s hands quickly Althoughthe first prototype version might well be unrefined and buggy,designers and engineers are able to learn much from quick iterationcycles, as opposed to trying to make that perfect initial product—anethos not all that much different from that practiced by their coun‐terparts in software

And, on the business and finance side, crowdfunding is wrappingtest marketing, promotion, and preliminary sales into a convenientpackage Early adopters from Kickstarter or IndieGoGo becomeyour core test audience, giving startups a critical initial market fortheir new product ideas Crowdfunding also limits the amount ofmoney you need to recoup from R&D, or, at least, it gives you theopportunity to find that initial capital

Part 1 Hello, Market! | 7

Part 2 Growth and the Difficulties of

Production in Volume

When you’ve proven there’s a product/market fit for your prototypeand validated the features and price point, the next great challengefor product companies comes with the shift to manufacturing involume Not only do larger product runs require an equally largefinancial investment, but quality control becomes increasingly diffi‐cult

If all goes well on the market side, the adoption rate for your prod‐uct will accelerate—represented by the so-called growth “hockeystick” on the graph—as the product’s audience moves from earlyadopters to more general acceptance

Unlike the initial design and prototyping phases of the product life‐cycle, change in manufacturing processes has been slower in com‐ing, and for good reason Factories still use steel molds to createinjection-molded parts, which is by far the fastest and most reliableprocess for manufacturing runs of plastic 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 using metal is indeed an emerging technol‐ogy, the low surface quality of the print makes for a poor mold.However, as these processes are refined, it seems clear that the nextevolutionary phase of the product renaissance could be on the vol‐ume manufacturing side Looking even farther out, we can see howthe advances in emerging technologies like robotics will makegreater 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 interactiveproduct designers can use from prototype into production Techni‐cal Machine’s Tessel 2, shown in Figure 1-1, appeals to those entre‐preneurs who find themselves caught in that awkward productionmiddle ground where a startup could be supported by thousands ofcrowdfunding backers, but lack the tens of thousands of early

adopters necessary to ensure the economies of scale that make vol‐ume manufacturing sensible.

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

The team at Technical Machine realized that because most existingprototyping products on the market today weren’t designed to scalefor production, it could help product designers and engineers takethat next step The popular Raspberry Pi board, for instance, wasdesigned to be a learning tool; try to put it into your productionproduct, though, and you’ll find that the sourcing costs at volumemake it prohibitive to use Tessel 2 fills that gap, serving not just as adevelopment board, but also as a path from development into pro‐duction

“If you’re generating the first batches of a product for early adopters,the volumes needed can be in the low thousands With these kinds

of numbers, it’s very possible that using an off-the-shelf part makesmore 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 foroff-the-shelf parts while still allowing for some lightweight customi‐zation to match its customers’ specific needs As Figure 1-2 illus‐trates, this gives product designers a professional-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 takethose ports off and save them money on their bill of materials That’s

Part 2 Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume | 9