Jonathan Follett

The Future ofProduct Design

978-1-491-92817-2

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The Future of Product Designby Jonathan Follett

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Table of Contents

The Future of Product Design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1A Product Design Renaissance 1The Evolution of Product Design 4Part 1. Hello, Market! 5Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume 7Part 3. Product as Dialogue 16Part 4. Design for End-of-Life 20Conclusion 22Companies, Products, and Links 23

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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 andJon Bruner.

The Future of Product Design

—Jonathan Follett

A Product Design RenaissanceThe world is changing. The lines between software and hardwareblur; fresh approaches to manufacturing reduce the time from ideato 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 thex-factor. And, how we work together as participants in this productrevolution, both as people and as organizations, will play a key rolein 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‐bly be product design—although it’s likely that product designersthemselves wouldn’t agree on it.

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

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. Ina prescient article2 on the next wave manufacturing phenomenon,The Economist postulated the following:

...the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, witheach product tailored precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling.The factory of the future will focus on mass customization and maylook 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 userwill 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 asprinting 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‐

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

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 by2025, 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 worldIf 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 napkinHow 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‐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.

A Product Design Renaissance | 3

Emerging technologies are not just changing what’s being made orhow fast it’s being developed, they’re also changing who is capable ofmaking 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 DesignThe powerful interplay between innovative use of new technologiesand creative methods for working collaboratively is transformingproduct design.

New Ways of WorkingSometimes, we forget that we are still, relatively speaking, in the firstmoments of the information age, saddled with the legacy structuresof 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, orotherwise. 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 humanadvancement, the speed at which this work is disseminated and re-used is also a critical factor. What the age of information has givenus is the ability to stand on the shoulders of others, taking advantageof their efforts, to build new work, ideas, and even funding in realtime.

Preparing for a new product lifecycleA 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‐

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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 variantsof 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 iRobotFor a decade, Scott Miller was an engineering lead at iRobot wherehe 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.

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 tounderstand how the robot behaved in unstructured environments.We would create the files... and build $25,000 models of stereolithog‐raphy, or SLA, which was incredibly brittle. There are all sorts of

Part 1. Hello, Market! | 5

examples of us turning off the cliff detectors and having the robot justdrive off the end of the table and shatter itself to pieces.Today, you could pick MakerBot for FDM [Fused Deposition Mod‐eling] or Formlabs for SLA, for a much cheaper price. In fact, for acouple thousand bucks, you can actually buy your own machineand be able to create models that work even better than what wehad 10 or 15 years ago, at a fraction of the price, and a muchquicker iteration cycle. Rather than having to wait a week or twoweeks to get your parts back, you can even have them back in themorning. And this lets you go much faster.On the electrical side at iRobot, when we wanted to build the firstcircuit board to spin the wheel modules, we had to get down to thebare metal and design our own H-bridge with flyback diodes andtransistors, figure out what components to pick, and actually do thehardcore engineering. It took probably a month between designingit, sending the board out, getting the board back, and writing thecode just to get a simple motor to spin. Whereas today, literally in20 minutes, my 7-year-old son can grab an Arduino, copy and pastesome sample code, adjust the key variables, and he’s spinningmotors.There’s been a really interesting abstraction from the complexity ofhow the thing actually works to much more of a, ‘Let’s focus on get‐ting the product working and not worrying as much about thedetails.’ I think that’s incredibly enabling for the prototype.”

Software and the Speed of SharingThe 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 makeit 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‐

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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 2. Growth and the Difficulties ofProduction in VolumeWhen 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 in

Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume | 7

volume. 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 thePrototype-to-Production ProblemTechnical 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 earlyadopters necessary to ensure the economies of scale that make vol‐ume manufacturing sensible.

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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 kindsof 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’srelatively easy to do. We’re trying to find these creative ways to make

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

pseudo-customization possible at this median-level scale for peoplewho are trying 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 wantedto be able to make hardware at the same sort of iteration speed thatwe made software. Obviously it’s not going to be entirely possiblebecause there’s shipping physical goods involved in that, but... there’sa lot of room for improvement.”

A Tale from the Trenches: Dragon Innovation and theChallenge of Going from One to ManyDragon Innovation is a manufacturing services firm that helps bothstartups and established companies negotiate the difficult terrain ofoutsourced production and the challenge of moving from prototypeto volume. “You have to pick a great contract manufacturer or fac‐tory to work with you. If you get this right, you can build a really

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strong foundation and create a successful company. But, if you get itwrong, then it’s like death by a thousand cuts, and it’s very, very dif‐ficult to recover,” says Scott Miller, Dragon’s CEO.

Dragon is on the forefront of manufacturing service innovation,making the process as transparent as possible and helping compa‐nies select factories from a comprehensive network of service pro‐viders, such as the one shown in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3. Factory workers in China assemble circuit boards. (Photocourtesy Dragon Innovation)

Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume | 11

“More often than not, you’re not going to find them doing a websearch, because it’s very difficult to know who’s good and who’s notgood. At Dragon, we’ve got a database of a couple hundred factorieswe’ve worked with and are constantly expanding that,” Scottexplains.

The Request-for-Quote processFor the product designer, understanding the ins and outs of puttingtogether a Request for Quote (RFQ) can be intimidating. As a partof an RFQ package, the team at Dragon recommends that you havethree to five factories bid on your work so that you can have a strongbasis for a line-by-line pricing comparison.

The first part of the RFQ consists of a document describing theproduct, company, and team, as well as the key areas in whichthey’re looking for assistance from the factory. If you’re a startup,this document can be crucial because reputable factories in the FarEast work with substantially larger customers, making money whenshipping products in volume, not in short runs. It’s critical in theRFQ, therefore, that a startup illustrate for potential manufacturingpartners the opportunity that comes from working with them.

The second part of the RFQ is the Bill of Materials (BOM), whichspecifies all the component parts and quantities needed to constructthe end product. The BOM is critical for having insight into the costof everything that’s going into a product, as well as being able tomake comparisons between different factories.

The third part is the all-important schedule. As Scott explains,“Once you’ve got that, you go visit the factories [Figure 1-4], start tofigure out who’s good to work with, the capability of the team...things like that. Then, finally, you’ll come back and do the apples-to-apples comparison to understand the key cost drivers, and then howthey line up, based on your visit. Having gone through that process,a company is in a great position to pick a factory.”

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Figure 1-4. The factory floor (Photo courtesy Dragon Innovation)

“At Dragon, we’re always agnostic on where our customers build.The only thing we care [about] is that they succeed. Because webuild a lot of consumer electronics, China often makes sense; but ifyou’re doing lower volume—say, under 5,000 units, as a roughguideline—the United States makes tremendous sense,” adds Scott.

“What we typically see, if you contrast the United States and China,in China, everything is very vertically integrated. So you’ve got themolding, the SMT [Surface-Mount Technology] for the circuitboard, the quality testing, and the pack-out all in one facility.Whereas in the United States, it tends to be more fragmented. Youmay work with a molding shop to do the injection molded parts,and then a different circuit board shop to put together your PCBAs,and then a different house to do the final assembly. You just struc‐ture the RFQ in a manner that’s conducive to that, but the process isexactly the same.”

As product designers, it’s important that we understand how manu‐facturing processes work, how they could change in the future,where there are risks, and where there’s room for greater efficiency.However, with outsource manufacturing this can be difficult to dobecause the industry lacks transparency. In the future, we could ben‐efit from software tools that enable products to move through the

Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume | 13

process more predictably. But for the time being, it might very wellbe that service innovation, like that provided by Dragon, will be thedriver of disruption.

David meets Goliath: Achieving Innovation Speed forEnterprise CompaniesWith emerging technologies moving more quickly than ever, it canbe hard to steer a large vessel, such as an enterprise organization, totake advantage of them.

For larger companies that already have an established product port‐folio and are seeing innovation happening at the grassroots level, theability to utilize crowd-sourcing or rapid prototyping might still beproblematic. The question comes down to this: when is it appropri‐ate to retool a product process when you’ve got standard operationalprocedures that make money for you today?

The ambiguity that can come with experimentation is always scaryand potentially costly. And, there are many aspects of innovationprocess that don’t match up with the large company productionmethods optimized to do one thing really well.

According to Dragon’s Scott Miller, “When it comes to productdesign and development, the biggest thing on the minds of theCEOs of larger companies is: ‘How to get an enterprise to go faster?How do we get the speed of an entrepreneur to innovate and stay ontop of things?’ Their biggest concern is how do they innovate morequickly. It’s certainly a challenge. If you look at what it takes to movethe needle for a big company versus a small one, it’s a tremendousamount of volume. When you do that, there’s a lot more risk, that it’svery difficult to fail fast to succeed sooner.”

Risk Taking and the EnterpriseEnterprise companies don’t want to lose out on opportunitiesbecause they can’t take risks; they need new ways to evaluate innova‐tive ideas and make good decisions about developing their products.To solve this dilemma, innovating in small bites, by acquiring start‐ups or forming incubators—where employees can have greater free‐dom to experiment outside the regular organizational structure—isa reasonable strategy. For example, the Boston area is a hotbed of

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large-company innovation lab activity, from CVS, Johnson & John‐son, Staples, Verizon, and others.

Small PilotsIn the past, starting the manufacturing of a new product in signifi‐cant volume always required an enormous leap of faith. Unsurpris‐ingly, the result was that many projects never saw the light of day—adifficult outcome for product designers, indeed. For even the largestof companies it can be understandably difficult to justify occupyinga manufacturing facility and initiating a 100,000-unit run when youlack all but the most basic of market validation.

However, in contrast today, as large companies recognize the impor‐tance of rapid innovation, they’re finding ways to run smaller pilotprograms—manufacturing 5,000 to 10,000 units in order to get afull understanding of the product/market fit. By testing products inthe market at a small scale and gathering data quickly, companiescan make informed decisions about whether they should scale-upmanufacturing. If a company gets the signal that there’s strength to aproduct line, they can ramp up to full-scale production rapidly.

Developing InfrastructureThe product landscape is changing as Fortune 500 companies beginplacing their bets on emerging technologies. At the 2015 ConsumerElectronics Show (CES), Samsung announced its focus on the IoTand the connected home. This might have seemed like a big bet forthe tech giant. The bigger play, however, might not be in the waySamsung changes people’s interactions with their home appliances,entertainment, and living environments, but rather in how the com‐pany creates the infrastructure that binds it all together.

The IoT itself still lacks a solid infrastructure, which might still beyears from being developed. “While the Internet itself is accessible,there remains a huge gap between the devices that we create and get‐ting to the Internet,” says Ben Salinas, a designer and engineer atemerging technology consultancy, Involution Studios. “WiFi net‐works require a lot of power to connect to and are inconsistent.They’re not universal. We see a lot of devices tethering to a phone touse that Internet connection. That still has issues.”

Salinas continues, “If you’re one of these small companies that arebuilding a product for less than a few million dollars, you probably

Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume | 15

are playing with the frameworks that larger companies, like Sam‐sung, Apple, and Microsoft, have already created.”

When it comes to emerging technologies, for entrepreneurs andsmaller companies, the opportunities lie in bringing products tomarket quickly, even if you’re playing on someone else’s network orusing someone else’s infrastructure. For the larger companies, mak‐ing that network, driving the standards, and owning the ecosystemare the big plays in the long term.

Part 3. Product as DialogueWe are approaching a moment when product lifecycle maturity doesnot preclude further innovation; rather, it provides a platform for it.In the past, companies have dealt with mature product lines—thosewith wide adoption but minimal growth—by adding more featuresand attempting to find new uses and audiences to rejuvenate them.Of the many places in the product development and manufacturinglifecycle that can be disrupted, this could be one of the most signifi‐cant. Emerging technologies, especially the bevy of connectedmachines promised by the IoT, offer an opportunity for companiesto not only regularly update, but also analyze usage data returningfrom these connected machines—making mass customization on auser level possible. This data-driven interplay between company andconsumer, between user and designer, might begin to alter the prod‐uct lifecycle to resemble more of an ongoing flow.

If data flow goes both ways—a conversation between designer anduser, rather than a speech—the product represents a living relation‐ship and is never fully completed. Rather than think about a finishedproduct, as designers we should also incorporate into our thinkinghow a company can be hyper-responsive to users of its products.

Connected devices and the IoT offer great potential for creatingongoing dynamic interaction. For example, consider a product suchas a washing machine that can respond to energy cycles; variables,such as the speed and pattern of agitation, and the amount and tem‐perature of water can be customized based on our personal usagepatterns. Through this, the relationship that we have with our wash‐ing machine changes, and the decisions that the designer and themanufacturer make about which wash cycles to push to us becomevaluable touchpoints in an ongoing conversation.

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A Tale from the Trenches: Making LEO, The Maker PrinceLEO, The Maker Prince is a book by Carla Diana (a Smart Designfellow and New York Times contributor) that celebrates emergingtechnology, inspiring young designers with a creative message, madepossible by 3D printing.

LEO, a visitor from space who you can see in Figure 1-5, prints 3Dmodels based on sketches that are created by the book’s narrator.The imaginative tale can truly become real for readers, as designs ofthe characters are available for them to 3D print, along with variousaccessories, from musical instruments to a planter to a chess set.

Figure 1-5. LEO, The Maker Prince (Photo courtesy Carla Diana)

But where the book really shines, at least from a design standpoint,is as an example of a product as dialogue. Readers share their workson the book’s website and Diana makes ongoing adjustments to thedesigns based on input from them. So, the book in some sense, isalways being updated, and Diana is having a conversation with thebook’s readers through the medium of a physical product.

One reason Diana created a children’s book about 3D printing wasto put virtual objects such as those in Figure 1-6 out in the world asan experiment to see who downloaded them, why they downloadedthem, and what they did with them. “That was a fascinating moment

Part 3. Product as Dialogue | 17

for me,” says Diana, “because I felt like, ‘Wow, you could have neverdone this before.’”

“People commented to me about some of the prints. They said, ‘Oh,this particular part grows more successfully for me standingupright.’ I worked as hard as I could to try to get the objects to printas well as they would with a typical FDM at-home printer. That wasa really interesting moment for me, too, because I felt like, ‘Oh, I cantry this and I can just change the file.’”

Figure 1-6. All of the characters from the book can be 3D printed.(Photo courtesy Carla Diana)

“I did that because I am envisioning this future where it comes todistribution: A designer, manufacturer, entrepreneur no longer hasto think about, ‘Okay, well how many parts of this do I have to makeand where does it get warehoused? Where does it get distributedand what retailers is it going to? There’s that whole dream of thestreamline distribution and I think it’s very realistic,” states Dianaenthusiastically.

A Tale from the Trenches: Understanding ConsumerDecision MakingHow does a company know when it’s time to place a bet on emerg‐ing technologies?

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“I think disruption for disruption’s sake will never win,” says EllenDiResta, a strategic design advisor for companies like Sanofi andBecton Dickinson, and former Managing Director for innovationconsultancy Design Continuum.

DiResta goes on to say, “Every single client I have, I always love themoment when I say to them: ‘Nobody wants your products. No onewants to buy an extra thing. Nobody wants to think about your stuff.The people who think the most about your products are you guys.That’s it. You have to give them something. You have to enable themto do something. If you don’t know what that is, and you’re busy justfocused on your thing, you will miss the mark eventually.’”

The relationship between the designer and the user of products isbecoming ever closer. Understanding the intrinsic motivations ofthe population engaged with your company is paramount to facili‐tating those relationships going forward. In many instances, compa‐nies base their product portfolios and their future plans on emerg‐ing technologies and how they expect those technologies to evolve.But the product-based relationship you have with your customerscan be deeper and potentially longer standing.

DiResta suggests that companies need to avoid being seduced by thefunctionality of a potentially disruptive technology; instead, theyneed to ask, “How can these capabilities better enable our custom‐ers?” At the same time, the product designer needs to understandthe full extent of a technology’s capabilities, because from thisknowledge, she can help define the desired user experiences.

Companies can err by going too far in the opposite direction, as well—expecting consumers to tell them what to do and what to design.When, in reality, the motivators driving a consumer’s choices mightbe something that they’re not ever going to be aware of, let alone besomething that they can articulate.

Decision Motivators“When I worked with a housewares company, I was interviewingwomen at home who had kids in school. One lived in a verydepressed area and another person lived in Wellesley, Massachu‐setts, which is very affluent,” DiResta elaborates.

“They had very similar values. Their choices were very differentbecause their means and their circumstances were very different.

Part 3. Product as Dialogue | 19

The woman in Wellesley sent her kids to public school, because shegrew up so privileged and isolated and segregated... She felt like shelived in a bubble. She wanted her kids to have a chance to be morenormal. Wanted and picked Wellesley and had a very, very nicehouse—but by her background standards, very modest—becauseshe wanted her kids to be normal.”

“The other woman home-schooled her kids, because she felt that theschool in town was just bad. Her house was not that great, but shesaid, “I can’t send my kids to this school and expect them to ever getout of this town.”

DiResta continues, “So you would say they are very, very different.But the way they made decisions and how they chose, if youreversed the two people, they would be making the same choices aseach other. The values that those products or services had to speakto had to be the same.”

The disruptive technologies that will be the most successful willenable people to do what they want to do from the beginning—justin better ways that fit with their changing context. “That’s reallywhat Apple did,” DiResta says. “Nobody wants to interact with tech‐nology. Apple provided technology in a way that you can workthrough technology to do the things you want to do.”

Part 4. Design for End-of-LifeSooner or later, a product will reach the end of its useful life. Asoverall usage declines, a company will gradually reduce support forit, and eventually “sunset,” or phase-out, that product.

If one of the natural outcomes of a Product Renaissance will be agreat many new products imagined and brought into the world,designers will increasingly need to be concerned about the entiretyof the product lifecycle including its decline, and perhaps mostimportant, with what happens to the product after people are nolonger using it.

Although we as designers might not like to admit it, the fact is thatdesign and pollution are inexorably connected. The design activitiesin which we engage at the beginning of the product lifecycle inevita‐bly create positive or negative environmental outcomes at its end-of-life. To effect positive outcomes, we can and should ask: “What arethe considerations for sustainability and environmental impact?”

20 | The Future of Product Design

This is not a new idea in design; rather, it is one whose time hascome. The Design for Environment (DfE) program, put in place bythe United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as farback as 1992, includes as a part of its toolkit the lifecycle assessment(LCA), “a systems-based approach to quantifying the human healthand environmental impacts associated with a product’s life from‘cradle to grave’.”

Today, using software tools such as thinkstep’s GaBi, designers cancomplete a product lifecycle assessment to determine its carbon,water, and overall environmental footprint, along with resource andenergy efficiency for its manufacturing and usage.

We can select materials that are environmentally friendly early in themanufacturing process, because recently there has been great inno‐vation in materials such as biodegradable plastics.

From a recycling standpoint, the biggest opportunity might lie inDesign for Disassembly (DfD), making electronic products mucheasier to separate into their core components—from circuit boardsto metal and plastic parts—and sending each of these into theirappropriate recycling streams. Perhaps one day, hopefully in thenot-too-distant future, we will have printed circuit boards (PCBs)designed for easy component removal, minimizing the need for des‐oldering and exposure to heavy metals.

Design for Remanufacturing (DfR) is a similar strategy that strivesto remove durable components of a product at the end of its lifecyle,reprocess them, and use them once again in a newly created item.

Even though this kind of design for a product’s end-of-life—whetherit be for disassembly and recycling or remanufacturing—does takemore effort, there is a tremendous opportunity here for productdesigners to take responsibility for and control of the aspects of theproduct lifecycle that were overlooked during previous eras. Forboth startups and large companies alike, this systemic view of prod‐uct design is worth remembering, when encountering the pressuresto release something quickly and just get a product on the shelf.

On-Demand ProductionIn the future, we can also consider that there might be no need tophase out products if manufacturing can be generated on demandand the price for creating individual versions is low. Today the print-

Part 4. Design for End-of-Life | 21

on-demand segment of the publishing industry ensures that bookswith an audience will never go out of print. The digital files for anybook can be stored in the cloud until a customer orders it, at whichpoint the book is printed, bound, and shipped. It’s not hard to imag‐ine a similar scenario for more complex products. There are already3D printing platforms today, such as Shapeways, for creating simpleobjects on demand. In a similar way, distributed manufacturing isbecoming reality as crowdsource services such as 3DHubs give mak‐ers access to an extensive local network of 3D printers. We canimagine how distributed fabrication for business might be accom‐plished with such a system: add together enough 3DHub providersin an area and you could quickly complete a modest run, dependingon the availability of the network.

ConclusionIn this evolving world of emerging technology and product creation,designers who can create objects that are both compelling to theconsumer and within the bounds of manufacturing capabilities willbe exceptionally valuable. Understanding your materials—what theycan do and what they can tolerate—is key, be they plastics and met‐als or pixels and code. With such an understanding, product design‐ers can offer their insight, not only to envision future products, butalso to think about the process for getting there.

How do we approach product design and the evolving product life‐cycle?

Here, inspired by Dieter Rams, the influential industrial designerknown worldwide for his landmark product designs for Braun andVitsoe, we’ll conclude with three principles for good product designin this brave new world of emerging technologies:

Good product design serves as an enabler for people.To make a product useful and understandable, our understand‐ing of the user must be of primary importance.

Good product design is innovative in process.Drawing on new ideas for working together—from crowdsourc‐ing to open source reference designs—we can stand on theshoulders of others to create better products.

22 | The Future of Product Design

Good product design is environmentally friendly.As we design, we must take into account end-of-life planningthat enables disassembly, recycling, and even remanufacturing.

Companies, Products, and LinksThroughout this report, we’ve discussed a variety of companies andproducts to illustrate important concepts in and approaches toproduct design for emerging technologies. Table 1-1 lists these com‐panies and products, ordered alphabetically, along with relevantlinks to further information.

Table 1-1. List of companies discussed

Product Company Link

3DHubs 3DHubs http://www.3dhubs.com

Arduino Arduino http://www.arduino.cc

GaBi thinkstep http://www.thinkstep.com

GitHub GitHub, Inc. http://www.github.com

GrabCAD GrabCAD http://www.grabcad.com

MakerBot MakerBot Industries, LLC http://www.makerbot.com/

OnShape OnShape, Inc. http://www.onshape.com

Roomba 880 iRobot Corporation http://www.irobot.com/For-the-Home/Vacuum-Cleaning/Roomba

Shapeways Shapeways, Inc. http://www.shapeways.com

SolidWorks Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. http://www.solidworks.com

Tessel 2 Technical Machine http://www.tessel.io

Upverter Upverter, Inc. http://www.upverter.com

Companies, Products, and Links | 23

About the AuthorJonathan Follett is a principal at Involution Studios where he is adesigner, business lead, and internationally published author on thetopics of user experience and information design.

His most recent book, Designing for Emerging Technologies: UX forGenomics, Robotics, and the Internet of Things (O’Reilly) was pub‐lished in December 2014. He is also a co-author of Beautiful Data:The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions (O’Reilly). Over the pastdecade, Jon has written for online and print publications includingA List Apart and UX Matters.

Throughout his 15-year design career, Jon has contributed to beauti‐ful, usable software for enterprise, healthcare, and emerging tech‐nology clients, from the Fortune 500 to the market leaders of thefuture. Jon is a classically trained pianist who dreams of one dayhaving a family rock band with his two sons. Find him on Twitter at@jonfollett.

AcknowledgementsThe universe of possibilities presented by emerging technologies,from the IoT to robotics to additive fabrication, is vast and intimi‐dating but also inspiring. Product design is changing so quickly thatthere can be no shame in admitting that even those of us closest to itcan only guess where it’s going.

The designers, engineers, and product folks who were kind enoughto talk with me and inform and refine my thinking for this reportinclude Drew Carlton, Carla Diana, Jeff Champagne, Ellen DiResta,Craig Mauch, Jon McKay, Scott Miller, and Ben Salinas. I couldn’thave put this together without them.

As usual, the O’Reilly Media editorial team was fantastically suppor‐tive. Both Mary Treseler and Angela Rufino have pushed me toarticulate the promise I see in the design field of the twenty-firstcentury.

I should say, as well, that my wife Jen tolerates my late night writingbinges, of which she has supported more than her fair share.

Let’s make something great.