Machines For Living

The Future of Design

Brian Ling, a designer at Philips, writes at Design Sojourn that the next industrial design evolution will treat all layers of a product as an expression of a single conceptual design.  "In the past", writes Ling, "what was practiced and taught to us at school was that Industrial Design was a process that was  essentially a linear step by step process."  This step by step approach, diagrammed on the right by Ling, is also found in the legacy approaches to software design (waterfall) and architecture (design-bid-build), each of which is undergoing changes very similar to the one Ling describes in industrial design.

Ling describes a common problem with the legacy step by step approach, a problem which designers in all industries will recognize.

"The problem with this sort of approach we found out, was that people started to treat our product “layers” as they would budgets. If there was a lack of budget they would “logically” start to “cut” back these layers. Some examples of common discussions designers have include “Oh no money? Ok lets toss that metal housing and turn it into plastic…” or “Can’t afford that brush metal trim, lets turn it black instead?”. Does this sound familiar?"

Telco 2.0 and the Redesign of Everything

The residential telecom (and cable) industries appear to be careening down a path of evolution from a provider of consumer network services to a revolutionary platform for all businesses to redesign their products and services.  This path is defined, above all else, by the Broadband Incentive Problem.  The transition to a platform for the redesign of everything, spurred by this problem, is a story best told in three acts: Telco 1.0, Telco 1.0 SP1, and Telco 2.0.

Telco 1.0: Broadband access is currently provided all-you-can-eat in industrialized countries.  The result of this business model has been remarkable broadband penetration, but this penetration leads to a plateau in access revenue while network costs continue to escalate (primarily from video over the Internet).  Korea, which has the highest broadband penetration in the world, is the canary in the coalmine, as the chart to the right shows.  The resulting Broadband Incentive Problem, as explained by the MIT Communications Futures Program (which included participants from Comcast, BT, DT and FT) is the following: "The broadband value chain is headed for a train wreck....Today's prevailing business models give wired and wireless broadband operators the perverse incentive to throttle innovative, high-bandwidth uses of the Internet."  The network cost increases that prompt this throttling are both capital and operational costs, as the MIT report explains in detail.

"The broadband value chain is headed for a train wreck....Today's prevailing business models give wired and wireless broadband operators the perverse incentive to throttle innovative, high-bandwidth uses of the Internet."

Obama's Stimulus Planners: Design Jobs lead to Electronic Health Records

A growing chorus of politicians is raising concerns over the inclusion of projects that would create green collar jobs (alternative energy and transit projects) and those that would finally bring about the digitization of medical records, because they are not "shovel-ready" and so would not create jobs anytime soon.  Rep. Baron Hill (Ind) argues to the Washington Post, ""If we're going to call it a stimulus package, it has to be stimulating and has to be stimulating now. I think there are members of our caucus who are trying to create a Christmas tree out of this."  This is a red herring argument in the case of electronic medical records just as much as it is with regard to green collar jobs.

The design of a technical infrastructure for portable electronic medical records that includes all health care providers, consumers and researchers is as massive an undertaking as was the creation of the interstate highway system in the 50s, and will require thousands of design jobs.

The design of a technical infrastructure for portable electronic medical records is as massive an undertaking as was the creation of the interstate highway system in the 50s, and will require thousands of design jobs.