{"id":2254,"date":"2016-03-02T14:19:16","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T14:19:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=2254"},"modified":"2016-03-02T14:19:16","modified_gmt":"2016-03-02T14:19:16","slug":"anybody-home-ixd16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/anybody-home-ixd16\/","title":{"rendered":"Anybody Home? Where did design dissapear off to?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is the transcript for my talk at IXDA<\/a> in Helsinki on March 2nd.<\/p>\n

Il faut confronter les id\u00e9es vagues avec des images claires. – Jean-Luc Godard<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I want to talk about the areas that were abandoned by design and designers and why they are worth rediscovering.<\/p>\n

Hello. On good days I describe myself an industrial designer & an interaction designer. This is what I was trained as and that\u2019s what my degree certificates would say for all the world to see if I ever bothered to frame and hang them. On bad days I say that I\u2019m an internet of things designer. This means nothing to most of the people, I say it because it feels clearer to me than what industrial or interaction design stands for within the internet of things community that has grown worldwide over the last five years.<\/p>\n

Making not Designing<\/b><\/p>\n

Between 2007 and 2010 I was CEO and Co-Founder of Tinker.it later renamed Tinker London, the first UK distributor of the Arduino boards. At the time I was fresh off an interaction design course where I had come up with the Good Night Lamp. Gillian Crampton Smith who is sitting in the room is responsible for this and I would like to thank her for that. We helped promote the use of the Arduino to computer science students. flash developers, web developers, jewellerers, graphic designers and researchers. We ran workshops around the world for the public and for clients. People never thought of the Arduino as supporting a design effort, but it should have been. It should have been the tool that industrial designers would learn about and design higher resolution prototypes so they could own more of the design pie in a project. So that they could stop complaining that people came to them at the last minute with crappy products people just wanted to pretty up. So that they could quit their day jobs and start product companies everywhere. But that wasn\u2019t to be. The Arduino became about other things, about \u2019making\u2019, about open source, about empowerment, about knowledge barriers were being broken. Not about design. It featured the story of a web developer who had grown a little tired of screens could pick up some electronics skills easily and \u2018make something\u2019. Making and designing became separate activities.<\/p>\n

A growing community of non-designers designing\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Our workshops always attracted more technically savvy\u00a0 people than industrial designers, architects, graphic designers or UX designers. The timing was terrible of course, as the Arduino came out the iPhone was launched so UX designers left the table and went to distract themselves with smaller screens. And the industrial designers didn\u2019t engage much at all, preferring to design things for others however frustrating that was than to spend a bit of time understanding how to code and engage with designing electronics. Knowing how to prototype electronics is still not as prevalent as knowing how to draw 10 years on, because we still see more value in someone being able to draw us a scenario of someone using a connected object than build us a prototype to figure out how an interaction feels with the constraints of connectivity and technology. Because oh my god are there constraints. And if you\u2019d prototyped with the technology you\u2019d end up really understanding that making lights switch on and off from around the world seems easy but turns out to be incredibly difficult.<\/p>\n

Technical founders, not designers<\/b><\/p>\n

So between the iPhone and Nest being acquired in early 2014, the internet of things grew slowly and with minimal design community engagement. It\u2019s almost as if designers were waiting to be called up to the table. Design courses might run one or two introductory Arduino classes but nothing that stuck to a designer\u2019s head and more importantly to their fingers. In London, the founders of internet-connected startups have continued to come from technically-savvy professions or graduate program: engineering, electronics engineering, computer science, industrial automation, military applications, sometimes (rarely) advertising. All of them were told about designing for users and user-centric design, but they were not told how. They weren\u2019t even told that design and user-centered research are one and the same. I co-ran a workshop with Dott studio yesterday in London where we invited internet of things startups to come and share their process from coming up with an idea to whatever stage they were at. They were all able to articulate their process and the reasoning behind business decisions, but design was almost completely absent in the first 6 months of development. It was all about the prototyping and testing. No questioning of the \u2018why\u2019 not paper prototyping, not user interviews, no personas, nothing.\u00a0 At best agile software development processes were attempted inside of a mashup of other processes. Forget the double diamond, this was more like the spaghetti plate. And these are the bravest people, they quit their day job, are wrestling to find funding, join incubators, spend a LOT of time on their ideas, but don\u2019t work with designers from the word go. This is crazy when you consider that in London we now have 11 iot meetups and that cities like Prague attracted hundreds of people at its first iot meetup a few months ago.<\/p>\n

Screens that hide a world of design opportunities<\/b><\/p>\n

So if designers aren\u2019t working with startups, maybe they\u2019re working with corporations. But then it\u2019s 2016 and Samsung have released a smart fridge which they call the Home Hub. I had to check my watch to make sure I hadn\u2019t been sent back to the 1950s. Home. Hub. Who spends enough time in the kitchen to think that it is the be all and end all of their home life? 1950s housewives. Noone else. I don\u2019t know a single woman who would have the money to buy this fridge and would spend any time at all in her kitchen. Maybe out of guilt of buying a Home Hub for a while. Where were the designers when this was manufacturered?<\/p>\n

Designers go around the world and talk about user-centered design with anger because we don\u2019t understand why people could create such horrors. But that\u2019s because they never showed\u00a0 in the first place. They didn\u2019t want to become middle managers, then proper managers, they wanted to stay close to the craft of design. So that\u2019s what happens when you dissapear inside a company, when you stop inspiring people about what you do and what values you bring. People design fridges with screens on them because we never told them not to. Designers weren\u2019t important enough, the technologists were.<\/p>\n

Designers were given the job of designing the screen\u2019s user experience. Noone stepped up and said: maybe we should rethinking shopping interactions, not the fucking fridge. Not the end point of interaction. But that\u2019s the trouble of the internet of things, there are too many touch points that need designing so we start with the easiest: the screen.<\/p>\n

Exciting, shiny screens! Nevermind the systems and the injustice they enable. Screens can be designed! Interactions can be designed. Some interactions.\u00a0 People\u2019s micro-interactions can be observed without building a physical object, without seeing how quickly they throw your product in the bin or stop using it. Big data up to a point.<\/p>\n

Changes can be made on the fly (sortof). Oh the flexibility, oh the addictiveness. Oh the design possibilities. But not for the dying or the bed-ridden. For the middle class who watched a bit too much Downton Abbey. For people who would never want to have an au pair or a cleaner full time living at home, but still want access to those \u2018services\u2019. So we designed the glossy touch point of the so-called the sharing economy. The economy of job insecurity, exploitation, property bubble, car-obsession and people who are always hungry but can\u2019t cook. We buy crappy furniture off eBay, we leave the seal on our mobile phones so we can sell them on eBay. We get delivery from our favorite restaurants, we stopped going to hotels, we started renting out our apartment to pay for our retirement or our holidays. We went from designing interiors like they really mattered, like people were going to judge us if our napkins didn\u2019t match our plates, to designing our digital wallpapers. Design now allows us to create social value elsewhere, so why bother with interiors and communities.\u00a0 So we engage less with our local community or our local councils. We become the high class citizens of nowhere in particular. High-class migrants with an addiction to television shows, craft hamburgers, expensive coffee and personality-less interiors on instagram.<\/p>\n

But what about all this stuff we\u2019re designing?<\/b><\/p>\n

So how can we even start to think about an industrial revolution which would require us to care about our homes and interiors again? Most of the internet of things is about \u2018smart home\u2019 or \u2018smart city\u2019 service product experiences that feature someone stable, in the 1950s, who will always live in their home.\u00a0 Someone who knows their neighbours, and organises PTA meetings. Someone uses that fridge\u2019s screen to check the weather and the news. Someone who doesn\u2019t have flatmates because they are too poor to live on their own. Someone who is going to care about the napkins matching the plates. Someone who is going to buy fabric napkins in the first place. Someone who doesn\u2019t exist anymore.<\/p>\n

Even Ikea\u2019s Steve Howard says we\u2019ve reached peak stuff, peak home furnishings. Because those things have lost their appeal for us. We\u2019re bored of them, things are much more important online even if that\u2019s not true, it feels true.<\/p>\n

Where can design go now?<\/b><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not true because where we have peaked is in the pointless stuff. We have yet to design the stuff that matters actually. The stuff that is going to permeate our lives soon. We still haven\u2019t seen or thought about the products we\u2019ll need to buy to see if our water is clean, our air is breathable, our family safe and healthy. We still haven\u2019t designed the interactions that will convince our governments that these are important issues and policies need to change. We\u2019ve not even begun to think about how we will deal with the disposal of all the stuff that we\u2019ve decided to through away because we\u2019re reading Marie Kondo. Those are the products and interactions that are going to be really worth designing.<\/p>\n

Those companies of course already exist but they don\u2019t do well, they barely exist on the fringes of what you might call success, mostly because designers don\u2019t get involved or they don\u2019t show up to help. It\u2019s too hard, too techy. But that\u2019s precisely why it\u2019s interesting. Why it\u2019s worth doing. Why it\u2019s worth coming out of your comfort zone, why being a designer should be not only about doing total design, both online and offline. The world is changing and you have to change with it too.<\/p>\n

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Here is the transcript for my talk at IXDA in Helsinki on March 2nd. Il faut confronter les id\u00e9es vagues avec des images claires. – Jean-Luc Godard I want to talk about the areas that were abandoned by design and designers and why they are worth rediscovering. Hello. On good days I describe myself an… Continue reading Anybody Home? Where did design dissapear off to?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conference","category-internet-of-things","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-Am","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2255,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2254\/revisions\/2255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}