![](\"https:\/\/s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com\/originals\/cb\/32\/1e\/cb321ef06df52220bb3fbe7b7e82a10b.jpg\")
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I just came back from CES (thanks to Here<\/a> for flying me over to see their work, I’ll write about that soon too) and wanted to write down some thoughts I’ve been having over the past few months which crystallised during this trip. I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow in Oslo at an event organised by Telenor<\/a>\u00a0which will touch some of what I’ll write about here too.<\/p>\n I’ve been thinking about product design. Technically I studied industrial design<\/a>, graduated from a B.A.(Sc) Sp. in 2004.\u00a0We were never introduced to programming, computer science principles, electronics design or prototyping and the internet was an image search tool for presentations. That was 2004 but I have met\u00a0people who still constrain their product design career that way. The course I studied\u00a0has basically not changed while over the past 12 years,\u00a0product design has been taken away from ‘designers’ to become an extension of computing and the latest technology.<\/p>\n A product has become a physical manifestation of computing capability, with little concern given to the ‘user’ because it is now so cheap to produce something physically, that whether someone finds a product ‘useful’ or not hardly matters.\u00a0It’s about what the ‘user’ can contribute to the computing power and the technology. The function is almost accidental. A physical product is no longer a tool to solve an actual problem. The design of the product is now simply a process of execution of a technological capability, not the core value. The physical product, just an accidental interface to a land of data to be mined. It is a physical access point\u00a0to people’s behaviours, language skills and habits in their home, cars and at work.<\/p>\n A bit like Narcissus, looking into the mirror, we want our technical capabilities to mirror us.\u00a0We are making the mirror.<\/p>\n Robots and assistants at CES were a great examples of design by technologists, of that mirror made physical. I worked for over 2 years for an EU-funded \u00a0social robotics project<\/a> and the computing technology has hardly improved (mostly relying on great copywriters<\/a>) but the access to design means that simple, clunky technology can be made to look final and believable enough for consumers.\u00a0Some of the ‘robot companions’ you can find in the CES Robotics Marketplace<\/a>\u00a0included Abilix<\/a>, Koova<\/a>, Unibot<\/a>, Furo-i Home<\/a>, Loobot<\/a> (don’t ask), Alpha 2<\/a>, Laundroid<\/a>\u00a0(no product pics), Nannybot<\/a>\u00a0and i-RobiQ<\/a>. All a little hopeless, there was also Kuri<\/a>\u00a0a gender-confused (copy uses\u00a0both he and she but not it) home robot launched by Mayfield Robotics. The CTO’s interviewed talks about the technical ability to make robots cost effective, not the fact that there was a great need for them. And that’s the problem in a nutshell.<\/p>\n The expression ‘just because we can doesn’t mean we should’ will become ‘now that we did, why did we again?’ as user and need-driven design has completely disappeared in the developed\u00a0world.<\/p>\n Our biggest problems\u00a0\u00a0have nothing to do with connectivity and technology but we’re enjoying the engineering-led distraction.<\/p>\n Environmental responsibility, ridiculous packaging, data ownership are all areas that people have been thinking and writing about for over 70 years and we have done, as designers, almost nothing about them. At least not enough to fill the halls of CES.<\/p>\n So design, as it was once conceived, is no longer the glue between technical capabilities and user needs. It is simply the physicalisation tool of technologists with no real understanding or appetite for real needs as there are better, advertising led ways of making money. Hardware doesn’t make you money anymore.<\/p>\n How\u00a0did we get here? Well the design industry just went to sleep. It’s star system (Stark, Rashid, B\u00e9har, Mooi, etc) is decades old and young talent\u00a0distracted by it.<\/p>\n For a product designer to want to learn about technology, he\/she would\u00a0not be going to a traditional design course but then he’d lose out on some of the technical essentials of design. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.<\/p>\n There is not yet a space for graduate design education that caters to this new world, that fights back. A world that teaches people that to build great products, a design education isn’t enough, you need financing, marketing, engineering and manufacturing partners. You, actually, need to be a design entrepreneur<\/strong> in order to control the user-need driven vision you are taught in design education. \u00a0And that’s hard to tell someone who, at 18 or 19, \u00a0just knows that they like to draw.<\/p>\n I’d like to try to build such a design\u00a0program longer term. If you’d like to talk about that drop me a line at alex at designswarm dot com. Let’s keep calm, but let’s not carry on. There is much work to do.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Happy New Year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just came back from CES (thanks to Here for flying me over to see their work, I’ll write about that soon too) and wanted to write down some thoughts I’ve been having over the past few months which crystallised during this trip. I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow in Oslo at an event organised… Continue reading The end of design<\/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":"Blogging like it's 2007. 'The end of design'. #iot #robots #AI #CES2017","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":[9,30,109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-internet-of-things","category-robotics","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-Bf","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309","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=2309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2310,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2309\/revisions\/2310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}