The Future of

Product Design

Jonathan Follett

The Future of Product Design

by Jonathan Follett
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Table of Contents

The Future of Product Design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

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

1
4
5
7
16
20
22
23

The Future of Product Design

Jonathan Follett

A Product Design Renaissance

The world is changing. The lines between software and hardware
blur; fresh approaches to manufacturing reduce the time from idea
to market; and new smart objects and systems herald our connected
future.1
A product design renaissance might be on its way, but despite all
this potential and promiseor maybe because of itthe ride could
well 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.
Theres never been a better time to be a product designer, although
theres also perhaps never been a more confusing time, either. Today,
the combination of emerging technologies and powerful new
resources and methodsfrom open source reference designs to
crowdfundingare democratizing innovation, compressing the
design cycle, and reshaping the relationship between consumer and
product. If the amalgam of user experience (UX), software, indus
trial, material, and engineering design had a name, it would proba
bly be product designalthough its likely that product designers
themselves wouldnt agree on it.

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 OReilly editors Mike Loukides and
Jon Bruner.

In this report, well examine from a product designers perspective

the ways in which these changes are disrupting design and the prod
uct lifecycle as well as considerations for people and companies
looking at new ways of approaching product innovation and cre
ation. This is not an all-encompassing overview; rather, its a snap
shot of a rapid evolution, as seen from the trenches of product
design.

Is This the Third Industrial Revolution?

Twenty-first century product design is being disrupted by factors
both cultural and technological. The confluence of crowdsourcing,
new manufacturing methods, and other emerging technologies has
set 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 customers whims, is falling.
The factory of the future will focus on mass customization and may
look more like... weavers cottages than Fords assembly line.

In this new revolution, economies of scale and the mass production

required to reach these are replaced by the efficiency and leverage of
highly targeted, rapidly developed, and, hopefully, less wasteful
products that retain an artisanal value for the consumer.
Manufacturing for the mass market will no doubt remain for the
many products that have a universal appeal, but for those items that
truly intersect with our unique needsthat seem to have our per
sonal imprint in themthese individualized products will grow and
flourish in a new period of craftsmanship at scale.
In this burgeoning new era, the designers understanding of the user
will be paramountan in-depth comprehension that goes beyond
typical 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 were not talking personalization in a trivial way, such as
printing a childs name on a toy, or a familys photo on a coffee mug;
this new personalization will be the creation of objects that fit into
our daily lives with impeccable ease. For example, for the busy par
2 http://www.economist.com/node/21553017 (accessed April 20, 2015)

The Future of Product Design

ent perhaps a set of connected home appliances that help to measure

the overall nutrition, caloric intake, from freezer to refrigerator, to
oven for each family members meals; or for the avid athlete, custom
training gear that adheres to changing body measurements and
adjusts 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 to
the trillions of dollars of market disruption for the Internet of
Things (IoT), robotics, and so on, and we can begin to appreciate
the scale of change that is coming.

Reshaping the world

If past is indeed prologue, we must come to terms with the fact that
although the emerging technologies of the Second Industrial Revo
lutionfrom the automobile to electric powerreshaped the world,
they did so in many ways that were negative as well as positive.
From rampant pollution to the abuse of our planets natural resour
ces, the environmental consequences that are the Second Industrial
Revolutions legacy remain critical areas with which we must con
tend.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century: If we consider the massive
number of new objects that a product renaissancepropelled by the
IoT and 3D printingcould bring, introducing millions of new
things into our world, its clear we must also consider design not just
for mass adoption, but also for mass decline and return to the
stream 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 and
knowledge to invest in time-consuming R&D cycles, complex man
ufacturing lines, long supply chains, and expensive marketing and
distribution. And even though there were certainly plenty of upstart
startups and disruptors, these were far from the norm.
3 Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business and the global

economy.

A Product Design Renaissance

Emerging technologies are not just changing whats being made or

how fast its being developed, theyre also changing who is capable of
making it. The ambitious entrepreneur who understands an audi
encethe young mother who has an idea for improving products
for her baby or the coffee fanatic who can see the future of special
ized brewingare enabled to move their ideas from mind to reality,
from napkin sketch to use by an appreciative audience. And, as these
technologies evolve and mature, we can expect more democratiza
tion to come.

The Evolution of Product Design

The powerful interplay between innovative use of new technologies
and creative methods for working collaboratively is transforming
product design.

New Ways of Working

Sometimes, we forget that we are still, relatively speaking, in the first
moments of the information age, saddled with the legacy structures
of the industrial past. These structures continue to govern and guide
our interactionsfrom societal to organizational to interpersonal
despite being relics of a bygone era. As such, we are still discovering
how to organize our efforts together when it comes to knowledge
work, 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 opportunities
for building objects in both the digital and physical worlds. And, if
building on the work of others is crucial to innovation and human
advancement, the speed at which this work is disseminated and reused 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 real
time.

Preparing for a new product lifecycle

A product typically moves from design, to prototype, then into the
marketplace, 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
4

The Future of Product Design

actions between a product and the marketplace, and ultimately

between the product and the many people who use it. It is on this
foundation 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 creating
entirely new ones, as well. We can already see that the lines between
software and hardware products disappearing as the many variants
of the IoTfrom 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 between
biological and mechanical products will follow suit. Not only must
companies contend with the difficulties of introducing emerging
tech into their product portfolio, they must negotiate a labyrinth of
complex factors as the product lifecycle itself is remade. Within this
new product lifecycle, as designers, we must be concerned with the
myriad of development and production considerations, which will
vary at every stage.

Part 1. Hello, Market!

At the market introduction stage of the product lifecycle, the cost of
designing, prototyping, and validating with users continues to drop
precipitously due to advances in 3D printing, open source designs
for 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 at
Dragon Innovation, a hardware innovation and manufacturing con
sultancy.
Scott reflects on his experiences with prototyping the original
Roomba 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 stereolithog
raphy, or SLA, which was incredibly brittle. There are all sorts of
Part 1. Hello, Market!

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 Mod
eling] 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 variables, and hes spinning
motors.
Theres been a really interesting abstraction from the complexity of
how the thing actually works to much more of a, Lets focus on get
ting the product working and not worrying as much about the
details. I think thats incredibly enabling for the prototype.

Software and the Speed of Sharing

The speed, agility, and open ethos of the software world have made
inroads 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 as
the sharing of mechanical and electrical designs means that such
elements are reusable.
In the realm of software development, services such as GitHub make
it easy to keep track of and share codecreating a virtuous cycle in
which designers and engineers can build upon the foundations of
open source libraries and contribute back to the larger community.
Electrical engineers are starting to take a similar approach using
services such as Upverter, where they can share reference designs.
Although still in its early stages, Upverter has made the leap from an
initial user base of hobbyists and hackers to enterprise clients. Simi
larly, on the mechanical side, GrabCAD makes it possible for engi
6

The Future of Product Design

neers to share models so that they dont need to design a product

from 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 software
could be a barrier to entry for a startup. CAD software can be
expensive, especially if youre an early-stage company with a great
idea for a product and not much else. Enter the next generation of
CAD in the cloud, with less-expensive alternatives to traditional seat
licenses, like subscription pricing and even free versions. CAD soft
ware is being reinvented with the nimble startups, makers, and
hackers in mind. In this realm, both established players like Auto
desk, with its Fusion 360 offering, and newcomers like Onshape, a
company started by the former founders of SolidWorks, are compet
ing to become the product designers 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. The
timeline from the napkin sketch to the works-like/looks-like model
has become incredibly compressed, making it possible now for
designers to get something in a customers hands quickly. Although
the first prototype version might well be unrefined and buggy,
designers and engineers are able to learn much from quick iteration
cycles, as opposed to trying to make that perfect initial productan
ethos not all that much different from that practiced by their coun
terparts in software.
And, on the business and finance side, crowdfunding is wrapping
test marketing, promotion, and preliminary sales into a convenient
package. Early adopters from Kickstarter or IndieGoGo become
your core test audience, giving startups a critical initial market for
their new product ideas. Crowdfunding also limits the amount of
money you need to recoup from R&D, or, at least, it gives you the
opportunity to find that initial capital.

Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of

Production in Volume
When youve proven theres a product/market fit for your prototype
and validated the features and price point, the next great challenge
for product companies comes with the shift to manufacturing in

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

volume. Not only do larger product runs require an equally large

financial investment, but quality control becomes increasingly diffi
cult.
If all goes well on the market side, the adoption rate for your prod
uct will acceleraterepresented by the so-called growth hockey
stick on the graphas the products audience moves from early
adopters 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 create
injection-molded parts, which is by far the fastest and most reliable
process for manufacturing runs of plastic parts in volume. But steel,
of course, cant be easily changed after its created, so the penalties
for generating an incorrect mold can be substantial.
At least for the time being, you cant 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 next
evolutionary phase of the product renaissance could be on the vol
ume manufacturing side. Looking even farther out, we can see how
the advances in emerging technologies like robotics will make
greater 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 interactive
product designers can use from prototype into production. Techni
cal Machines Tessel 2, shown in Figure 1-1, appeals to those entre
preneurs who find themselves caught in that awkward production
middle ground where a startup could be supported by thousands of
crowdfunding backers, but lack the tens of thousands of early
adopters necessary to ensure the economies of scale that make vol
ume manufacturing sensible.

The Future of Product Design

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

The team at Technical Machine realized that because most existing
prototyping products on the market today werent designed to scale
for production, it could help product designers and engineers take
that next step. The popular Raspberry Pi board, for instance, was
designed to be a learning tool; try to put it into your production
product, though, and youll find that the sourcing costs at volume
make it prohibitive to use. Tessel 2 fills that gap, serving not just as a
development board, but also as a path from development into pro
duction.
If youre generating the first batches of a product for early adopters,
the volumes needed can be in the low thousands. With these kinds
of numbers, its very possible that using an off-the-shelf part makes
more 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 for
off-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, lets just take
those ports off and save them money on their bill of materials. Thats
relatively easy to do. Were trying to find these creative ways to make

Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume

pseudo-customization possible at this median-level scale for people

who 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 wanted
to be able to make hardware at the same sort of iteration speed that
we made software. Obviously its not going to be entirely possible
because theres shipping physical goods involved in that, but... theres
a lot of room for improvement.

A Tale from the Trenches: Dragon Innovation and the

Challenge of Going from One to Many
Dragon Innovation is a manufacturing services firm that helps both
startups and established companies negotiate the difficult terrain of
outsourced production and the challenge of moving from prototype
to 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
10

The Future of Product Design

strong foundation and create a successful company. But, if you get it

wrong, then its like death by a thousand cuts, and its very, very dif
ficult to recover, says Scott Miller, Dragons 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. (Photo

courtesy Dragon Innovation)

Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume

11

More often than not, youre not going to find them doing a web
search, because its very difficult to know whos good and whos not
good. At Dragon, weve got a database of a couple hundred factories
weve worked with and are constantly expanding that, Scott
explains.

The Request-for-Quote process

For the product designer, understanding the ins and outs of putting
together a Request for Quote (RFQ) can be intimidating. As a part
of an RFQ package, the team at Dragon recommends that you have
three to five factories bid on your work so that you can have a strong
basis for a line-by-line pricing comparison.
The first part of the RFQ consists of a document describing the
product, company, and team, as well as the key areas in which
theyre looking for assistance from the factory. If youre a startup,
this document can be crucial because reputable factories in the Far
East work with substantially larger customers, making money when
shipping products in volume, not in short runs. Its critical in the
RFQ, therefore, that a startup illustrate for potential manufacturing
partners the opportunity that comes from working with them.
The second part of the RFQ is the Bill of Materials (BOM), which
specifies all the component parts and quantities needed to construct
the end product. The BOM is critical for having insight into the cost
of everything thats going into a product, as well as being able to
make comparisons between different factories.
The third part is the all-important schedule. As Scott explains,
Once youve got that, you go visit the factories [Figure 1-4], start to
figure out whos good to work with, the capability of the team...
things like that. Then, finally, youll come back and do the apples-toapples comparison to understand the key cost drivers, and then how
they line up, based on your visit. Having gone through that process,
a company is in a great position to pick a factory.

12

The Future of Product Design

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

At Dragon, were always agnostic on where our customers build.
The only thing we care [about] is that they succeed. Because we
build a lot of consumer electronics, China often makes sense; but if
youre doing lower volumesay, under 5,000 units, as a rough
guidelinethe 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 youve got the
molding, the SMT [Surface-Mount Technology] for the circuit
board, the quality testing, and the pack-out all in one facility.
Whereas in the United States, it tends to be more fragmented. You
may 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 thats conducive to that, but the process is
exactly the same.
As product designers, its important that we understand how manu
facturing processes work, how they could change in the future,
where there are risks, and where theres room for greater efficiency.
However, with outsource manufacturing this can be difficult to do
because 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 well
be that service innovation, like that provided by Dragon, will be the
driver of disruption.

David meets Goliath: Achieving Innovation Speed for

Enterprise Companies
With emerging technologies moving more quickly than ever, it can
be hard to steer a large vessel, such as an enterprise organization, to
take advantage of them.
For larger companies that already have an established product port
folio and are seeing innovation happening at the grassroots level, the
ability to utilize crowd-sourcing or rapid prototyping might still be
problematic. The question comes down to this: when is it appropri
ate to retool a product process when youve got standard operational
procedures that make money for you today?
The ambiguity that can come with experimentation is always scary
and potentially costly. And, there are many aspects of innovation
process that dont match up with the large company production
methods optimized to do one thing really well.
According to Dragons Scott Miller, When it comes to product
design and development, the biggest thing on the minds of the
CEOs 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 on
top of things? Their biggest concern is how do they innovate more
quickly. Its certainly a challenge. If you look at what it takes to move
the needle for a big company versus a small one, its a tremendous
amount of volume. When you do that, theres a lot more risk, that its
very difficult to fail fast to succeed sooner.

Risk Taking and the Enterprise

Enterprise companies dont want to lose out on opportunities
because they cant 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 incubatorswhere employees can have greater free
dom to experiment outside the regular organizational structureis
a reasonable strategy. For example, the Boston area is a hotbed of

14

The Future of Product Design

large-company innovation lab activity, from CVS, Johnson & John

son, Staples, Verizon, and others.

Small Pilots
In 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 daya
difficult outcome for product designers, indeed. For even the largest
of companies it can be understandably difficult to justify occupying
a manufacturing facility and initiating a 100,000-unit run when you
lack all but the most basic of market validation.
However, in contrast today, as large companies recognize the impor
tance of rapid innovation, theyre finding ways to run smaller pilot
programsmanufacturing 5,000 to 10,000 units in order to get a
full understanding of the product/market fit. By testing products in
the market at a small scale and gathering data quickly, companies
can make informed decisions about whether they should scale-up
manufacturing. If a company gets the signal that theres strength to a
product line, they can ramp up to full-scale production rapidly.

Developing Infrastructure
The product landscape is changing as Fortune 500 companies begin
placing their bets on emerging technologies. At the 2015 Consumer
Electronics Show (CES), Samsung announced its focus on the IoT
and the connected home. This might have seemed like a big bet for
the tech giant. The bigger play, however, might not be in the way
Samsung changes peoples 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 be
years 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 at
emerging technology consultancy, Involution Studios. WiFi net
works require a lot of power to connect to and are inconsistent.
Theyre not universal. We see a lot of devices tethering to a phone to
use that Internet connection. That still has issues.
Salinas continues, If youre one of these small companies that are
building 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 and
smaller companies, the opportunities lie in bringing products to
market quickly, even if youre playing on someone elses network or
using someone elses infrastructure. For the larger companies, mak
ing that network, driving the standards, and owning the ecosystem
are the big plays in the long term.

Part 3. Product as Dialogue

We are approaching a moment when product lifecycle maturity does
not preclude further innovation; rather, it provides a platform for it.
In the past, companies have dealt with mature product linesthose
with wide adoption but minimal growthby adding more features
and attempting to find new uses and audiences to rejuvenate them.
Of the many places in the product development and manufacturing
lifecycle that can be disrupted, this could be one of the most signifi
cant. Emerging technologies, especially the bevy of connected
machines promised by the IoT, offer an opportunity for companies
to not only regularly update, but also analyze usage data returning
from these connected machinesmaking mass customization on a
user level possible. This data-driven interplay between company and
consumer, between user and designer, might begin to alter the prod
uct lifecycle to resemble more of an ongoing flow.
If data flow goes both waysa conversation between designer and
user, rather than a speechthe product represents a living relation
ship and is never fully completed. Rather than think about a finished
product, as designers we should also incorporate into our thinking
how a company can be hyper-responsive to users of its products.
Connected devices and the IoT offer great potential for creating
ongoing dynamic interaction. For example, consider a product such
as 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 usage
patterns. Through this, the relationship that we have with our wash
ing machine changes, and the decisions that the designer and the
manufacturer make about which wash cycles to push to us become
valuable touchpoints in an ongoing conversation.

16

| The Future of Product Design

A Tale from the Trenches: Making LEO, The Maker Prince

LEO, The Maker Prince is a book by Carla Diana (a Smart Design
fellow and New York Times contributor) that celebrates emerging
technology, inspiring young designers with a creative message, made
possible by 3D printing.
LEO, a visitor from space who you can see in Figure 1-5, prints 3D
models based on sketches that are created by the books narrator.
The imaginative tale can truly become real for readers, as designs of
the characters are available for them to 3D print, along with various
accessories, 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 works
on the books website and Diana makes ongoing adjustments to the
designs based on input from them. So, the book in some sense, is
always being updated, and Diana is having a conversation with the
books readers through the medium of a physical product.
One reason Diana created a childrens book about 3D printing was
to put virtual objects such as those in Figure 1-6 out in the world as
an experiment to see who downloaded them, why they downloaded
them, 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 never
done this before.
People commented to me about some of the prints. They said, Oh,
this particular part grows more successfully for me standing
upright. I worked as hard as I could to try to get the objects to print
as well as they would with a typical FDM at-home printer. That was
a really interesting moment for me, too, because I felt like, Oh, I can
try 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 to
distribution: A designer, manufacturer, entrepreneur no longer has
to think about, Okay, well how many parts of this do I have to make
and where does it get warehoused? Where does it get distributed
and what retailers is it going to? Theres that whole dream of the
streamline distribution and I think its very realistic, states Diana
enthusiastically.

A Tale from the Trenches: Understanding Consumer

Decision Making
How does a company know when its time to place a bet on emerg
ing technologies?

18

The Future of Product Design

I think disruption for disruptions sake will never win, says Ellen
DiResta, a strategic design advisor for companies like Sanofi and
Becton Dickinson, and former Managing Director for innovation
consultancy Design Continuum.
DiResta goes on to say, Every single client I have, I always love the
moment when I say to them: Nobody wants your products. No one
wants to buy an extra thing. Nobody wants to think about your stuff.
The people who think the most about your products are you guys.
Thats it. You have to give them something. You have to enable them
to do something. If you dont know what that is, and youre busy just
focused on your thing, you will miss the mark eventually.
The relationship between the designer and the user of products is
becoming ever closer. Understanding the intrinsic motivations of
the 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 customers
can be deeper and potentially longer standing.
DiResta suggests that companies need to avoid being seduced by the
functionality of a potentially disruptive technology; instead, they
need to ask, How can these capabilities better enable our custom
ers? At the same time, the product designer needs to understand
the full extent of a technologys capabilities, because from this
knowledge, 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 consumers choices might
be something that theyre not ever going to be aware of, let alone be
something that they can articulate.

Decision Motivators
When I worked with a housewares company, I was interviewing
women at home who had kids in school. One lived in a very
depressed area and another person lived in Wellesley, Massachu
setts, which is very affluent, DiResta elaborates.
They had very similar values. Their choices were very different
because 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 she
grew up so privileged and isolated and segregated... She felt like she
lived in a bubble. She wanted her kids to have a chance to be more
normal. Wanted and picked Wellesley and had a very, very nice
housebut by her background standards, very modestbecause
she wanted her kids to be normal.
The other woman home-schooled her kids, because she felt that the
school in town was just bad. Her house was not that great, but she
said, I cant send my kids to this school and expect them to ever get
out 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 you
reversed the two people, they would be making the same choices as
each other. The values that those products or services had to speak
to had to be the same.
The disruptive technologies that will be the most successful will
enable people to do what they want to do from the beginningjust
in better ways that fit with their changing context. Thats really
what Apple did, DiResta says. Nobody wants to interact with tech
nology. Apple provided technology in a way that you can work
through technology to do the things you want to do.

Part 4. Design for End-of-Life

Sooner or later, a product will reach the end of its useful life. As
overall usage declines, a company will gradually reduce support for
it, and eventually sunset, or phase-out, that product.
If one of the natural outcomes of a Product Renaissance will be a
great many new products imagined and brought into the world,
designers will increasingly need to be concerned about the entirety
of the product lifecycle including its decline, and perhaps most
important, with what happens to the product after people are no
longer using it.
Although we as designers might not like to admit it, the fact is that
design and pollution are inexorably connected. The design activities
in which we engage at the beginning of the product lifecycle inevita
bly create positive or negative environmental outcomes at its end-oflife. To effect positive outcomes, we can and should ask: What are
the 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 has
come. The Design for Environment (DfE) program, put in place by
the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as far
back as 1992, includes as a part of its toolkit the lifecycle assessment
(LCA), a systems-based approach to quantifying the human health
and environmental impacts associated with a products life from
cradle to grave.
Today, using software tools such as thinksteps GaBi, designers can
complete a product lifecycle assessment to determine its carbon,
water, and overall environmental footprint, along with resource and
energy efficiency for its manufacturing and usage.
We can select materials that are environmentally friendly early in the
manufacturing process, because recently there has been great inno
vation in materials such as biodegradable plastics.
From a recycling standpoint, the biggest opportunity might lie in
Design for Disassembly (DfD), making electronic products much
easier to separate into their core componentsfrom circuit boards
to metal and plastic partsand sending each of these into their
appropriate recycling streams. Perhaps one day, hopefully in the
not-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 strives
to 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 products end-of-lifewhether
it be for disassembly and recycling or remanufacturingdoes take
more effort, there is a tremendous opportunity here for product
designers to take responsibility for and control of the aspects of the
product lifecycle that were overlooked during previous eras. For
both startups and large companies alike, this systemic view of prod
uct design is worth remembering, when encountering the pressures
to release something quickly and just get a product on the shelf.

On-Demand Production
In the future, we can also consider that there might be no need to
phase out products if manufacturing can be generated on demand
and 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 books

with an audience will never go out of print. The digital files for any
book can be stored in the cloud until a customer orders it, at which
point the book is printed, bound, and shipped. Its not hard to imag
ine a similar scenario for more complex products. There are already
3D printing platforms today, such as Shapeways, for creating simple
objects on demand. In a similar way, distributed manufacturing is
becoming reality as crowdsource services such as 3DHubs give mak
ers access to an extensive local network of 3D printers. We can
imagine how distributed fabrication for business might be accom
plished with such a system: add together enough 3DHub providers
in an area and you could quickly complete a modest run, depending
on the availability of the network.

Conclusion
In this evolving world of emerging technology and product creation,
designers who can create objects that are both compelling to the
consumer and within the bounds of manufacturing capabilities will
be exceptionally valuable. Understanding your materialswhat they
can do and what they can tolerateis 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, but
also 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 designer
known worldwide for his landmark product designs for Braun and
Vitsoe, well conclude with three principles for good product design
in 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 togetherfrom crowdsourc
ing to open source reference designswe can stand on the
shoulders 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 planning
that enables disassembly, recycling, and even remanufacturing.

Companies, Products, and Links

Throughout this report, weve discussed a variety of companies and
products to illustrate important concepts in and approaches to
product design for emerging technologies. Table 1-1 lists these com
panies and products, ordered alphabetically, along with relevant
links 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/VacuumCleaning/Roomba

Shapeways

Shapeways, Inc.

http://www.shapeways.com

SolidWorks

Dassault Systmes 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 Author

Jonathan Follett is a principal at Involution Studios where he is a
designer, business lead, and internationally published author on the
topics of user experience and information design.
His most recent book, Designing for Emerging Technologies: UX for
Genomics, Robotics, and the Internet of Things (OReilly) was pub
lished in December 2014. He is also a co-author of Beautiful Data:
The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions (OReilly). Over the past
decade, Jon has written for online and print publications including
A 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 the
future. Jon is a classically trained pianist who dreams of one day
having a family rock band with his two sons. Find him on Twitter at
@jonfollett.

Acknowledgements
The 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 that
there can be no shame in admitting that even those of us closest to it
can only guess where its going.
The designers, engineers, and product folks who were kind enough
to talk with me and inform and refine my thinking for this report
include Drew Carlton, Carla Diana, Jeff Champagne, Ellen DiResta,
Craig Mauch, Jon McKay, Scott Miller, and Ben Salinas. I couldnt
have put this together without them.
As usual, the OReilly Media editorial team was fantastically suppor
tive. Both Mary Treseler and Angela Rufino have pushed me to
articulate the promise I see in the design field of the twenty-first
century.
I should say, as well, that my wife Jen tolerates my late night writing
binges, of which she has supported more than her fair share.
Lets make something great.