Pocobor.

A big topic of worry right now in the US is the outsourcing of jobs. A lot of people are wondering how we as Americans can be competitive when wages in so many other parts of the world are so low. Now while this is open to debate, I believe that in order to stay competitive in the 21st century, America has to lead the way in technology and innovation; we have to lead the world in new ideas.

The advent of globalization and low wage jobs abroad means that the only way we can compete is by being ahead of the bell curve when it comes to technology. But if we are to lead the way in technology and innovation, we need our students to enter fields like engineering and science. Unfortunately, the percentage of students going into science and technology is on the decline in the US1, which is very bad news.

Why is this bad news? Because without the proper training, American students will not have the tools to create the things we dream up. Degrees in engineering and science are the tools American students will need if they hope to be leaders in technology.

Ok, so we have a problem, but how do we fix it?

How do we convince American students to go into science and engineering? The key to this riddle, in my opinion, is women.  Studies have shown that women have a huge influence on the education of their children (both boys and girls)2.  If more women go into engineering, then more of their children will be exposed to engineering, and it becomes a positive feedback cycle.  Already in the US, the fields of law and medicine, which were historically male dominated fields, have a higher application rate among women than men3.  This suggests that just because science and technology have traditionally been male dominated fields, this can change.

But how do we go about convincing the next generation of women to enter engineering and science?

I think the trick here is to redesign science and engineering curriculum and the tools used in these fields, such as calculators, computers, or microscopes, to appeal to women.

An example of how this can be effective can be seen in urban biking in the US versus Europe4. Bike infrastructure in Europe was designed to address women’s innate risk aversion; instead of sharing the roads with automobiles many bike lanes in Europe have their own dedicated lanes, completely separated from automotive traffic. In addition, unlike many dedicated bike lanes in the US that simply run through parks or along river promenades, the bike lanes in Europe were designed to access useful parts of the city, such as local shopping centers, thus making biking practical as a means of running errands.

By examining the gender disparity in urban biking between the US and Europe, it is possible to see the effects of designing bicycle infrastructure for women and how that affects overall bicycle usage. In the US urban biking is 66:33, male to female. At the same time the overall percentage of urban biking in the US is 2%, compared to 12% in Germany where the gender disparity is 51:49, male to female, and 27% in Netherlands, where the disparity is actually in the other direction 45:55, male to female. From this it can be surmised that by making it more appealing for women to ride bicycles you actually increase the overall number of bikers.

I believe the same can be true for women in engineering, and the overall number of Americans going into engineering.

How do we redesign tools and curriculum that are more appealing to women?

I think the first step in addressing how to make the tools and curriculum for science and technology more appealing to women is to bring women into the design process. For example, using sports in a physics textbook to describe a physical phenomenon (such as a baseball flying through the air under the influence of gravity) implies that you are familiar with baseball, a male dominated sport.

Another area of possible improvement is in the redesign of the tools we use, such as graphing calculators. If a woman were to design a calculator, would it still look like what we envision a calculator to look like? Screen on top, keys on bottom, basic 3 x 3 number pad? I don’t know the answer to this question, but we need to at least reexamine the possibility that the tools we use in science and technology have historically been designed for men, which might be radically different from how women would want to use them.

I think it would be very interesting to put together a team of designers and educators- half female, half male- and tell them to create from scratch a science and technology curriculum including the tools needed, from microscopes to software, and see what the final result would is. I bet it will be drastically different from what we currently have in our schools today.

Design matters, and I think the first step to making science and engineering appealing to women is to re-examine how science and engineering is presented in school from a design aesthetic. This in turn will lead to more women going into science and engineering, which will hopefully result in more Americans in general going into science and engineering, which is the key to America remaining a leader in technology and innovation as we go forward in the 21st century.

Bracket from 1883 Tournament of Genius.

The Original Feud
Though Thomas Edison is remembered as one of the most prolific, influential, and successful inventors in history, he actually lost one of his biggest professional battles.  He spent a large portion of his life wrapped up in a struggle over the future of electricity.  He advocated the use of DC (direct current) power and bitterly opposed champions of AC (alternating current) power such as Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse.  The “War of Currents” was heated enough that Edison became involved in the development of the electric chair, despite his opposition to capital punishment, to demonstrate what he saw as the dangers of AC power.  He also publicly executed a number of animals via electrocution to prove his point.

In the end, Edison lost; today virtually any wall outlet in the world provides AC power.  However, I think the pendulum may be swinging back and I’m going to float the argument that DC power will enjoy much more widespread use in the next hundred years than in the past hundred.

AC vs. DC Power
It’s actually not quite accurate to imply that DC power has not been used since AC won the power generation and transmission war.  However, it is illustrative to look at the two types of power and their advantages and disadvantages.

DC power uses unidirectional flow of electric charge and is produced by batteries, solar cells, and dynamo-type electric generators.  Generally speaking, it is more difficult to transmit over long distances than AC power without significant energy loss (although high voltage direct current – HVDC – can be used for efficient transmission in certain settings).  Since the adoption of AC power for the electrical grid, the chief use of DC has been in battery-powered applications.

AC power, on the other hand, uses bidirectional flow of electric charge and offers significant advantages over DC for highly efficient power transmission.  Because the power grid is AC, most of the devices in our lives that plug into the wall are designed and optimized for an AC power source (although many of the devices internally convert the power to DC for use).

Centralization vs. Localization
The power grid approach, that has dominated since Edison’s time, uses a combination of large, centralized power plants with a network of transmission and distribution lines to send the power where it needs to go.  AC power is the logical choice in a power grid, because of power transmission advantages. Historically, the economics of power plant design have made a distributed, localized model infeasible.  However, things are now changing.

The Coming Sea Change
Renewable energy generation via technologies such as solar, wind, and hydropower looks to be the way of the future (initially in combination with fossil fuels and eventually exclusively).  In particular, technologies such as solar have a few interesting characteristics: (1) they output DC power and (2) they lend themselves well to a distributed model.  For instance, it’s easy to put solar panels on every roof in a city so that all the buildings are generating power, whereas it doesn’t make sense to have a coal power plant in every home.  In a situation like this, power transmission is not much of an issue since the power is being used in the same place it is being generated.  That being the case, there is no need to convert to AC, send to the wall outlet, and then convert back to DC for use.

Bottom Line
The reason that the today’s electric grid uses AC power (efficient transmission) will matter less and less in a future world where power generation takes place in a more distributed fashion.  Imagine a 12/24VDC world, instead of the 120/240VAC world of today (this brings up a number of questions and issues in its own right, which probably deserve their own post, but we’ll set those aside for now).  The opportunities to both redesign existing appliances and devices and also to create new products that fully take advantage of the new power paradigm are staggering.  So I throw out a challenge to the designers of the world: look around and start thinking about optimizing electrical products for low voltage, DC power – and make Edison proud.

A research project, called Skal, allows users to control a media center by placing different physical objects embedded with RFID tags in a bowl embedded with an RFID reader.

Timo Arnall, from the Oslo School of Architecture & Design, spoke last month at the “IxDA Interaction 10″ about how technology and networked objects are providing an entirely new interaction category. Designers and engineers, including Pocobor, are embedded technology into products that are providing an entirely new user experience. He stresses the difficulty and importance of communicating and/or visualizing the captured data for immediate feedback and for reflection in the future.

I’ve embedded the video of his presentation below for you to take a look. He focuses primarily on his research using RFID, but sprinkled throughout are some interesting comments about designing for this new product category. Enjoy.

An Eskimo can build an igloo in 40 minutes (how to build an igloo). It took three friends and me almost 11 hours to build our first igloo. BUT, the resulting structure and the night of sleep within were very satisfying. On the spectrum of technology, an igloo is much like a wheel: low tech on the whole, but very technical in the details. It is a remarkable structure that is elegant, highly efficient, and can be built using only snow and a saw. However, each block of the igloo must be shaped and placed very carefully if the structure is to support itself.

When we set out into the woods near Lake Tahoe, I brought my mobile phone just in case of an emergency. I tend to do this a lot (“just in case”), but normally there ends up being no phone signal and my phone is dead weight. However, when we arrived at the site of our soon-to-be igloo, I was surprised to see that I had full reception for my phone. With lots of work ahead of us and having no interest in receiving phone calls or emails, I turned off the phone and set it aside. This was no place for technology! We were there to build an igloo!

The next morning, before leaving, we discussed ways to document our little snow dwelling. Beyond the many photographs taken, we decided we should create a blog for the igloo (in hopes that others might find it and update us on its standing). We originally planned to do this once we got back to civilization, but with 3G mobile coverage, we realized that we could do it all from within the igloo! It was quite a technological contrast – using an iPhone to create a blog from within an igloo.

It is this technological contrast that I wish to highlight here. We live in a world of technology, but we also live in a world of igloos. As we get caught up in email, apps (the iGloo app is the next big thing), and digital everything, it is important to remember the simpler, perhaps more elegant, forms of technology that have existed for thousands of years. While the latest technology may be the best thing since sliced bread, sliced bread may just be the best thing since the igloo.

Check out this great book I used for reference and build your own!

Recently Gizmodo put up an article about a project one of our interns was working on while she was here at Pocobor. The project is a ring bearer robot for her sister’s wedding. I remember her working on it while she was here, and thinking, this is going to be a very interesting wedding. I’m glad everything worked out well, and hopefully the robot didn’t drink too much and hit on the DJ equipment. Not funny? Ok, here’s the full article.

A prototype version of the soft morphing blob robot.

I recently heard about a robot being developed jointly by iRobot and researchers at the University of Chicago that sounds like science fiction come to life. The concept is a soft, shape-shifting robot that moves by something called “jamming skin enabled locomotion.” Check out the video that the researchers have released that does a much better job than I can of explaining the ideas behind the technology and showing their prototype in action (to skip the details and get to the action, scroll to 1:50):

I am excited about this project for several reasons. First of all, there are some very interesting potential applications enabled by the robot’s ability to morph its shape and traverse complex terrain. Such a device could squeeze through small holes or cracks and be an extremely valuable tool for rescue operations (think collapsed buildings, for instance) as well as national security purposes (I would guess that this is why DARPA is funding the project).

Second of all, I think the project is a great example of a concept that is captivating enough to generate excitement in people who wouldn’t normally care about advances in robotics. The idea is so fanciful and yet at the same time easy to understand that it has a way of capturing the imagination (for me, at least). And anything that gets more people interested in science, technology and engineering is good news in my book.

Tesla Motors is exhibiting its Roadster Sport next month at the Detroit Auto Show. They are “shipping” their car by driving it the 2700 miles between Los Angeles and Detroit. The cool thing is they are going to drive the car 2700 miles without having to use a single gallon of gasoline. It’s true that they will need to recharge their batteries from the grid every couple of hundred miles, but at least their power “could” be coming from a renewable energy source like wind or solar. It’s a start.

In general I love the idea of electric cars. They’re clean, they’re quiet, and they use electric-motors, which means high low-end torque and great acceleration!

I’d also like to congratulate Laurel, one of our former interns. She’s now an employee at Tesla Motors and has been chosen to drive one of the legs of the trip to Detroit. Have fun.

Here’s a link to the official website for the Tesla drive to Detroit: http://www.teslamotors.com/roadtrip/

We recently returned from an amazing two week trip to Uganda, Africa! We were there deploying a handful of product prototypes for a field study and meeting our users face to face. The image above is the site of one of the deployments, which was a typical off-grid (no electricity) village home and business. It was an amazing hands on, user-centric design experience, which gave me the opportunity to identify and empathize with the end user. An incredible amount of information was exchanged and user behavior understood in a very short amount of time. From the first deployment on, opportunities and design changes have been swirling in my head. Now that we’re back in SF we’re ready for the next phase of the project, even as field data continues to trickle in.

I enjoyed experiencing the polarity of the bustling city and the quiet and peaceful country. The capital city, Kampala, was vibrant and alive with movement everywhere. The countryside was beautiful with more rolling green hills (and Matooke, the local green plantain) then I’ve ever seen. The people were incredibly welcoming, friendly, and hospitable, which made us feel immediately comfortable and at home in both the city and the country. I’d just recommend using extra caution when crossing the road; the pedestrian in Uganda has no right of way.

The electronics district in Kampala.

Does it get greener than this?

A recent email thread from bird-watchers in my hometown got me thinking about the interaction between technology, nature, and humans. An osprey, a fish-eating bird of prey, named Mr. Hannah, has traveled over 3,000 miles south from New England into the Amazon over the past few weeks, and thanks to an electronic transmitter strapped onto him, humans now have even more reason to envy birds and their worldly travels. We may be able to use calculus, and we’re smart enough to worry about the future, but I’d bet that you might trade some brain power for a pair of wings and a self-guided tour of the globe. The maps show the September and October journey of Mr. Hannah down into South America. See this website for further detail of Mr. Hannah’s journey.

The specifics of bird migrations have long been an incomplete puzzle to scientists, but with data from birds such as Mr. Hannah the Osprey, the puzzle pieces are falling into place. Many technologies have converged to make this possible. GPS and satellite communication hardware have become small enough to be carried by a bird, batteries have reached a critical size, power, and weight to be highly portable, and information systems now exist to receive and manage the data as it is sent from remote transmitters.

There is no doubt that this miniaturization trend will continue to accelerate. The limits of size, power, and complexity will be pushed to satisfy our increasingly demanding expectations and will enable scientific investigation, such as that seen with Mr. Hannah, that was impossible just a few years ago. New technologies will allow huge leaps in what we know and understand about nature and our planet, and because these technological challenges lie at the heart of Pocobor’s expertise, we’re looking forward to being part of the journey.

The actual design process is a little more complicated than this.

One of the things we’ve found ourselves talking about a lot lately around the office is the design process for smart or mechatronic products and what makes it unique. Because design processes in general are so open-ended, they are difficult to speak broadly about but I think that effective mechatronic design requires its own approach and is worth thinking about.

Not Really a Process

First off, I actually think that the term “design process” is a bit of a misnomer in general and particularly for smart product design. To me, the word “process” implies a set or fixed course of action almost like following a checklist or recipe to arrive at a predetermined outcome (in this case, the final design). However, because the goals and parameters surrounding any given design problem can be so varied, it is impossible to specify a universally good design process. The path followed during the creation of a good design can be different for every design and every designer.

For smart products, which cross the boundaries of traditional engineering disciplines (mechanical design, electrical engineering and software development, to name a few), this is particularly true. The increased number of design considerations resulting from the large number of facets of the design increases the number of potential design paths – both good and bad – significantly. However, it is still possible to identify some common factors in the creation of a good design. Instead of a process, though, I prefer to think of it as a mindset that facilitates good design.

What Is The Mechatronic Design Mindset?

It can be useful to think of designing a system or device as a series of trade-offs – consider the ever-present cost vs. performance tradeoff or something like the relationship between engine horsepower and gas mileage. One of the things that differentiates mechatronics from more traditional design is that the number of tradeoffs and inter-relationships is usually higher. When the designer makes a choice regarding (for instance) the mechanical design, s/he has to consider not only the ramifications for the other parts of the mechanical design but also how that choice will affect the electronics and software of the system. To design effectively, the designer must embrace a mindset that considers tradeoffs and consequences that may not usually be considered for certain subsections of the design.

Who Is Designing?

Saying this isn’t very profound – it’s basically common sense. However, following this line of thought has some practical ramifications for designers of mechatronic systems. The main conclusion is that designers of smart products should cultivate skills across traditional engineering disciplines so that they are able to understand and appropriately weigh all of the applicable factors when making decisions.

It is certainly possible for a mixed team of traditional engineers (e.g. mechanical engineer + electrical engineer + programmer) to create a well-designed mechatronic system. However, I would argue that the level of collaboration and communication required for this to occur in practice is prohibitively time-consuming and difficult for most design problems. Instead, I think the most effective practice is to involve designers who have some expertise in all of the relevant fields, which allows them to easily consider all of the facets of the system together. Although the time required to become (and remain) conversant in multiple disciplines typically precludes brilliant-guru level expertise in any one, an effective design team can be assembled for any given problem that combines multi-disciplinary mechatronics engineers with traditional engineers as needed.

Why Should You Care?

Smart products are becoming ubiquitous in our lives. From the car you drive to the temperature control system in your house to the digital camera in your pocket, systems that used to be strictly mechanical are increasingly integrating microcontrollers and becoming smarter. This new class of systems demands a new mindset and a new approach to enable the most efficient and effective creation of new designs.