Pocobor.

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.

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.

I came across a blog post about the Arduino yesterday on an industrial design blog, Core77. I was definitely surprised to see an entire post dedicated to the Arduino, an open-source electronics and embedded software platform which targets DIY’ers and non-engineers who want to build/hack smart products, on a blog that focuses primarily on product and industrial design. The Arduino is getting great exposure and keeps popping up in places I wouldn’t expect. I’m excited the conversation about and accessibility of smart product design is spreading.

Why I’m Excited

The Arduino provides scaffolding for outsiders and non-embedded system designers, to understand and explore smart product design. It doesn’t matter what your experience or skill level is, Arduino provides an extremely accessible interface for people to get started, from both a hardware perspective and a software perspective. The electronics come packaged and ready to go, with easy to use connectors and easy to understand labels. Several vendors even provide drop-in electronics, called shields (click for a list of shields), which provide specific functionality (ie motor control) to the user with little effort. The free software interface provides a level of separation and simplification from the Microcontroller (MCU). Users have access to easy-to-understand functions and don’t have to familiarize themselves with specific registers and modules of the MCU.

People you wouldn’t expect are getting their hands dirty and cool things are happening. The internet is ripe with cool projects people have put together on their own and there are a ton of project examples and project guides to get people involved. Everyday people are building their own smart products!

Why This Matters To Me

Most importantly, the discussion is finally spreading to people in different walks of life! The exposure allows people who aren’t necessarily engineers to see the possibilities available in smart product design. Different perspectives can easily join the brainstorm. I’m convinced more wild and crazy ideas will be born, not only in garages but also in the office. Ultimately, better products will be designed.

And hopefully the realization of what is possible with a simple open source tool will lead people to imagine what is possible from a professional service firm (ahem Pocobor) and the value we offer. If nothing else, it helps me describe what I do and how technology is being incorporated into new products we use in our everyday lives.

Get Involved

We’ve even put the board in an open source project, called PedalOn, we’re completing for a client to allow customers to modify or rewrite the system software. We’ll talk more about this project in the coming weeks.

An Arduino is even inside PedalOn, a Pocobor project.

I encourage anyone not directly involved with smart product design to get their hands on one of these and start playing. The barrier to entry is low; you can get one for less than $30 from Sparkfun. Or try another distributor - for a full list of distributors look here.

Recently I have been using LEGOs to prototype a gearbox for one of our clients. Every time I dig into a box of LEGO parts and hear that familiar rustle of plastic components, I am struck by how useful LEGOs are for creating rapid models of mechanical systems. And while I normally use LEGOs to build smaller-than-life models of larger systems, a group in England is constructing a full-size house, complete with LEGO shower and toilet, from millions of LEGO blocks! Seriously! Check out more here.

I am very interested to see how they incorporate LEGO’s “Mindstorms” robotic technology into the house. I can imagine motion sensing light control and a LEGO HVAC system powered by a Mindstorms computer. Of course, they may have bigger issues to worry about, such as waterproofing the roof.

I normally don’t get too excited about fonts.  I’m pretty happy with Times New Roman – go ahead, make fun of me, I can take it.  However, I recently came across a new font that caught my attention.  It is a font made by recording the motions of a car as it “writes” out each letter at the hand of a stunt driver.  The project was carried out by Happiness Brussels, an innovative advertising group in Belgium that has effectively integrated technology into many of their projects.

Beyond being a very innovative way to advertise the handling of a new car (the Toyota iQ), the font development project illustrates a real-world example of an object tracking system. By mounting a camera to the ceiling of the warehouse and attaching colored circles to distinct portions of the car, the specialized software can track the overall position of the vehicle in real time.  Further, it can track the path of each tire as the vehicle moves through space and really adds to the authenticity of the font.  The project effectively conveys the interplay between the physical world and electronics/software.

Check out more here.

Some of us at Pocobor went to see Objectified on Sunday (playing at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts throughout most of July here in San Francisco). Objectified is a documentary on industrial and product design by Gary Hustwit (the same person who produced/directed the documentary Helvetica). I really enjoyed the film. The film meanders through the different aspects of design (what is design, what makes good design, what are the goals of good design, and where is design heading). Along the way it interviews many of the heavy hitters in the design community, from the lead industrial designer at Apple to the founders of IDEO.

I found the film to be very inspirational because it reconfirmed my views of the importance of good design, and in a kind of self congratulatory slap on the back, it made me feel proud that we here at Pocobor are part of this growing design movement.

Although there were many interesting points in the film, there was one in particular that stuck with me: most companies know the average life span of their products, whether it is a mobile phone that will probably be used for 15 months, or a toothbrush that will probably last 2 months. But despite this short lifespan, almost all products are made with materials that will last thousands of years. Karim Rashid, who brought up this point, mentioned that if he will only keep his cell phone for 11 months, it might as well be made of cardboard that can more easily be recycled.

Cardboard Mobile Phones: Coming to Apple Stores Soon?

While his statement was hyperbole, it got me thinking about the idea of making products with materials that will start to biodegrade almost immediately after their use is done. I don’t have any immediate thoughts or solutions, but I find it a very interesting concept.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so a 60 second video must be worth 1,500,000 words (assuming 25 frames per second).

Now that I’m back from Milan and a little rested, I wanted to briefly explain the concept we exhibited.

From the video you’ll notice that there are two identical stands, each with alternating metal and glass poles.  This exhibit is only a small scale model of a much larger concept, both in physical size and geographically. Each stand represents a much larger monument that will exist in a public space in large cities around the world. For example, one of these monuments could reside in San Francisco’s Civic Center, with another monument located near Paris’s Eiffel Tower.

The exhibit encourages interaction from everyone who passes by and provides the opportunity for people all across the world to interact with one another in the name of “Peace”. The idea is that when someone in one of the cities, for example San Francisco, touches a metal pole, the two adjacent glass poles light up and emit a musical tone. Simultaneously the corresponding glass poles in Paris light up and play the same note played in San Francisco. If someone in Paris then responds by touching the corresponding metal pole being touched in San Francisco (so that in both cities the corresponding poles are being touched simultaneously) the light and tone becomes stronger. If the two remotely connected people hold that touch for a sustained time period (approximately three seconds) the lights will begin to flash signifying a “Peace” event between these two individuals.

The exhibit also provides the ability to make musical chords locally or between cities. There are twelve metal poles, each producing a note in an octave (C, C#, D, D#, E, F, etc.). For example, if three people working together in different cities create a C chord (C, E, G or metal pole one, metal pole five, and metal pole eight) they will hear the C chord as well as see another unique “Peace” event (a light cascade up and down the installation). However the chord needs to be exact in order for a special event to occur. For example, C, E, G, A (pole one, pole five, pole eight, and pole ten) will not produce a special “Peace” event because that combination is not harmonious. The idea is that it is hard to produce harmony, but once you do it is beautiful.

The ultimate idea is that through touch, sound, and warmth (light) people will be able to interact with people from faraway lands in a very personal way to promote “Peace”.

Well, Design Week has wrapped up and I am headed home from Milan.  Before I leave though, I thought I’d send back a quick update.  The show was a great experience and we received a really positive response to the exhibit.  USA Today linked to a pretty good description of the exhibit and some of the feedback from show attendees made it onto Twitter as well.  When I get back to San Francisco later this week, look for a more comprehensive description of the project, including lots of pictures and videos.  Ciao from Milan for the last time (for this year at least).

I’m currently in Milan at Salone Satellite (a part of Milan Design Week) exhibiting the “Passage for Peace,” a concept collaboratively developed with the design firm Knoend. The exhibit is an interactive lighting installation utilizing gestural interconnectivity technology meant to bring people together in unity to hope for peace. Learn more at www.knoend.com/peace or wait for more details here next week.

Ciao.