Here Comes the Screenless Fork
The “Internet of Things” is changing everything - even innovation. In Product Development, the demand to make almost every conceivable object “smart” or “connected” requires developers to approach design in revolutionary ways. The “Internet of Things” is breaking new ground in the way humans interact with the most basic objects - forcing innovators to re-invent the wheel (literally and figuratively) in design and process.
Increasingly, clients ask our designers at bb7 to incorporate sensors and radios into everyday objects, allowing them to interconnect. These new “smart” objects are becoming part of the fabric of the “Internet of Things”. As early implementers, designers recognize that computing and radio communication technologies are now mature enough to overlay an information dimension onto previously static objects. Take, for example, a fork that senses the food and activity of eating to improve the experience and simplify the task.
For connected products like the screenless fork, our initial work considers the technical feasibility of the sensors & radios and their integration with a suitable computing stack to create a system. Requirements analysis and design engineering are the normal process steps, followed by prototyping and testing.
Along with demonstrating technical feasibility, multidisciplinary design teams tackle the tasks of understanding the product from a user-centered standpoint. Industrial designers, interaction designers, and human centered design researchers work together to harmonize the new possible functions for these products, meeting the needs and goals of users. Feature sets and product functions are conceptualized and evaluated against users’ possible desires and expectations. Analyses, models, and prototypes of product concepts are synthesized, compared, and refined. This is the standard, familiar innovation methodology.
But, somehow putting a radio into a familiar product changes things up a little. The familiar innovation methodology itself needs to be innovated to meet these products’ surprising needs. Although these products might appear exactly as their predecessors; indeed they provide new, surprising but invisible functionality. This presents a break from traditional task-referenced, user-centered design. Suddenly, traditional industrial design and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) norms do not provide sufficient guidance:
What’s the Play without a Display?
HCI standards mainly need a display and these new products may not have displays. Basic HCI principles like responsiveness, feedback, task analysis, consistency, reversibility, recognition, and tolerance are still valid for these new products, but they are not fully informative for products that present unfamiliar feedback to users, if any feedback at all. The existing norms of HCI depend on close interactivity between the computer and the user.
Although new connected products will indeed manifest interaction between user and computer, these interactions may be silent and unobservable. Users will need clarity about the hidden, silent activities of their products and surroundings, which HCI norms do not yet provide.
Traditional task-referenced user-centered approaches to addressing user needs may fall short also. The new functions afforded by invisibly sensor-laden and connected but otherwise familiar-looking products may not follow smoothly from the functions of predecessor products.
Interaction Design for New World of Product Interactions
Refined gestural interaction between users and technology remains in infancy compared to traditional GUIs. Handheld, screen-less, everyday objects like knives and forks will accelerate the need for new and meaningful norms of gestural communication between people and objects.
The Fork that Gathers Food and Data
The connectedness of some products may serve no obvious purpose to users at all. For example, some products may just deploy sensors invisibly supporting an analytics system. Users have more or less accepted that websites and apps often have the dual purpose of meeting users’ needs while collecting information. High integrity products must be clear and explicit about this dual purpose. New challenges will arise for products whose information gathering capability may be completely hidden (like a fork that inconspicuously gathers data about eating habits for market research).
The emergence of connected products will lead to the augmentation of traditional design approaches with revolutionary new ones. HCI could become Human Computer Object Interaction (HCOI) in surprising ways. While these developments are ongoing, everyday design will evolve as a combination of traditional and new ways:
Innovating Innovation Methodologies
Existing fast track incremental methods like user observation, task analysis, and best practice HCI will not be good enough. Designers will have to discover emergent, new user goals and related tasks. These discoveries will be more imagination-driven than traditional user-responsive ones. Here, time becomes an issue: Imagination-driven products tend to need lots of refinement.
Designers will have to plan extra prototyping and usability test cycles, so they can discover and refine the opportunities afforded by connected technologies in products. Importantly, they’ll have to explore and address users’ new relationships with these products. Once radios go inside, familiar objects may have completely new meanings to users, which will present the opportunity for increased functionality.
Teaching a Fork to Speak: New Design Language
We’ll need to develop a design language to signify products’ new but hidden connected capabilities. These may be power or data ports, antennas, sensor bulges, or graphics logos to express the existence of certain capabilities. How can a design team develop a fork that communicates its new functionality (e.g. calorie count or nutritional data procurement) without sacrificing its “forky” design and use? Many new gestural approaches will be tried and some winners will emerge. In time, language norms will solidify, initially to communicate the simple existence of otherwise hidden connected technologies. Eventually, there will be so many products with sensors and radios that language norms will evolve to communicate beyond the mere existence of connection to focus once again on functions, outcomes, and feelings.
When products afford revolutionary capabilities, the rules of design must adapt. The era of new smart objects is here. These smart objects will demand the development of revolutionary design methods, just as did the computer GUI in the 1970s and the smart phone of the 2000s. Maybe the screenless fork won’t revolutionize design, but a simple, everyday object is likely to change the future. As the pace of technology development accelerates, the pace of design methodology accelerates also.
About the Author: John Brassil is an accomplished Senior Project Manager for bb7, a comprehensive product development firm. He has applied his background in Mechanical Engineering to lead multi-disciplinary teams to develop commercially successful scientific instruments and award-winning medical devices. This researcher-engineer-inventor-innovator-teacher has published numerous papers in scientific journals - recently on the subject of organ transplantation. With patented inventions in medical devices, consumer products and scientific instruments, John’s work has won design awards (Red Dot, IDEA, MDEA, Good Design, and National Design Triennial). He developed a kidney transporter which is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute and MOMA. Further, he is the recipient of an NIH grant to study pancreases, and the Gates Foundation 2012 grant for pest control. The latter experimented with a pest resistant bowl which included an RFID chip – an inspiration for this article. John holds a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering with a focus in computer-aided design.
About bb7: bb7 is a global Product Development firm known for being the secret weapon behind profitable products that solve untapped demand, unresolved needs and business goals – across nearly every industry. The key to bb7’s high project success rates: More in-house capabilities than the average PD firm. Start-ups through Fortune 500 companies have relied on bb7 for product strategy, consumer insights research, concept development, ID, prototyping, engineering, testing and product implementation.
