designing for physical versus digital products

Designing forphysical versus digital productsChui Chui Tan

@ChuiSquared

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dorena-wm/4486051522/



Physical products❤

Designers

Digital products❤

For now, we can broadly group designers into physical and digital designers.

Physical product designer Digital product designer

I was a physical product designers when I worked with Panasonic designing the physical part of their stereo sets. Now, I’m a digital designer because most of my work is digital based.However, such clear categorisation is no longer valid.

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This is what physical product designers used to design - focused on product’s form, shape, material, how parts attach together.

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This is what physical designers have been designing in recent years - physical products now have to incorporate with digital interface or with software.

Years ago, digital designers used to design only for desktop - focused only on the website, the IA (information architecture), the images, the copy and content.

Now, we are designing more and more for mobile....

... and for tablets.Hence, we’ve to consider devices’ sizes, resolution, the interaction these devices support, the context of use of these devices - a lot about the physical devices.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wecand/4109772863/

The trend: both digital and physical are combining and interlinking. No more cutting lines between the two.



Network

Connectivity

Context-awareness

Data

Sensors

Multipurpose

UpdatabilityDan SafferAuthor of ‘Designing Devices’

Dan Saffer listed the characteristics which differentiate the devices of today from previous eras.

“The number of things connected to the Internet has already exceeded the number of people on earth.”

Cisco

Devices now are serving as the Internet’s interface to the physical world.

Nabaztag, a Internet-enabled electronic rabbit: connects to the Internet and read out your favourite RSS feeds, tell you the weather forecasts.

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Nest learning thermostat: learns the temperature you like, connect to the Internet to get weather forecast and it can be monitored and adjusted via Internet.

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Not just beautifully designed products that are in the market are Internet connected. Hackers/innovators are also using Arduino to create Internet connected devices.

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An antique clock was transformed to a weather clock. It connects to the Internet, downloads the current weather forecast and displays it on the clock.

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Tweet-a-pot: Coffee machine is connected to Twitter using Arduino. Tweet to turn the machine on.

http://tomtaylor.co.uk/projects/microprinter

Microprinter: Connect a second hand printer to the Internet using Arduino - print out daily reminders, notifications and so on.



Little Printer by Berg (which you can buy) which does exactly what the Microprinter does. But it’s beautiful.With more and more people building their own prototypes, it changes the way things are being designed.What people hack would be what we buy in the future.

Yesterdaywe design for

Todaywe design for

Mobile

Tomorrowwe design for

Physical + Digital

Desktop

When physical designers designed a fridge 10 years ago, they focused on the size, the material, the handle and so on. Now, the unique selling point of a fridge is its technology and smartness (e.g. LG smart fridge which was introduced in CES 2012).

We’re not just moving from digital to physical. It happens the other way round too.A group of people use 3D printing technology to create a village from the Minecraft online game. They took the virtual world to our physical world.

http://www.yaean.com/en/blog/2010/07/28/douglas-coupland-orca-sculpture/

http://ubersuper.com/uploads/yapb_cache/pixelpour23.69sj1a93fuo00gk8o40kw8w0k.jobm8bab0jk0ckw0ogww0488.th.jpeg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bashford/6208958674/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/6203921904/James Bridle gave a lot of examples where people bring digital concepts into our 3D environment in his talk in Web Directions Sydney 2011.





http://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/6203921904/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stml/6203921904/

Really Interesting Group created Christmas decorations based on their friends’ social media data (e.g. Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter and Dopplr).Another example of bridging the digital to the physical.

=Physical products

❤

Digital products❤

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Tomorrow’s designers

Hackers, Makers,

Innovators

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Digital and physical are combining.If you are a digital interaction designer now, in coming years, your client would expect you to also be able to design the physical parts of the product too.

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“You are not changing career,

your career is changing”

You need to start thinking and preparing because it’s not that you’re (or you want) to change your career, your career IS changing!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paolomazzoleni/436307747/

So... How could we prepare for the change?



http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenickster/3667839998/

Touch

Pain

Temperature

Kinaesthetic sense

Understand the senses that are being used when users interacting with digital and physical products.Not just sense of sight, hearing or smell, but also sense of touch.



Visceral Behavioural Reflective

In his book (Emotional Design), Don Norman described three dimensions which we use to craft our experience with a product:Visceral: about the look/appearanceBehavioural: about its use/practicabilityReflective: about self-image

Visceral Behavioural Reflective

Use these dimensions to help you to design products which differentiate your product from your competitors.

Skills & knowledge

You might need to have new skills or knowledge. You don’t have to be expert in everything, but it’s important to have a basic level of these knowledge.

Fixtures for productionLegislation

CAD drawing

Prototyping skills

Production

Safety/Ergonomics

Materials

Tooling

Shelf life

Life cycle

Sustainability

Durability

Packaging

User requirements

Business requirements

Market

Other touchpoints.... You’re already doing these!

Culture & tradition

Profit margin

Out of box experience

Easy to be maintained and serviced

Culture: Think from different angles (e.g. Japanese desire for lightness when it comes to physical product whilst British desire for sold objects. Both are about quality.

User requirements


Market


Culture & tradition

Profit margin Cost of physical products: material, production, packaging, transportation and storage cost.These costs apply to each individual product you produce and sell. The impact is much more significant!

User requirements


Market


Culture & tradition

Profit margin


Out of box experience: Not just about the first impression when unpacking and unboxing, but it also includes how easy to set up and to connect.

User requirements


Market


Culture & tradition

Profit margin


Easy to be maintained and serviced

Products should be easy to maintain and servic. You don’t want to have to dismantle the whole product just to change a battery.

Working team

You will need to work with people from different areas when designing for a physical and digital product.

Managers Engineers

http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottishgovernment/5081613382/

Part suppliers Designers

Users



Managers Engineers


Part suppliers Designers

Users

These people have the knowledge. Get them involved as early as possible and constantly communicate with each other throughout the whole design process.



Ways of working

The ways of working might be different too. But in some cases, you could still apply the same approach which you used when designing a website or software to physical product design.

You can always observe how people improvise in their daily life if you’re looking to design a new product.

If you already have a product, you can observe how people use it, spot the problems they have and improve those problems.

Bosch did an observation research in India to see how their German designed washing machine fit into their Indian users’ life. They went to their house and observe their daily routine and understand their culture.They found that the washing time needs to be shorter because Indian families have to do their laundry everyday.

Donna Rosa handbags: 1000 online survey was carried out with business women around the world before the handbag was designed. The design of this handbag provides exactly what the users need because each single detail is created based on the problems the designer heard in the survey.

The way you prototype will be different - wireframes don’t work in physical product design.Omnigraffle team created a iPad prototype using a piece of wood before iPad was out in the market.This is a good example of hardware + software prototyping.

Prototyping doesn’t have to expensive/complicated.A Royal College of Art student used blue foam to create different shapes of hairdryer to find the best one for hairdressers.

‣ Could it work?

‣ Any problems?

‣ What’s needed?

‣ How much?

‣ How to build it?

Physical products prototyping

Prototyping allows you to investigate if your idea could work, to identify potential problems (e.g. James Dyson created 5127 prototypes).You can also build BOM (Bill of Materials) from your prototype.

You can’t use Axure or Clickable Wireframes to present your prototype in physical product design.Storyboard (or sequential arts) is a good way to show the interactions people have with your product.

It can be a quick sketch storyboard, in a comic format, photo-based or created from various video clips.

Or you can use role playing/improvisation to present your prototype or concept.

Some people used videos to mock up and improvise how their product could be used.

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To sum up...

We’ve looked at how physical and digital worlds are combining, and how products are moving just physical or just digital to integrated products.We also looked at the transferable skills and knowledge. There are many overlaps. It’s NOT a complicated transition.

OurFuture

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42232541@N04/4267059618/

But the future is not yet defined. The products we design in the future do not necessary have to be all touchscreen based or can only be functioned via Internet connection (e.g. you don’t want your toaster crashes because the Internet connection is too slow or coffee machine doesn’t work because Twitter is down). The world will be unusable in this case.



OurFuture


We, designers are the people to make sure these situations don’t happen. We can shape how our future world is going to be.So, let’s create products which will work in the way we want them to work for a more usable and delightful world.



Thank youChui Chui Tan

@ChuiSquared