Designing Connected Products

Foreword

Since the dot-com crash of the early 21st century, the Internet has grown up. No longer a just a collection of virtual storefronts, it now facilitates a wide range of human expression and interaction. It catalyzes changes in our culture. It supports intimate contact, and it fuels revolution. Through it, we’ve realized a shift in our relationships, from a centralized model where a few central players control how we communicate to a decentralized one in which the size of your organization matters less than the relevance of your message. The decentralization of media and communication is the most important change brought about by the Internet.

Thus far, we’ve effected that change only through glass rectangles, but not for long. The Internet now connects your car, your car keys, your door lock, your lights, and your exercise regimen. Your informational body can now have a more direct effect on your physical body, and vice versa. We’re only just beginning to understand the implications of this, and to develop the tools to design for it.

Like the authors, I’m not a fan of the term “Internet of Things.” It overlooks this major change that the Internet has brought about in how we communicate, and instead, presents an ideal world in which the automation and centralization of data collection comes first, and the interaction of people and communities comes a distant second, if at all. This change is not about the things, but about the physical interaction those things enable.

We remember (and use) great products because of the experiences they help us to realize. Our interaction with a product—and with each other through it—is what makes it memorable. Really great connected products will be memorable for the same reason. We won’t remember them because of the data collected, but because of how they will enhance our lives and our connections to each other. Designing connected products is not just an engineering problem. This job takes creative input from many different disciplines: engineering, industrial design, anthropology, and user experience design, to name a few.

In this book, Claire Rowland and her colleagues outline a thorough framework for practicing the design of connected products and services. They provide the overview of the technical landscape that you’d expect from such a book, and best practices for designing connected products, including user research, business model formation, and prototyping methods, of course. But they also tackle issues that aren’t often covered: two chapters on understanding your fellow team members, for example. By juxtaposing the assumptions of each discipline, from industrial design to UX design to anthropology to product engineering, they provide insight on why something that seems nonsensical to an engineer might be important to a designer, and how the concerns of all team members are necessary to do a thorough job.

Looking beyond the everyday production tasks, they introduce two critical concepts that anyone working in this area needs to understand: interoperability and interusability. Without interoperability, we are doomed to a future of incompatible devices and standards from competing brands. Without interusability, we are doomed to a future of relearning core user experience concepts like connect, play, stop, and restart over and over again with each new interface.

A world in which connected devices are ubiquitous is one in which privacy, control, and transparency are radically changed. As designers of these systems, we need to take responsibility for our role in this shift. The authors acknowledge this, and provide an overview of the ethical considerations of designing connected products. This is one of the most valuable parts of the book, as it helps designers to think not just about the product or the business model, but the impact of their work on customers’ safety, privacy, and well-being. Gathering all the data in the world is pointless if we sacrifice quality of life for it.

I’ve been building network-connected physical interfaces, and teaching students how to do it, since 2001, and this is the first book I’ve encountered that gives designers a detailed and practical approach to do this. There are plenty of technical manuals (I’ve written a few) and there are some excellent critical monographs, but there hasn’t been a great design manual for connected devices until now. Thank you, Claire, Ann, Martin, Liz, and Alfred for making my job easier through this book.

TOM IGOE