Blog posts from September 2008

My first post on the Pulse Laser, in my newish role as an advisor to S&W, brings me to consider one of Jack and Matt’s mantras: that products are people too.

As Matt said in his talk at Reboot in 2007, it’s a extremely useful heuristic.

It’s useful in it’s apparent common-sense basis — after all, we personify at the drop of a hat, as Byron, Nass and others have pointed out for many years; but also in the almost absurd directions one can stretch the metaphor in order to see what drops out.

From the anthropomorphic surface-aesthetic of Alessi, to the 1st-person-puppetry of a NASA probe’s twittered stream of reports from another world – it would seem we welcome the products that, at least superficially, perform as people do.

But what other directions can we find then we squeeze the soapbar of this slippery saying a little harder?

One that’s been preoccupying me, and finding it’s way into my discussion with Jack and Matt are the ways that the economics of producing a product and producing media might start mirroring each other. Kevin Kelly posted a fascinating essay on the new economics of scale for artists and craftsmen, called “1000 true fans“.

I find myself asking:  if products are people too, then could they exist with a thousand true fans?

I hope you’ll excuse rather a long quote from Kevin Kelly’s piece as a scene-setter:

“the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist’s works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.”

Could Kelly’s solution extend to the design, manufacture, marketing and distribution of products?

Cross-reference Kelly with Sterling’s notion of the Spime: something that is information first and last, and a physical thing merely sometimes. Cross-reference Kelly with Gershenfeld’s sub-$20k rapid fab-labs. Design, maufacturing, marketing is becoming contingent, personalised. Distribution is dematerialising, and if one were being optimistic about Sterling’s vision  – so is waste.

On demand, on-desire products.

S&W recently produced an advanced prototype piece of social hardware for the BBC Audio and Music R&D team: a radio called Olinda. When they put the pictures live, there was quite a bit of desire to own an Olinda expressed by those commenting.

I joked with Matt and Jack that they should put the price tag of producing a prototype out there, and see who wanted one – or perhaps the price of a short-run of limited edition Olinda, which would reduce it perhaps from four figures a piece to three… Or perhaps the next generation of Olinda, with their input?

Would people buy something like that?

Perhaps a true fan of an established product designer or brand. After all, in tradtional design the likes of Ross Lovegrove or Marc Newson can command premium prices for their limited edition, but still ultimately mass-produced works.

This would be something different though potentially – not buying into a product design as a brand, but more like micro-investing in a product at it’s conception. Almost like a distributed commission of something that you’ve followed the progress of like a work of art.

Perhaps you’ve been part of the debate, shaping the potentialities – suggesting scenarios or sources of inspiration – or even componentry. Just like the small, passionate fanbase of a much-loved but non-mainstream performing artist there’s a relationship between you and the product, and crucially all the other fans of the product, perhaps mediated by services like GetSatisfaction. Certainly, already, some products on GetSatisfaction already have a fanbase talking to each other. Essential reading for product marketers…

It puts me to mind a little of what Matt Hanson is trying to do in film with A Swarm of Angels. Not only recruiting investment, but particpation in a cultural product they want to bring into the world.

This model would be a potential new spin on both human-centered design and product marketing. Collect the desires and needs of your customer base, but they’ve bought into the design process revealing something new about that. They are true fans of the designers, and the design process – invested in it both financially and aspirationally.

You can see some of this in communities such as Etsy, where crafters and product families definately have fanbases that are loyal to them; and they are rewarded by requests and delightful suprises both in the new products created in the dialogue and the level of attention they receive.

Is this possible in the arena of more complex products with behaviour, connectivity, and services woven into them? Is it possible where there’s not a direct relationship to the artisan or designer – that is, could it scale to work for larger companies and brands? After all, as Kelly says, this isn’t the path to megahits – it’s more about catering to many niches with equal attention, rigor and passion.

I think we’d argue that products and services for ‘generation-c’ can’t afford not to generate, nurture and learn from their ‘fanbase’, as soon the means of creating such products will lie with the fanbase themselves. It’s rich territory for designers and makers working today for sure: creating products and potentialities for products that will garner a fanbase through their lifetime has always been their goal.

In the recent past of industrial design and manufacture this was the mass-produced ‘megahit’ of the ‘design classic': the Aalto stool, the Eames chair, the Ive pods – but the breadth and depth of niches that this post-industrial scenario offers for viable, sustainable, economic exploration is something new I think, and one that post-industrial design firms such as S&W are itching to explore.

As a true fan, as well as advisor, I can’t wait to see what they make of it.

In 1977 Charles and Ray Eames made a documentary film called Powers of Ten. The second half of the film includes a slow zoom into a man’s hand, right the way through cells and molecules all the way down to an atomic structure. It’s extraordinarily engaging, beginning at a familiar human context, and visualising something desperately distant and unknowable.

About a year ago James King brought a book to my attention from a series called Analysis of the Massproduct Design by Japanese product designer Taku Sato.

Analysis of the Massproduct Design is just like the Eames Powers of Ten video but for everyday products.

Each book takes a manufactured product and breaks down the content, graphics, construction and packaging page by page. The books are like infinite zooms into fabrication and history.

There are four, in turn looking at Xylitol Lime Mint chewing gum, a Fujifilm disposable camera, ‘Licca the fashion dress up doll by Takara Co.’ and a litre of milk from the Meiji Dairies Corporation. The blurb reads:

…we will take up and focus on one mass-produced product seen everywhere in our daily life without special attention paid to and from the point of view of design we try to take a closer look at and analytically examine it to find what kinds of ideas, efforts, ingenuities have been put in to it.

Each book begins with an overview and in some cases a history. This is from the book on the Fujifilm disposable camera.

As the book progresses, spreads examine the product in greater and greater detail. Near the end of the Fujifilm book, there’s a photographic one micrometer cross section of the film stock.

One of my favourites spreads is from the book examining Xylitol chewing gum and is titled ‘The Feeling on the Teeth When Chewed.’ It’s about the material qualities of tablets versus sticks of gum. A quote:

The firmness of a chewing gum changes gradually with the passing of the time of its being chewed. In order to make this change of the chewing feeling close to an ideal one, the elements that should make up of the chewing gum are controlled… The figure shows the strength of the chewing exerted in the mouth measured with an analyzing device called RheoMeter. These graphs will tell you how different the chewing feelings are between ordinary sheet-type chewing gum and sugar coated chewing gum.

An ideal chewing feeling! A RheoMeter! They’ve got a machine for testing the chewiness of gum.

I think Taku Sato actually designed the packaging for the milk carton he analyses. One of the spreads shows what each of the indents on the base of the cartons are for. Ambiguity in the translation adds to the mystery in some cases:

…(image a) is a little dented. This is for securing the stability of the carton when placed straight on a table… The number (image c) is the filling machine’s column index. The embossed information works for cause of the trouble to be clarified when it happens.

The books feel like imaginary manuals. They offer the seductive illusion that with this book the object can be completely known, all secrets unravelled. They somehow imply that if all was lost, objects like these could be reconstructed with this knowledge alone.

A while back I came across the term ‘Spime’ in Bruce Sterling‘s book Shaping Things. He uses the word to characterise smart objects which talk about their histories, how they were made, where they were sourced, where they’ve been, etc. Spimes might be a cars which announce their locations, or a packaged beef steak which shows the cow it comes from and where that cow was raised.

Sato’s books are raw Spime porn. Objects showing off their shiny interiors, construction and their ancestors. The celebrity biographies of mass produced objects.

A little while back, I wrote a post titled Widgets, widgets, everywhere in which I suggested all consumer electronics should be thought of as platforms that could run applications created and shared by users. In particular,

If I was a pro-am photographer on a month-long safari shoot, I could grab a custom camera interface from the Web, set up to provide easy-access presets to the light and movement conditions I’d face. I’d repurpose a couple of the external buttons to twiddle parameters in the presets, and have a perfect wildlife interface for four weeks. At home, I’d revert to the general purpose interface or get another one.

This came out of a general idea about Generation C and products and continues like this: Gen C are into co-creation, but they’re also highly capable… so if your product doesn’t allow them to get involved, they’ll do it themselves regardless.

Well, here’s exactly what I was talking about:

Steven Chapman has created a way to control his DSLR camera with a custom interface on his Nintendo DS. It involves custom cables, custom DS software, a whole lot of smartness, and it saves him time. (Plus it’s playful: there’s a sound trigger thrown in there, just for kicks.)

This is the killer bit:

Where the Canon 5D can do a bracket of three shots, spread two stops apart, and the latest 1DS MKIII series can do a nine shot bracket, the “DS-DSLR” can do any number of shots, and if I don’t like the way it does it, I can rewrite the software to do it better.

And he’s selling the kit.

The power of adaptation. Imagine Canon had meant for this to happen. Imagine they had an App Store to allow people to share and to build businesses around this kind of activity.

Users are in a better position than designers to discover better products and experiences and, increasingly, better positioned to create them too. (Of course the best situation is that designers are also users… which is surprisingly often not the case.) Adaptive design is not just an approach but an opportunity.

Thanks Tom Armitage for the link.

My favourite trend spotters, trendwatching.com, just put out their monthly newsletter. (These are the folks who identified Generation C a couple years back, which let us finally express how the type of people you get on the Web are actually part of a much larger movement. Gen C comes up in the first few slides of most of our strategy work.)

This month’s trend is OFF=ON:

More and more, the offline world (a.k.a. the real world, meatspace or atom-arena) is adjusting to and mirroring the increasingly dominant online world, from tone of voice to product development to business processes to customer relationships.

Right on.

In the briefing, one of their example products is Availabot. Yes, that old thing. (Here’s a video of Availabot in action.) This is what they said:

Availabot is a golden oldie (it’s an ancient two years old!!), offering a physical representation of presence in instant messenger applications, which means Availabot plugs into your computer by USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away. Brilliant, and somehow very ON=OFF. But it apparently got stuck in concept mode. So could someone please bring this to market? (Just the waves of PR should make it worth the effort.)

It’s so true! Somebody should!

Okay, we should. And we’re going to. Oh, I’ve never said that in public before have I? There’s always a first time: yes, Availabot will make it to market.

Now seems as good a time as any to let you know what happened and what’s happening…

Ancient history

Way back in the mists of time (that is, 2006), Jack Schulze presented Availabot at the RCA show and picked up his MA. Schulze & Webb had just started, as a design studio and consultancy, and our first project was to make 100 prototypes and see where it took us.

So we made a bunch and put them in a shop, as demonstration models:

But developing a product is expensive, and starting a consultancy takes a lot of biz dev and effect, so when [insert name of Very Large Toy Company here] saw Availabot, got excited and offered to buy an option, we happily accepted. It was supposed to be for 12 weeks. It dragged on for over a year… and then the option didn’t go anywhere. Ah.

A lot happened in the meantime!

• Availabot focus-grouped successfully. We know the best target market and how many they’d buy (and for how much).
• We learned the relative importance of customisation versus basic features and price (customisation is less important than we believed, and we’ve designed a way to inexpensively hit the mark).
• We had a patent application published: 2008/0122647.
• We figured out the ancillary businesses.

Oh, and we built a successful design studio (with projects such as Olinda), and a consultancy with clients including Nokia, BBC, Blyk, Ofcom and more, with a great network of designers and a newly established advisory group (and more of that in another post).

But when the option expired, we’d had enough of foot-dragging by [yes, that same Very Large Toy Company again] and we didn’t renew. Time passed… during which time we found new partners, and a new angle.

Going it alone

We recognise the growing Generation C (creation, social, connected people), and believe that the key future way to sell many modern, complex products, media and services is as physical things. It’s impossible to operate like this and not have a knowledge of China. And of course, we still wanted to take Availabot to market.

So we decided to treat Availabot as a world probe: it was decided that we would take Availabot through to the position of being factory ready, and in the process learn as much as possible about the processes of manufacture, and how to develop these kind of complex products with so many moving parts. (Availabot is unusual in that it requires mechanics, embedded electronics, desktop software which knits together lots of other bits of desktop software, and network features.)

And once factory ready prototypes were on the table, we would either go to market ourselves, or partner for either distribution or acquisition plus royalties. The economics of these models are sound.

Which brings us to the present day.

Availabot today

Availabot is almost ready.

What you see above is a couple months old: a test model based on the original model, running on new circuitry with a novel mechanism that is as cheap as we can make it. We’ve been working hard with our electronics and manufacturing partner in Hong Kong to make this reliable, and to give it an open hardware API (over USB), which will of course be published.

The puppet in the picture is a placeholder. The new character development is almost complete. It looks pretty different, and I’m not going to show you photos of that, except to mention that although the customisation is toned down, we’ve come up with some exciting directions. Once the prototypes are finished, they’ll be attached to the newly improved motor and we’ll work on the liveliness of the movements. This is with our London partner and, though them, with visualisers and model makers working with our designs.

The team in Russia and Ukraine, working on the software, are a couple weeks away from finishing the second rev of the desktop software. Visually it’s pretty basic – the polished look comes when we go to market – but functionally it’s all there (there’s a plug-in API so third parties can hook Availabot up to all kinds of presence sources), and exactly what we need to demo the puppet round toy fairs.

And we have subsequent versions and associated businesses mapped out.

So what does factory ready mean?

Factory ready means when we decide to go to market, or we find a partner we’re happy with, there’s a direct path from here to mass production without any re-engineering. Bish bash bosh, in the shops.

Too long; didn’t read

Yeah okay, that was a lengthy story.

Here’s the summary:

• Availabot was stuck in a confidential options process with [Huge Toy Company] for ages. The work and market research was positive, but we didn’t renew. It’s a shame it didn’t work out.
• We’re working with partners and companies in London, Hong Kong and Russia to do character development (retaining some level of customisation), the mechanism, electronics, and embedded and desktop software. Future product directions are mapped out.
• Availabot is a very short way from being factory ready, at which point we’ll start showing the short run of prototypes to prospective partners and decide whether to go to market ourselves or let someone else take it on.
• We’re not ready to talk to partners until we have a twitchy bit of plastic on the table you can handle. But if you’re big enough, maybe it’s a good time to speak. Big means talking about taking over distribution and marketing globally, and working with us on a standard toy inventor and royalties basis (so I guess I’m talking Spin Master and up). If you’re talking about distribution or sales and you need a boxed product, or white labelling the technology, we’re not in a position to talk to you for a little while yet, sorry.

To be continued…

After so long having to keep quiet, it’s a relief to finally speak publicly. More news soon!

And of course, if you’d like help figuring out your OFF=ON product strategy, need design investigations or prototypes to reach an increasingly social and creative Generation C in the product, Web, mobile, media or services spaces, or can see another way our approach and skills can help your company, get in touch. S&W is over here, where technology is about people first.