A proposal for a novel food production system for deep space missions I put together with a collegue at Ecoation has been selected as one of ten Canadian semi-finalists in the Deep Space Food Challenge, a competition run by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency.

As the Product Design Manager leading Ecoation’s OKO CoBot product development I was interviewed to provide an insight into the product development process the team and I used for delivery.

Defining the architecture for new products is always an intresting challange. The potential for modular systems is exciting, but designing pratical modular product systems is hard - even Google gets it wrong. So how do you leverage the benefits of modularity when designing successful product systems?

Fully autonomous driving may still be a long way off but the technological advancements to date have been really impressive. I have always been involved in building and racing 1/10th scale remote control cars and surprisingly, many of the electronic driving aids have not been implemented there. I thought it might be a fun real time control project to implement some of these and an excuse to build a robotics platform for future projects I have in mind.

Recently, I watched Sir David Attenborough's 'A Life on Our Planet' and found the way he tied his personal observations of bio-diversity loss into the developing scientific understanding of what has been happening to our planet over his lifetime very compelling. However, I was most impressed by the way he followed this up by getting to the root cause of the problem.

Creating the radically new is hard. The biggest strategic decisions that shape the fundamental characteristics of the final solution are made at the earliest stages of a new project, when you have the least information. This is why the blank sheet of paper is both so exciting and so intimidating.

Descriptive statistics describe the basic features of a dataset in order to establish its validity. The first thing I do when looking at any new dataset is to describe the dataset statistically. Here I take you through a template Python file I use for this initial analysis.

The Human Machine Interface is a concept core to consumer electronics as it governs every interaction we have with technology in our lives. The first consumer electronics products used the analogue interactions of the products that had come before, dials and leavers. Physical buttons then gave way to digital buttons on screens and this paradigm now governs most of our interactions with electronics today. However new technology is poised to radically change this paradigm in the next decade.

Consumer research aims to capture, test and act on information about the behaviour of target consumers. It translates learnings from psychology, neuroscience & psychophysics into actionable insights for product design. It is most useful when developing products for people whose advantage is not clearly quantifiable with an existing technical performance metric (faster, stronger, or more productive).

As a designer of products, every decision I make is targeted to creating a beneficial effect of one sort or another. Beyond the value they provide to the direct user, products can have far reaching social and environmental effects. With this knowledge, we have an opportunity to explicitly design for the results we want and the ethical imperative to do so; but how do we make humanities material usage sustainable?

Design philosophies are a stated “interest in a set of problems… or foundational concerns”. Understanding the philosophies of other projects, designers, or movements, and, perhaps more importantly, having one you can articulate yourself is critical to consistently achieving the highest quality end products.

What if finding new music was fun and as easy as flicking a switch? Spotify provides a web API that provides access to a long list of metrics for every track on the platform.

The consumer electronics industry is primarily concerned with making products people want to buy. Consumers buy products for a number of reasons, the field of economics considers the two central market forces to be supply and demand, the latter is a measure of a people’s desire for a product. The simple need of a number of individuals to perform a key function the product provides could be quantitatively measured to derive this metric, however consumers can also be said to want products for more subjective reasons.

The user value offered by automotive is currently being disrupted by market, technology and regulatory forces. This provides opportunities for new entrants to the area. Any new entrant must deliver different and better value propositions in selected, non-commoditized markets to be successful. Ideally they should be positioned to avoid competing directly with cash rich incumbents and leveraging protected technology.

In the future, I expect to see more applications for neural networks in the IoT. Though there is a risk they are held back by basic actuators. Without being able to do more, the power of neural networks will not be experienced in the physical world.

Watercolour and ink has always been one of my favourite mediums to work with. The style really lends itself to representing the essence of a surface, its shape being brought out roughly with watercolour shading before adding solid black lines that force you to pick the elements that provide the strongest visual impression.

The Internet of Things is a technology trend with disruptive potential to create a paradigm shift in the way all physical products are designed, used and sold. It will create a bridge between the digital and physical worlds, increasing and providing new user value. In doing so it will create new products, open new markets and enable new business models. This is a B2C strategy to drive growth at premium hardware brands by utilising the IoT to improve physical products. It aims to position a hardware brand as a key player in the smart home.

Open source development models have the potential to help the traditional design and manufacture industry meet user desires for more personal and meaningful products. The design industry should recognize the advantages offered by the open source development model for hardware as well as software and incorporate it where appropriate.