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The Future of
Product Design

Jonathan Follett


The Future of Product Design
by Jonathan Follett
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Table of Contents

1. The Future of Product Design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
A Product Design Renaissance
The Evolution of Product Design
Part 1. Hello, Market!
Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume
Part 3. Product as Dialogue
Part 4. Design for End-of-Life

Conclusion
Companies, Products, and Links

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5
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16
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CHAPTER 1

The Future of Product Design

Jonathan Follett

A Product Design Renaissance
The world is changing. The lines between software and hardware
blur; fresh approaches to manufacturing reduce the time from idea
to market; and new smart objects and systems herald our connected
future.1
A product design renaissance might be on its way, but despite all
this potential and promise—or maybe because of it—the ride could
well be a bumpy one. The human aspect of the equation remains the

x-factor. And, how we work together as participants in this product
revolution, both as people and as organizations, will play a key role
in the outcome.
There’s never been a better time to be a product designer, although
there’s also perhaps never been a more confusing time, either. Today,
the combination of emerging technologies and powerful new
resources and methods—from open source reference designs to
crowdfunding—are democratizing innovation, compressing the
design cycle, and reshaping the relationship between consumer and
product. If the amalgam of user experience (UX), software, indus‐
trial, material, and engineering design had a name, it would proba‐

1 For a fabulous overview and vision of this universe and the technical trends driving it,

check out the report “Building a Solid World” by O’Reilly editors Mike Loukides and
Jon Bruner.

1


bly be product design—although it’s likely that product designers
themselves wouldn’t agree on it.
In this report, we’ll examine from a product designer’s perspective
the ways in which these changes are disrupting design and the prod‐
uct lifecycle as well as considerations for people and companies
looking at new ways of approaching product innovation and cre‐
ation. This is not an all-encompassing overview; rather, it’s a snap‐
shot of a rapid evolution, as seen from the trenches of product
design.

Is This the Third Industrial Revolution?
Twenty-first century product design is being disrupted by factors
both cultural and technological. The confluence of crowdsourcing,
new manufacturing methods, and other emerging technologies has
set the stage for what we might call a Third Industrial Revolution. In
a prescient article2 on the next wave manufacturing phenomenon,
The Economist postulated the following:
...the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with
each product tailored precisely to each customer’s whims, is falling. The
factory of the future will focus on mass customization and may look
more like... weavers’ cottages than Ford’s assembly line.

In this new revolution, economies of scale and the mass production
required to reach these are replaced by the efficiency and leverage of
highly targeted, rapidly developed, and, hopefully, less wasteful
products that retain an artisanal value for the consumer.
Manufacturing for the mass market will no doubt remain for the
many products that have a universal appeal, but for those items that
truly intersect with our unique needs—that seem to have our per‐
sonal imprint in them—these individualized products will grow and
flourish in a new period of craftsmanship at scale.
In this burgeoning new era, the designer’s understanding of the user
will be paramount—an in-depth comprehension that goes beyond
typical use cases, workflows, or trite personas and begins to resem‐
ble something more like a relationship that grows over time.
This understanding of the user DNA will drive product personaliza‐
tion. And we’re not talking personalization in a trivial way, such as
2 (accessed April 20, 2015)

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printing a child’s name on a toy, or a family’s photo on a coffee mug;
this new personalization will be the creation of objects that fit into
our daily lives with impeccable ease. For example, for the busy par‐
ent perhaps a set of connected home appliances that help to measure
the overall nutrition, caloric intake, from freezer to refrigerator, to
oven for each family member’s meals; or for the avid athlete, custom
training gear that adheres to changing body measurements and
adjusts over time.
The “return to craftsmanship” will be transformative economically,
as well. Research from McKinsey Global Institute indicates that by
2025, additive fabrication alone could have an impact of $550 bil‐
lion3 as it changes forever the manufacturing industry. Add this to
the trillions of dollars of market disruption for the Internet of
Things (IoT), robotics, and so on, and we can begin to appreciate
the scale of change that is coming.

Reshaping the world
If past is indeed prologue, we must come to terms with the fact that
although the emerging technologies of the Second Industrial Revo‐
lution—from the automobile to electric power—reshaped the world,
they did so in many ways that were negative as well as positive.
From rampant pollution to the abuse of our planet’s natural resour‐
ces, the environmental consequences that are the Second Industrial
Revolution’s legacy remain critical areas with which we must con‐

tend.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century: If we consider the massive
number of new objects that a product renaissance—propelled by the
IoT and 3D printing—could bring, introducing millions of new
things into our world, it’s clear we must also consider design not just
for mass adoption, but also for mass decline and return to the
stream of natural resources.

Everyone can sketch on a napkin
How are new products imagined, created, tested, and produced?
Generally speaking, this was once the purview of specialized profes‐
sionals, backed by large companies, who had the resources and
knowledge to invest in time-consuming R&D cycles, complex man‐
3 Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business and the global

economy.

A Product Design Renaissance

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ufacturing lines, long supply chains, and expensive marketing and
distribution. And even though there were certainly plenty of upstart
startups and disruptors, these were far from the norm.
Emerging technologies are not just changing what’s being made or
how fast it’s being developed, they’re also changing who is capable of
making it. The ambitious entrepreneur who understands an audi‐

ence—the young mother who has an idea for improving products
for her baby or the coffee fanatic who can see the future of special‐
ized brewing—are enabled to move their ideas from mind to reality,
from napkin sketch to use by an appreciative audience. And, as these
technologies evolve and mature, we can expect more democratiza‐
tion to come.

The Evolution of Product Design
The powerful interplay between innovative use of new technologies
and creative methods for working collaboratively is transforming
product design.

New Ways of Working
Sometimes, we forget that we are still, relatively speaking, in the first
moments of the information age, saddled with the legacy structures
of the industrial past. These structures continue to govern and guide
our interactions—from societal to organizational to interpersonal—
despite being relics of a bygone era. As such, we are still discovering
how to organize our efforts together when it comes to knowledge
work, whether that be scientific discovery, engineering, design, or
otherwise. But we are making progress.
As the creative class discovers and implements new forms of collab‐
oration around ideas and information, it opens new opportunities
for building objects in both the digital and physical worlds. And, if
building on the work of others is crucial to innovation and human
advancement, the speed at which this work is disseminated and reused is also a critical factor. What the age of information has given
us is the ability to stand on the shoulders of others, taking advantage
of their efforts, to build new work, ideas, and even funding in real
time.

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Preparing for a new product lifecycle
A product typically moves from design, to prototype, then into the
marketplace, through growth and maturity, and finally into decline.
For decades, this model has given business stakeholders, designers,
and engineers alike a way to understand and contextualize the inter‐
actions between a product and the marketplace, and ultimately
between the product and the many people who use it. It is on this
foundation that the practice of product lifecycle management (PLM)
has optimized the financing, development, manufacturing, and mar‐
keting for companies.
Today, this familiar model is being upended by emerging technolo‐
gies that are not only reinvigorating existing categories but creating
entirely new ones, as well. We can already see that the lines between
software and hardware products disappearing as the many variants
of the IoT—from connected objects such as wearables and automa‐
ted appliances to sensor laden environments like Smart Cities—
begin to take hold. Perhaps sooner than we think, the lines between
biological and mechanical products will follow suit. Not only must
companies contend with the difficulties of introducing emerging
tech into their product portfolio, they must negotiate a labyrinth of
complex factors as the product lifecycle itself is remade. Within this
new product lifecycle, as designers, we must be concerned with the
myriad of development and production considerations, which will

vary at every stage.

Part 1. Hello, Market!
At the market introduction stage of the product lifecycle, the cost of
designing, prototyping, and validating with users continues to drop
precipitously due to advances in 3D printing, open source designs
for mechanical and electrical engineering, and of course, crowd‐
funding.

A Tale from the Trenches: Prototyping at iRobot
For a decade, Scott Miller was an engineering lead at iRobot where
he contributed to the creation of the seminal in-home service robot:
the Roomba automated vacuum cleaner. He is currently the CEO at
Dragon Innovation, a hardware innovation and manufacturing con‐
sultancy.

Part 1. Hello, Market!

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5


Scott reflects on his experiences with prototyping the original
Roomba and contrasts that with the prototyping process of today:
“Mechanically, we wanted to get a working prototype to be able to
understand how the robot behaved in unstructured environments. We
would create the files... and build $25,000 models of stereolithography,
or SLA, which was incredibly brittle. There are all sorts of examples of
us turning off the cliff detectors and having the robot just drive off the

end of the table and shatter itself to pieces.
Today, you could pick MakerBot for FDM [Fused Deposition Modeling]
or Formlabs for SLA, for a much cheaper price. In fact, for a couple
thousand bucks, you can actually buy your own machine and be able to
create models that work even better than what we had 10 or 15 years
ago, at a fraction of the price, and a much quicker iteration cycle. Rather
than having to wait a week or two weeks to get your parts back, you can
even have them back in the morning. And this lets you go much faster.
On the electrical side at iRobot, when we wanted to build the first circuit
board to spin the wheel modules, we had to get down to the bare metal
and design our own H-bridge with flyback diodes and transistors, figure
out what components to pick, and actually do the hardcore engineering.
It took probably a month between designing it, sending the board out,
getting the board back, and writing the code just to get a simple motor
to spin. Whereas today, literally in 20 minutes, my 7-year-old son can
grab an Arduino, copy and paste some sample code, adjust the key vari‐
ables, and he’s spinning motors.
There’s been a really interesting abstraction from the complexity of how
the thing actually works to much more of a, ‘Let’s focus on getting the
product working and not worrying as much about the details.’ I think
that’s incredibly enabling for the prototype.”

Software and the Speed of Sharing
The speed, agility, and open ethos of the software world have made
inroads into product design and engineering, as well. In the past,
software systems for design and engineering were entirely closed,
which limited sharing across big teams; even more significant, it dis‐
couraged it across the industry. But that is beginning to change as
the sharing of mechanical and electrical designs means that such
elements are reusable.

In the realm of software development, services such as GitHub make
it easy to keep track of and share code—creating a virtuous cycle in
which designers and engineers can build upon the foundations of
open source libraries and contribute back to the larger community.
Electrical engineers are starting to take a similar approach using
services such as Upverter, where they can share reference designs.
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Although still in its early stages, Upverter has made the leap from an
initial user base of hobbyists and hackers to enterprise clients. Simi‐
larly, on the mechanical side, GrabCAD makes it possible for engi‐
neers to share models so that they don’t need to design a product
from the ground up.
The move to cloud-based software is also helping to accelerate prod‐
uct design. In the past, something as essential as CAD software
could be a barrier to entry for a startup. CAD software can be
expensive, especially if you’re an early-stage company with a great
idea for a product and not much else. Enter the next generation of
CAD in the cloud, with less-expensive alternatives to traditional seat
licenses, like subscription pricing and even free versions. CAD soft‐
ware is being reinvented with the nimble startups, makers, and
hackers in mind. In this realm, both established players like Auto‐
desk, with its Fusion 360 offering, and newcomers like Onshape, a
company started by the former founders of SolidWorks, are compet‐
ing to become the product designer’s choice.

Design, engineering, and project management techniques are begin‐
ning to cross-pollinate across the domains of software and hard‐
ware, with a focus on modularity of design and quick iteration. The
timeline from the napkin sketch to the works-like/looks-like model
has become incredibly compressed, making it possible now for
designers to get something in a customer’s hands quickly. Although
the first prototype version might well be unrefined and buggy,
designers and engineers are able to learn much from quick iteration
cycles, as opposed to trying to make that perfect initial product—an
ethos not all that much different from that practiced by their coun‐
terparts in software.
And, on the business and finance side, crowdfunding is wrapping
test marketing, promotion, and preliminary sales into a convenient
package. Early adopters from Kickstarter or IndieGoGo become
your core test audience, giving startups a critical initial market for
their new product ideas. Crowdfunding also limits the amount of
money you need to recoup from R&D, or, at least, it gives you the
opportunity to find that initial capital.

Part 1. Hello, Market!

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7


Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of
Production in Volume
When you’ve proven there’s a product/market fit for your prototype
and validated the features and price point, the next great challenge

for product companies comes with the shift to manufacturing in
volume. Not only do larger product runs require an equally large
financial investment, but quality control becomes increasingly diffi‐
cult.
If all goes well on the market side, the adoption rate for your prod‐
uct will accelerate—represented by the so-called growth “hockey
stick” on the graph—as the product’s audience moves from early
adopters to more general acceptance.
Unlike the initial design and prototyping phases of the product life‐
cycle, change in manufacturing processes has been slower in com‐
ing, and for good reason. Factories still use steel molds to create
injection-molded parts, which is by far the fastest and most reliable
process for manufacturing runs of plastic parts in volume. But steel,
of course, can’t be easily changed after it’s created, so the penalties
for generating an incorrect mold can be substantial.
At least for the time being, you can’t 3D print a new steel mold. And,
even though 3D printing using metal is indeed an emerging technol‐
ogy, the low surface quality of the print makes for a poor mold.
However, as these processes are refined, it seems clear that the next
evolutionary phase of the product renaissance could be on the vol‐
ume manufacturing side. Looking even farther out, we can see how
the advances in emerging technologies like robotics will make
greater automation of manufacturing not only possible, but likely.

A Tale from the Trenches: Technical Machine and the
Prototype-to-Production Problem
Technical Machine is a hardware startup headquartered in Berkeley,
California, that has found a niche selling boards that interactive
product designers can use from prototype into production. Techni‐
cal Machine’s Tessel 2, shown in Figure 1-1, appeals to those entre‐

preneurs who find themselves caught in that awkward production
middle ground where a startup could be supported by thousands of
crowdfunding backers, but lack the tens of thousands of early

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adopters necessary to ensure the economies of scale that make vol‐
ume manufacturing sensible.

Figure 1-1. The Tessel 2 board (Photo courtesy Technical Machine)
The team at Technical Machine realized that because most existing
prototyping products on the market today weren’t designed to scale
for production, it could help product designers and engineers take
that next step. The popular Raspberry Pi board, for instance, was
designed to be a learning tool; try to put it into your production
product, though, and you’ll find that the sourcing costs at volume
make it prohibitive to use. Tessel 2 fills that gap, serving not just as a
development board, but also as a path from development into pro‐
duction.
“If you’re generating the first batches of a product for early adopters,
the volumes needed can be in the low thousands. With these kinds
of numbers, it’s very possible that using an off-the-shelf part makes
more sense financially than building your own custom hardware,”
says Jon McKay, CEO of Technical Machine. With the Tessel 2,
Technical Machine is taking advantage of the economies of scale for

off-the-shelf parts while still allowing for some lightweight customi‐
zation to match its customers’ specific needs. As Figure 1-2 illus‐
trates, this gives product designers a professional-looking offering,
at an acceptable volume. “If [customers] are not using the Ethernet,
or USB ports, [or] some of the ten-pin module ports, let’s just take
those ports off and save them money on their bill of materials. That’s
Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume

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relatively easy to do. We’re trying to find these creative ways to make
pseudo-customization possible at this median-level scale for people
who are trying to build products,” Jon explains.

Figure 1-2. Tessel 2 modules (Photo courtesy Technical Machine)
“We came from a web development background, and we just wanted
to be able to make hardware at the same sort of iteration speed that
we made software. Obviously it’s not going to be entirely possible
because there’s shipping physical goods involved in that, but... there’s
a lot of room for improvement.”

A Tale from the Trenches: Dragon Innovation and the
Challenge of Going from One to Many
Dragon Innovation is a manufacturing services firm that helps both
startups and established companies negotiate the difficult terrain of
outsourced production and the challenge of moving from prototype
to volume. “You have to pick a great contract manufacturer or fac‐

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tory to work with you. If you get this right, you can build a really
strong foundation and create a successful company. But, if you get it
wrong, then it’s like death by a thousand cuts, and it’s very, very dif‐
ficult to recover,” says Scott Miller, Dragon’s CEO.
Dragon is on the forefront of manufacturing service innovation,
making the process as transparent as possible and helping compa‐
nies select factories from a comprehensive network of service pro‐
viders, such as the one shown in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3. Factory workers in China assemble circuit boards. (Photo
courtesy Dragon Innovation)
Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume

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11


“More often than not, you’re not going to find them doing a web
search, because it’s very difficult to know who’s good and who’s not
good. At Dragon, we’ve got a database of a couple hundred factories
we’ve worked with and are constantly expanding that,” Scott
explains.

The Request-for-Quote process
For the product designer, understanding the ins and outs of putting
together a Request for Quote (RFQ) can be intimidating. As a part
of an RFQ package, the team at Dragon recommends that you have
three to five factories bid on your work so that you can have a strong
basis for a line-by-line pricing comparison.
The first part of the RFQ consists of a document describing the
product, company, and team, as well as the key areas in which
they’re looking for assistance from the factory. If you’re a startup,
this document can be crucial because reputable factories in the Far
East work with substantially larger customers, making money when
shipping products in volume, not in short runs. It’s critical in the
RFQ, therefore, that a startup illustrate for potential manufacturing
partners the opportunity that comes from working with them.
The second part of the RFQ is the Bill of Materials (BOM), which
specifies all the component parts and quantities needed to construct
the end product. The BOM is critical for having insight into the cost
of everything that’s going into a product, as well as being able to
make comparisons between different factories.
The third part is the all-important schedule. As Scott explains,
“Once you’ve got that, you go visit the factories [Figure 1-4], start to
figure out who’s good to work with, the capability of the team...
things like that. Then, finally, you’ll come back and do the apples-toapples comparison to understand the key cost drivers, and then how
they line up, based on your visit. Having gone through that process,
a company is in a great position to pick a factory.”

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Figure 1-4. The factory floor (Photo courtesy Dragon Innovation)
“At Dragon, we’re always agnostic on where our customers build.
The only thing we care [about] is that they succeed. Because we
build a lot of consumer electronics, China often makes sense; but if
you’re doing lower volume—say, under 5,000 units, as a rough
guideline—the United States makes tremendous sense,” adds Scott.
“What we typically see, if you contrast the United States and China,
in China, everything is very vertically integrated. So you’ve got the
molding, the SMT [Surface-Mount Technology] for the circuit
board, the quality testing, and the pack-out all in one facility.
Whereas in the United States, it tends to be more fragmented. You
may work with a molding shop to do the injection molded parts,
and then a different circuit board shop to put together your PCBAs,
and then a different house to do the final assembly. You just struc‐
ture the RFQ in a manner that’s conducive to that, but the process is
exactly the same.”
As product designers, it’s important that we understand how manu‐
facturing processes work, how they could change in the future,
where there are risks, and where there’s room for greater efficiency.
However, with outsource manufacturing this can be difficult to do
because the industry lacks transparency. In the future, we could ben‐
efit from software tools that enable products to move through the
Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume

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process more predictably. But for the time being, it might very well
be that service innovation, like that provided by Dragon, will be the
driver of disruption.

David meets Goliath: Achieving Innovation Speed for
Enterprise Companies
With emerging technologies moving more quickly than ever, it can
be hard to steer a large vessel, such as an enterprise organization, to
take advantage of them.
For larger companies that already have an established product port‐
folio and are seeing innovation happening at the grassroots level, the
ability to utilize crowd-sourcing or rapid prototyping might still be
problematic. The question comes down to this: when is it appropri‐
ate to retool a product process when you’ve got standard operational
procedures that make money for you today?
The ambiguity that can come with experimentation is always scary
and potentially costly. And, there are many aspects of innovation
process that don’t match up with the large company production
methods optimized to do one thing really well.
According to Dragon’s Scott Miller, “When it comes to product
design and development, the biggest thing on the minds of the
CEOs of larger companies is: ‘How to get an enterprise to go faster?
How do we get the speed of an entrepreneur to innovate and stay on
top of things?’ Their biggest concern is how do they innovate more
quickly. It’s certainly a challenge. If you look at what it takes to move
the needle for a big company versus a small one, it’s a tremendous
amount of volume. When you do that, there’s a lot more risk, that it’s
very difficult to fail fast to succeed sooner.”

Risk Taking and the Enterprise
Enterprise companies don’t want to lose out on opportunities
because they can’t take risks; they need new ways to evaluate innova‐
tive ideas and make good decisions about developing their products.
To solve this dilemma, innovating in small bites, by acquiring start‐
ups or forming incubators—where employees can have greater free‐
dom to experiment outside the regular organizational structure—is
a reasonable strategy. For example, the Boston area is a hotbed of

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large-company innovation lab activity, from CVS, Johnson & John‐
son, Staples, Verizon, and others.

Small Pilots
In the past, starting the manufacturing of a new product in signifi‐
cant volume always required an enormous leap of faith. Unsurpris‐
ingly, the result was that many projects never saw the light of day—a
difficult outcome for product designers, indeed. For even the largest
of companies it can be understandably difficult to justify occupying
a manufacturing facility and initiating a 100,000-unit run when you
lack all but the most basic of market validation.
However, in contrast today, as large companies recognize the impor‐
tance of rapid innovation, they’re finding ways to run smaller pilot
programs—manufacturing 5,000 to 10,000 units in order to get a

full understanding of the product/market fit. By testing products in
the market at a small scale and gathering data quickly, companies
can make informed decisions about whether they should scale-up
manufacturing. If a company gets the signal that there’s strength to a
product line, they can ramp up to full-scale production rapidly.

Developing Infrastructure
The product landscape is changing as Fortune 500 companies begin
placing their bets on emerging technologies. At the 2015 Consumer
Electronics Show (CES), Samsung announced its focus on the IoT
and the connected home. This might have seemed like a big bet for
the tech giant. The bigger play, however, might not be in the way
Samsung changes people’s interactions with their home appliances,
entertainment, and living environments, but rather in how the com‐
pany creates the infrastructure that binds it all together.
The IoT itself still lacks a solid infrastructure, which might still be
years from being developed. “While the Internet itself is accessible,
there remains a huge gap between the devices that we create and get‐
ting to the Internet,” says Ben Salinas, a designer and engineer at
emerging technology consultancy, Involution Studios. “WiFi net‐
works require a lot of power to connect to and are inconsistent.
They’re not universal. We see a lot of devices tethering to a phone to
use that Internet connection. That still has issues.”
Salinas continues, “If you’re one of these small companies that are
building a product for less than a few million dollars, you probably
Part 2. Growth and the Difficulties of Production in Volume

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15

are playing with the frameworks that larger companies, like Sam‐
sung, Apple, and Microsoft, have already created.”
When it comes to emerging technologies, for entrepreneurs and
smaller companies, the opportunities lie in bringing products to
market quickly, even if you’re playing on someone else’s network or
using someone else’s infrastructure. For the larger companies, mak‐
ing that network, driving the standards, and owning the ecosystem
are the big plays in the long term.

Part 3. Product as Dialogue
We are approaching a moment when product lifecycle maturity does
not preclude further innovation; rather, it provides a platform for it.
In the past, companies have dealt with mature product lines—those
with wide adoption but minimal growth—by adding more features
and attempting to find new uses and audiences to rejuvenate them.
Of the many places in the product development and manufacturing
lifecycle that can be disrupted, this could be one of the most signifi‐
cant. Emerging technologies, especially the bevy of connected
machines promised by the IoT, offer an opportunity for companies
to not only regularly update, but also analyze usage data returning
from these connected machines—making mass customization on a
user level possible. This data-driven interplay between company and
consumer, between user and designer, might begin to alter the prod‐
uct lifecycle to resemble more of an ongoing flow.
If data flow goes both ways—a conversation between designer and
user, rather than a speech—the product represents a living relation‐
ship and is never fully completed. Rather than think about a finished
product, as designers we should also incorporate into our thinking

how a company can be hyper-responsive to users of its products.
Connected devices and the IoT offer great potential for creating
ongoing dynamic interaction. For example, consider a product such
as a washing machine that can respond to energy cycles; variables,
such as the speed and pattern of agitation, and the amount and tem‐
perature of water can be customized based on our personal usage
patterns. Through this, the relationship that we have with our wash‐
ing machine changes, and the decisions that the designer and the
manufacturer make about which wash cycles to push to us become
valuable touchpoints in an ongoing conversation.

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A Tale from the Trenches: Making LEO, The Maker Prince
LEO, The Maker Prince is a book by Carla Diana (a Smart Design
fellow and New York Times contributor) that celebrates emerging
technology, inspiring young designers with a creative message, made
possible by 3D printing.
LEO, a visitor from space who you can see in Figure 1-5, prints 3D
models based on sketches that are created by the book’s narrator.
The imaginative tale can truly become real for readers, as designs of
the characters are available for them to 3D print, along with various
accessories, from musical instruments to a planter to a chess set.

Figure 1-5. LEO, The Maker Prince (Photo courtesy Carla Diana)

But where the book really shines, at least from a design standpoint,
is as an example of a product as dialogue. Readers share their works
on the book’s website and Diana makes ongoing adjustments to the
designs based on input from them. So, the book in some sense, is
always being updated, and Diana is having a conversation with the
book’s readers through the medium of a physical product.
One reason Diana created a children’s book about 3D printing was
to put virtual objects such as those in Figure 1-6 out in the world as
an experiment to see who downloaded them, why they downloaded
them, and what they did with them. “That was a fascinating moment

Part 3. Product as Dialogue

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for me,” says Diana, “because I felt like, ‘Wow, you could have never
done this before.’”
“People commented to me about some of the prints. They said, ‘Oh,
this particular part grows more successfully for me standing
upright.’ I worked as hard as I could to try to get the objects to print
as well as they would with a typical FDM at-home printer. That was
a really interesting moment for me, too, because I felt like, ‘Oh, I can
try this and I can just change the file.’”

Figure 1-6. All of the characters from the book can be 3D printed.
(Photo courtesy Carla Diana)
“I did that because I am envisioning this future where it comes to

distribution: A designer, manufacturer, entrepreneur no longer has
to think about, ‘Okay, well how many parts of this do I have to make
and where does it get warehoused? Where does it get distributed
and what retailers is it going to? There’s that whole dream of the
streamline distribution and I think it’s very realistic,” states Diana
enthusiastically.

A Tale from the Trenches: Understanding Consumer
Decision Making
How does a company know when it’s time to place a bet on emerg‐
ing technologies?

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Chapter 1: The Future of Product Design


“I think disruption for disruption’s sake will never win,” says Ellen
DiResta, a strategic design advisor for companies like Sanofi and
Becton Dickinson, and former Managing Director for innovation
consultancy Design Continuum.
DiResta goes on to say, “Every single client I have, I always love the
moment when I say to them: ‘Nobody wants your products. No one
wants to buy an extra thing. Nobody wants to think about your stuff.
The people who think the most about your products are you guys.
That’s it. You have to give them something. You have to enable them
to do something. If you don’t know what that is, and you’re busy just
focused on your thing, you will miss the mark eventually.’”

The relationship between the designer and the user of products is
becoming ever closer. Understanding the intrinsic motivations of
the population engaged with your company is paramount to facili‐
tating those relationships going forward. In many instances, compa‐
nies base their product portfolios and their future plans on emerg‐
ing technologies and how they expect those technologies to evolve.
But the product-based relationship you have with your customers
can be deeper and potentially longer standing.
DiResta suggests that companies need to avoid being seduced by the
functionality of a potentially disruptive technology; instead, they
need to ask, “How can these capabilities better enable our custom‐
ers?” At the same time, the product designer needs to understand
the full extent of a technology’s capabilities, because from this
knowledge, she can help define the desired user experiences.
Companies can err by going too far in the opposite direction, as well
—expecting consumers to tell them what to do and what to design.
When, in reality, the motivators driving a consumer’s choices might
be something that they’re not ever going to be aware of, let alone be
something that they can articulate.

Decision Motivators
“When I worked with a housewares company, I was interviewing
women at home who had kids in school. One lived in a very
depressed area and another person lived in Wellesley, Massachu‐
setts, which is very affluent,” DiResta elaborates.
“They had very similar values. Their choices were very different
because their means and their circumstances were very different.

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