Apps are great – having downloaded two billion of them, users clearly love them, but I wonder what this means for the future of users’ experiences on mobile and other devices. While apps are great at maximizing the experience on a particular device, the proliferation of different smartphone platforms means that there are at least five different OSs developers need to think about (iPhone OS, Blackberry OS, Symbian, WebOS (Palm) and Android). Isn’t this just another version of the Windows, Mac OS and Linux battles? (Interestingly, Windows Mobile, while early to the party, seems to be lagging.) What you can do in the mobile world depends, more than ever, on what device you have.

 Certainly the last 15 years have seen multiple revolutions in the web experience (anyone remember html 1.0 and blinking text?). Instead of ‘there’s an app for that,’ just a couple of years ago, we might have said, ‘there’s a site for that.’ But the limitations of the web environment (or the great capabilities of the iPhone) made the opportunity for apps too good to ignore. Each opportunity brings new challenges with it; in this case, it’s finding, choosing and managing lots of apps. In a world of 100,000 apps, the killer app might just be an app navigator. The iPhone App Store today has a lot more in common with Yahoo! in 1994 than Google in 2009.

So we’re only at the beginning, and we know a lot is going to change in the app space. But the right question here is: What’s the total experience that users really want to have? And who’s going to make it happen? It’s time to take a step back and think about people.

Bench advertising is very commonly seen in bus stops and public parks. On my daily commute, they’re mostly dominated by dentists, realtors, pharmaceutical companies, and sometimes public health campaigns like HIV testing. Ever since the smart advertisers from “District 9″ flooded the city of Los Angeles with “Non-Humans seen in La Cienega exit off 10 freeway,” “Bus bench for humans only” warning signs (I actually followed the sign and called to report non-human sightings), Cougar Town is now following suit and put Courtney Cox on the typical realtor bus bench spots.  Compared to conventional posters, these attempts to make audiences feel as if they are actually living the storyline seem more effective. To those who watch Cougar Town, it adds realism and emotional connections, to those who don’t, it peaks curiosity to find out more from those www’s…

"Up In The Air"

I have a 12-mile daily commute on Venice Boulevard, and it’s very interesting to see how advertisers try to grab commuters’ attention, especially now with digital billboards. As I wait for the lights to turn green, I now get the pleasure of being advertised by up to 6 different TV shows, whereas 2 years ago, I would have seen that billboard long before I arrived, and ignored it completely as I waited for the lights. Though none has impressed me until recently when I saw the smart advertisers from “Up In The Air” truly embrace the technology by shifting two images with the same background–one with George Clooney alone facing the runway, the other with two other travelers in the picture (as shown) within the same time frame given to each advertiser. I see a not too distant future when billboards will actually work with local traffic patterns (loaded with Google traffic data), to rotate content accordingly, or even work with cars embedded with smart chips to gauge the primary audience level at each given stop light.

826 Boston is the seventh center to be modeled after 826 Valencia, the acclaimed youth writing program co-founded by writer Dave Eggers. Continuum paired up with the local writing and tutoring center to create a new brand identity, communication strategy, and print collateral.

The collateral, playing off 826 Boston’s whimsical Greater Boston Bigfoot Institute storefront, includes witty copy, colorful graphics and hand-drawn illustrations.

The new identity will launch Monday, October 5th at and advanced screening party of Where the Wild Things Are, hosted by 826 Boston and the movie’s screenwriter Dave Eggers.

Swine Flew with panel at the conference.

For those of you who were never a Boy Scout, the Pinewood Derby is a competition in which contestants build a small wooden car to race on a 40 foot track against other cars of the same approximate size and weight. The goal is to work within the parameters of the rules to build the fastest car.

Several years ago, the IDSA (Industrial Designers Society of America) decided to sponsor a derby car race for designers at their annual IDSA National Conference in Pasadena. The response was overwhelming as designers and engineers entered dozens of impressive cars that would lie, cheat and creatively steal their way to the finish line.

Since that first race in 2004, the competition has raged on, with designers from all over the country fielding extraordinary cars. For this years IBM Unlimited Derby held at the IDSA conference in Miami, Continuum approached their participation in the race in a new way. Rather than trying to create the fastest car, the team decided to create the most memorable car. To accomplish this, we started by brainstorming themes that would be relevant to what’s going on in the world.

The planet is currently going through a financial crisis that hasn’t been experienced in eighty years. We’re all being forced to pinch pennies and find creative ways to save money. At the same time, worldwide concern is high around health threats like the swine flu. Continuum took these themes and turned them into a statement of hope, a piggy bank car called Swine Flew.

The generous contribution of the IDSA audience.

Throughout the four-day conference, the attendees were encouraged to add their spare change to the piggy bank. This served two purposes. First, each coin made the car slightly heavier, and consequently, faster. Second, Continuum offered to multiply every contribution by 10 and donate the final amount to design education.

The Swine Flew pit crew members, Jung Tak, Damien Vizcarra, and Kevin Young (many thanks to the non-traveling crew of Jake Childs, Rich Ciccarelli and Bruce MacRae) have returned from the IDSA National Conference and are proud to bring home the award for Fastest Car in the Gravity Weight Class as well as the award for Most Fun.

We’re also proud to say that the generous contributions of the IDSA audience helped Swine Flew raise a total of $1,274.40 for design education.

The crew members are proud to bring back two IBM Derby awards.

There is still quite a bit of detective work to be done. A cursory look at our graphs shows we are using on average 40kWatts (the equivalent of 400, 100 Watt, light bulbs) during nights/weekends and about 120kWatts peak during normal business hours.

From the below graph we can see that during business hours something is causing large spikes. Since this only happens during typical work hours we could probably attribute this behavior to the power hungry tools in our awesome Models Shop, or maybe the elevator. The spikes are probably due to the inductive load introduced when a motor such as a saw or compressor is turned on.

The chart below is a display of power use over a ten day period. You can see the reduced power consumption over the weekends and holidays. I would gather that since there is a small amount of power consumption on Monday May 25th (Memorial Day) some Continuumites are workaholics!

What’s Next

Possible improvements
Migrate data server applications to a proper web server
Add multi client capabilities so we can host data from other users.
Tie in real time power cost metrics
Carbon footprint tie in
Tie in weather parameters such as outside temperature and humidity.

Contribute
If you find this design intriguing and would like to contribute in some way, or if you have any questions feel free to email me at mcosta@dcontinuum.com

The client application runs on the iMx21 meter reader. It contains 2 endless threads SocketThread and LCD Thread.

LCDThread – each iteration of the loop it performs a frame grab using the EZFB API. It converts the image to grayscale then calculates the average pixel intensity for the square we care about. The pixel intensity is low when the box on the Elster LCD is “on” and goes up when the box is cleared. This thread also draws a square onto the LCD screen so the person installing the meter reader can easily align the video camera.

Images of the meter reader output LCD.
The Kh box is visible, note the O/F text output. 1 means the box has been detected.

The Hr box is not visible, note the O/F text output. 0 means the box has not been detected.

The second thread is the SocketThread. This thread waits for a new measurement from the LCDThread. When a new value is ready it just sends the power value over Socket to the web server.

Testing
I tested the accuracy of the box blink rate algorithm with a test LCD display. Using a Microchip Explorer16 Dev board and a PIC24H processor, I rigged up a simple blinking box on the explorer16 LCD. With this test setup I set the blink rate to .1Hz, 1Hz, and 10Hz to verify my Emeter application.

Calculations
This application converts Blink Time to power in kilo-watts. The formula for this calculation is:

Power (kW) = (.9kWh * 3600s * 200) / BlinkTime
The .9kW and 200 are values taken from the meter.

Data & Web Server
The web server is running Ubuntu Hardy Heron, ProFTPD and Apache 2.0

EMeterServer Application
The EMeterServer has only one simple socket thread. This thread just sits and waits for a new Power value from the client. If there is a new value, it writes it to a MySQL database table.

Web Server
The data server hosts the data via simple RSS feed, and Perl scripts. Any internet ready device or web page could access the scripts or RSS feeds to get real time power use.

PowerRss.php – Returns an XML RSS feed that contains the latest power use value.

graphUpdateLong.pl- Returns a link to an image of a graph of the power use over time.

meterUpdate.pl – Returns a link to an image indicating the power use as a simple needle meter.

GoogleJSON2.pl -Returns a JSON object table containing historical power use. (used for Google Visualizations API)

Insert a link to these files in your web browser and you will see the results

http://209.48.56.105/power/PowerRss.php

http://209.48.56.105/power/graphUpdateLong.pl

http://209.48.56.105/power/meterUpdate.pl

http://209.48.56.105/power/GoogleJSON2.pl

With the recent banning of Speedo’s LZR sharkskin-inspired speedsuits and the exposure of possible steroid use by Boston Red Sox baseball player David Ortiz, it raises an exciting question: What role does design play in the evolution of sport?

Michael Phelps’ eight Olympic gold medals is a record that may never be broken, all set while wearing Speedo’s suit. The suit is modeled after the drag-resistant texture of sharkskin and compresses the swimmer’s body in key areas. Though Olympic records are falling, most world-class swimmers have access to the suits — is this an unfair advantage or an enhanced design?

Andy Roddick hits tennis balls fast. 153 MPH fast. Speeds like these were unheard of in the days of Rod Laver and wooden tennis racquets. Nowadays it is commonplace for men and women on the professional tour to be serving well above 100 MPH. Now that graphite, titanium and ceramic composites are routinely used for weight reduction and enhanced rigidity, even beginners have the opportunity to use something much improved over the tennis racquets of yore. But are the racquets improved or is the game just different?

400-yard drives on the golf course? Not before monster-sized titanium club heads.
Track spikes that are lighter than a slice of 7-grain bread? Not just for Olympians anymore.

Why should full-body swimsuits be any different?

Can a shoe be too light? Can a ski have too much spring?

Should altering an athlete’s equipment be any different than altering an athlete’s body? What is “ethical” body-altering? How about Red Bull energy drink? Can an athlete with a super-reconstructed knee jump higher or cut quicker than one without? How “able” should an athlete be? How soon will it be before athletes intentionally integrate prostheses or have healthy joints and limbs replaced with titanium ones before the original is worn out?

What is “performance enhancing design”? Few groups are asking and acting upon such questions — certainly there are lots of terrific opportunities to evolve sport and enable our bodies to push the limits of sport, but within what ethical boundaries? And how can (or should) design enhance such experiences?

Design Overview

The electricity monitoring system consists of two major components. The first component is the utility meter reading device, the second is the data server. The utility meter reader monitors electricity usage and sends the latest value to the data server via TCP/IP sockets. The data server stores this value and serves the historical data through custom Perl scripts for web page display or RSS feed.

Utility meter reading in the electrical closet.

Overview

The Elster A3 Alpha utility meter has a blinking box (called Kh in the manual) on the LCD display with a blink frequency proportional to the instantaneous power use (marked by A in the above image). Every time the box changes state, this indicates .9kWh have been used. This will be our method of monitoring instantaneous power use. 

 In short this is an Embedded Linux device centered upon a Freescale iMx21 processor. It optically reads power usage from the utility meter and feeds the latest power consumption data to the server through a custom TCP/IP socket.

 The main requirement for the meter reader was flexibility. Some other requirements are video input/output and Ethernet. As a result I decided to use an ARM based processor that could run embedded Linux. This would allow me to develop software in a flexible Linux setting using GNU libraries and I would have a greater array of compatible hardware peripherals should I need them. 

Freescale iMX

We have worked with Freescale iMX processors on a few previous projects before so I knew they would be sufficient for my needs.  The iMX21 micro has an Enhanced Multi-Media Acceleration (EMMA) peripheral built in which frees the ARM processor from some of the intensive video manipulation tasks. The M9328MX21ADS development board from Freescale comes with an Embedded Linux BSP making it a very attractive platform for its “out of the box” quality.  Plus Gerry Vahe the FAE at Freescale is an Embedded Linux buff and he is a great resource because if you have ever built an embedded Linux development environment you know it can be a headache at times!

Freescale M9328MX21ADS development board, some notable features: 

·     IMX21 Arm Processor

·      Video Camera

·     3.5″ TGT QVGA LCD module 

·        Ethernet Interface, RS232

·     Hardware based RS232 bootloader ensuring I can never “brick” my device. 

Freescale Linux BSP with LTIB

·     Powerful kernel containing drivers for hardware included with the ADS dev. board

·      Blob TCP/IP bootloader featuring NFS capabilities & RS232 shell terminal

·      Includes GNU arm compilers and libraries

·      Includes a large array of demonstration applications and utilities.

I especially like the flexibility of deleloping an embedded device using NFS (Network File System). With NFS I don’t need to flash the device with new firmware for each build, I just recompile and reboot the device. The bootloader is setup with the proper IPs to fetch the kernel and file system image from my Linux development machine.

Tune in next week for a description of the software.  

The empowerment of consumers in a free market society affords us all our dollar votes. However, the balance of this free market scale, originally defined by 18th century economist Adam Smith, implies a level of transparency and knowledge. These days, products which are built to last are undervalued and “Made in USA” claims are no longer the heavyweights they were, much less possible. Now that our society is in deep with China, who manufactures over $280 billion of our products, is it time for us to take a closer look at our values and dollar votes? How will we decide the shape of designs to come? How will we as consumers re-energize our economy to support a healthier American body? 

Consumer Activism

Consumer activism has been part of our history since the boycotts of the Revolutionary War. Through consumer’s choices the “invisible hand” leads us to patronize and invest. Supporting products and services with our patronage is apart of our country’s heritage. However, voting with our dollar has never been more complex. Nearly every product aimed at us with precision comes decked with variables in fine print and a barrage of implications. As our ability to understand our product’s make-up and their respective systems has declined, our means for consciously buying has dwindled away.

If we apply this same activism to the more literal consumption of food we see an analogous battle. Many consumers are becoming more aware of the organic vocabulary and are slowly realizing the impact of ingesting these manufactured goods into their own bodies. Agribusiness will face real growing pains as book titles like “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan slowly bend our mainstream mentality. Robert Kenner’s recent film, Food, Inc., also takes direct aim at transparency in agribusiness. In parallel, we must consider this ingestion in a wider view of products. How complete is the public’s knowledge of the impacts of the products we support? Are we as buyers the well-versed nutritionist or the kid in the candy store with little knowledge of our own health? As we put a close eye on each dollar spent in today’s economy, the demand is up on values and knowledge. Each dollar counts.    

Disconnection to Manufacturing

The consumer’s ability to vote for product systems properly has been nullified by their detachment from making goods. To understand how our stuff is made requires a full understanding of its material sourcing and manufacturing processes, shipping and distribution channels, and where it ends up. As it stands, life cycle analysis is not for the common consumer. Most of people’s time at the point-of-purchase is dedicated to figuring out gangly new interfaces, not an analysis of shipping routes and raw material mines. To highlight the disconnection between consumers and manufacturing processes, we find programs like How It’s Made, on The Discovery Channel, a fantastic spectacle. To many, this is the closest they’ll get to understanding the processes of making everything we own, to scale. Edward Burtynsky shows how it’s no Gepetto hammering away making our stuff. He paints a rarely seen picture.

Burtynsky, the acclaimed documentarian of Manufacturing Landscapes, is not out to ruin our comfort with buying our cozy products. He’s a photographer who wants to honestly depict the reality of the modern machine. Within the space of consumerism literature and publicity, Burtynsky’s approach is unique; his open narrative quietly emphasizes the potency of scale. He is one of many making the profound point that we have a very limited understanding of the resources it takes to make our products, how many countries and stakeholders were involved, and where our products go after their planned obsolescence. We must consider how such large and complex systems effects our free market scale where knowledge and transparency are key.  It’s oddly enlightening to find anything like the Footprint Chronicles, an honest window into Patagonia’s process of making. We must work towards a new intimacy with making. While Big Box retailers continue slashing prices with a wink consumers need to think twice about their vote. 

Mainstream vs. Underground

More than a third of Americans shop at Walmart each week. Alongside this we notice its ever burgeoning counter force, the world of handmade craft. Marking this industry’s progress are web communities like Supermarket and Etsy. Only started in 2005, Etsy now has over 200,000 sellers who bring in over $12 million worth of goods per month. Documenting this recent explosion is Handmade Nation. They captured the movement late last year with their film and book release telling a new story of our roles as both consumers and producers. It exposes a different side to product development, the punk rock side.

As craft fairs pop up in gymnasiums, warehouses and small boutiques around the nation the movement appears as a rebellion. This time consumers are introducing something new to buying: community. The new-found value of having an authentic understanding of a product and a relationship with its maker is like a slap in the face. Designers in this realm thrive off of networking and joining into a collective understanding of their resources. Handmade Detroit shows a vibrant online hub for exchanging ideas, skills, resources, and events. This exchange has allowed the craft world to move beyond an incestuous offering of kitchy stationary and cutesy flowery cut-and-sew products. These communities can now develop structures that allow for more complex processes and advance as the industry becomes more robust. The makers can nimbly select materials that accurately align with buyer’s most current values such as sustainable materials or local produce. Ultimately, this helps refine the creative expression of individual communities, making beautifully unique culture.

With new values of community and hand craft, Hartmut Esslingers’ original expression of emotional design through Apple’s early products is sure to evolve into something more transparent, connected, and hands-on. 

Design Within Reach

Shifting into a paradigm of consciousness means a tough learning curve. With more values infiltrating our systems of “voting” for products consumers will look for simpler, more transparent solutions. Sure, language systems will need to be invented to communicate a product’s social and ecological impacts (certifications and “nutritional facts” labels for products). However, today’s handmade craft world shows how it’s more than feeling good through effective communication and marketing. Product systems which sustain will ultimately be made through an involvement in the community and an intimacy with the creative process.

Being involved in a community of commerce is about personal relationships with the people involved, the stakeholders. Who’s behind the process? What motivates them? Strong product development companies and vendors know the value of these connections and spend big on fine-tuned service and sales. Similarly, we still realize the value of that ashtray we made in art class for our parents (smoking or non) and its endless value, a stamp in time.  Owning things that are connected to strong relationships is of the highest value. The tighter our list of stakeholders becomes, the more we gain an understanding of the process and invest in our communities. We may see how development systems working on this community scale can more efficiently customize solutions to its needs and promote its own expression. As consumers understand their products more, stakeholder’s values of fair trade, worker’s rights, and local manufacturing will be heightened.

With the typical scale of production, involving the consumer in the creative process oftentimes means more SKU’s, colorways, mass customization, or a complex aftermarket. However, as we grow closer to the process, consumers will be offered more personalized solutions and empowered to adopt the DIY movement. In a struggling economy we’ll realize great design and powerful dollar votes by enabling communities to access the creative design process. Ponoko is one example of an enabling product system that allows an online community to submit their own designs using laser cutting as its medium. Places like 3rd Ward and The Workroom can now get more traction as people in their community jump in and get designing. Systems like these promote an collective and accessible process which naturally fulfills its needs and potential, starting to look very much like an open source network.

Considering these ideas of transparency and craft, the mentality of “good design” will be more accessible for common consumers to grasp. They can start to vote for products which they understand, enabling them to invest in products which align with their values. In just a couple generations, the ancient tool of design has been refined for making products on massive scale that encompasses many cultures. Reapplying the same tool with a bit of consciousness may just help us navigate through the economic wasteland. Maybe we can spend less time moping about the economy in Walmart, and instead realize our own resources and creativity. The US is rebranding itself, spread the word.