When designers and engineers refer to “hygiene,” they are usually not referring to their grooming habits. Instead, they are talking about the basic tasks that users expect a product in a category to be able to do. We expect refrigerators to keep food cold. We expect banking websites to let us check our account balances. We assume that a word processing program will let us print documents.

The problem arises when, in the quest for more features, hygiene is ignored. Basic activities are ignored, or the product is sluggish and unresponsive. We have to make sure the Buddha Nature of the product is protected. The product should do the simple tasks it is supposed to do as well as possible.

No company is safe from this issue. The vaunted iPhone isn’t a particularly good phone (nor, arguably, good for sending texts).

Hygiene is just one area where the technology and engineering affect the user experience. Reliability and responsiveness are basic qualities that have to come before any additional features be piled on. (And then, of course, checked again.)

Testing the product with users in the context of use, and especially longitudinal studies, will reveal issues with reliability over time. A ruthless adherence to the known, basic laws of responsiveness is also required.

No matter how many additional features a product has, no matter how beautiful its form and interface, the product that can’t do its basic functions has got to suck.

Our phone was in great company alongside projects from RKS, Ammunition, Lunar, and Smart Design, all perched on a table between the snacks and the new Porsche Panamera. The new HP Envoy laptops were on display as well, accompanied by young pretty models who could explain both their palm weight and processing power, while never losing their smile.

The event kicked off with a panel discussion among three of this year’s Masters of Design: Pentagram’s Lisa Strausfeld, David Rockwell of The Rockwell Group, and David Butler from Coca-Cola. Moderated by Linda Tischler from Fast Company, the conversation was both insightful and entertaining.  And it generated my new favorite digispeak phrase, “to double click” (on something to explore it in more depth).

The room was packed with interesting people from the design industry, and I was honored to share a green “Expert Design Blogger” badge with  veterans like Steve McCallion, Dan Harden, John Edson, Robert Brunner and Tom Dair. I enjoyed great conversations with fellow bloggers and Fast Company staffers, as we milled about the exhibition that also included work from IDEO, Alessi, David Adjaye, and an interactive Coke machine.

My favorite piece was by designer Ken Carbone, who created a scupture from his personal journals, handmade books filled with images, sketches and collages of found materials and words. It was strikingly low tech, visceral, and expressive,  in a room full of metals and plastics.

In the end, I didn’t win the raffle for the free Envoy laptop, and as far as I know no one went home with the Porsche. But I enjoyed the evening nonetheless, and I’m proud to have represented our one-year-old Kicker among so many masters of design.

You can find the official photos and videos from the event at Fast Company.

How BERG has been using the term, as in the use of non-traditional materials, including non-tangible technologies (“immaterials”) such as RFID, has really resonated with the work we do at Kicker, where the form of the product, while still important, only tells part of the object’s story. Objects become hosts for all sorts of interactivity that may or may not be suggested by their forms (if there even are forms). I was getting to this same idea in my talk Interaction as a Material, but didn’t quite make it concrete enough.

More than anything, it seems that post-industrial design is both a way of working and a way of thinking about products. It’s a way of working in that it considers the interactive behavior a product should engender before considering its physical form. There may be no physical form at all, in fact. Or, more accurately, the “form” is an area whose parameters are unseen by the naked eye. The technology of “immaterials” can be used to extend the form beyond the physical object into an area of space.

In post-industrial design, data becomes a resource to be managed, the same way electricity is managed in traditional industrial design: it must be detected, acted upon, transferred, stored. Data, and the technologies that surround its management, have properties, truly physical properties, that while they cannot be seen, they can certainly, like gravity, be felt and experienced. Consider how close you have to stand to get a paper towel from a sensor-driven dispenser, or the length of time it takes to transfer a file via Bluetooth.

It’s this management of data via digital technologies that powers post-industrial products, be they websites, interactive environments, or devices. In a world becoming filed with sensors, microprocessors, RFID and other near-field technologies, mesh networks, etc., an awareness of the immaterials that structure our interactions will become more and more a necessary design skill. Not only during the process of design, but in communicating presence and instruction to those who use our products.

How we think about time and space and how we interact with the physical world are shifting, and this is (obviously) a big deal: for the design profession, those we work with, and for the world in general. The times, they are a-changing. God help us all.

What will reading look in the future? Will we be using printed books, rectangular electronic devices, embedded technologies? This competition challenges designers to envision a rich future digital reading experience, based on a defined set of design research.

Clearly unlike some of our worthy (cough, cough) competition, we actually did only spend the allotted time coming up with our solutions. We started by coming up with a list of design principles based off the provided research:

• Needs to be able to show book covers (and thus personal taste) via a quick visual reference
• Has to display traces of history
• Can have physical characteristics (weight, visible signs of age) that reflect the content
• Has different physical instantiations for the same content, adjustable based on reader’s context
• Supports reading multiple things at any given time (although not necessarily at once)
• Not embarrassed to be seen using in public.

We then quickly put together a list of behaviors and tasks that we thought the solution should support, everything from bookmarking to quoting a passage to creating a sense of accomplishment as the content is read. Then we started brainstorming. Ideas ranged from glasses to Silly Putty to cafe tables to gloves. But then we narrowed these dozen or so ideas down to three:

BookLight
BookLight is a mini projector/camera the size of a book light. It can clip onto book-like objects, solid surfaces, or behind the ear. BookLight can project text onto any surface and starts by projecting a reading collection for a reader to choose from. BookLight is controlled via gestures visible through its camera. Readers can page through reading material, make bookmarks and notes, and underline text with a hand or stylus. The camera also detects usage and image changes over time to reflect fingerprints and page “aging.” Pages can permanently take on some of the texture of the surface they are projected onto. Projection can be re-sized for context: reading on a hand, on hand-held reading surface, on a table or wall, etc.

BookEnds
Two “paddles” held separately in each hand create BookEnds, which project a holographic image in between them that displays reading material in air. The size of the reading canvas is determined by how far apart the reader’s hands are while holding the paddles. The reader flips through pages by lifting the right paddle towards left one, as though turning a page in a newspaper or book. The weight of the paddles shifts to reflect the reader’s place in the book. The relative size of each book is reflected in the weight of the panels as well. The panels can be stored standing up on a shelf to charge, displaying the spines of the reader’s collection between them.

Book Blocks
Book Blocks are post-it sized, thin squares with a matte, touchscreen display. Book Blocks snap together to form a larger surface area for reading. For example, many blocks together can form a newspaper-sized reading surface — content adjusts for the new surface space. Publishers can sell special blocks with their content (e.g. individual books, a yearly subscription to the New York Times, etc). Readers can share content by snapping off a block and handing it to a friend. Cafes can have Blocks embedded into tables so that visitors can attach their own blocks to see what the last occupants of the tables were reading.

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. It’s becoming less and less difficult to manufacture and develop products. Stories abound of people building new web products overnight or in a week. Rapid manufacturing techniques mean you can get physical products built in days, not months. This doesn’t mean these products are any good, of course, just that it can be done.

Rapid construction doesn’t mean a damn thing if no one cares about the product. Having an idea for product doesn’t mean that people will want it. People care about products that fill a need in their lives. And not just the company’s need to make money off this idea, but a real, unmet need of your customers. What can this product give them that no other product can? What is the value proposition? Why would anyone spend their time and money using this?

For an amazingly large number of companies, start-ups especially, the answer is a resounding, “We don’t know, but we’re certain people will like it.” Or, better yet, “Focus groups tell us they’d use it.” If your product doesn’t meet a need, adoption (after a possible initial burst of interest fueled by novelty) will decline and the product will fail.

Not being able to articulate succinctly why a customer would use your product and what need it fills in their lives is an enormous failure of product strategy. Not a line of code, not a sketch of form, not a chart in a marketing plan should ever be started without this crucial piece of knowledge.

There are any number of ways to figure this out. Competitive analysis is a good place to begin. Where is the hole in the market? What could be there? A vision prototype can help as well, trying to imagine the end state of the product. Design research is another helpful tool to find out the three key things when designing a product: motivations (why would someone use this product?), expectations (how do users think this product should work?), and behaviors (what is the context of use, and what tasks does it need to successfully perform?).

Guesses can be made at these, of course, and sometimes very good ones. But what makes products terrible is when no one even bothers to guess at them. No one looks from outside the organization at what the end user (often unconsciously) needs. Thus, we get flooded with products that aren’t differentiated, that don’t meet any needs or desires, that don’t convince customers to make them a part of their lives. Landfills are littered with these products, as is the TechCrunch Deadpool. In other words, they suck.

For the most part, those who design and build products want them to be good. They want people to buy and use them. They want them to be enjoyed and maybe even win an award or two. They want to make money and be successful. But they are constrained (or seemingly constrained) by time, money, personnel. Resources, in other words. Too few resources can choke an otherwise promising product.

Without enough time, the product team won’t be able to do enough iteration or testing. Without enough money, products can be shoddily made out of cheap materials or not have enough infrastructure to work properly. Without enough of the right kind of manpower, products might be made poorly and/or slowly.

Of course, all products are going to have constraints. No project has unlimited time, money, and people…and nor would you even want them to. (In another post, I’ll talk about having too many resources.) “Design depends largely on constraints,” as Charles Eames reminds us. But it is the deliberate withholding or poor allocation of resources that can cripple a product.

Sometimes organizations can forget that their role is not simply to perpetuate the organization, but to create or refine products (and/or services) that people will buy and use. And their best efforts (read: resources) should be directed at this task.

Often some of these constraints are false ones. “We have to get this product out by Q2.” “Why?” “Because it’s on the spreadsheet.” The trick is to figure out which constraints are the serious, immovable ones and which ones are arbitrary. Of course, it is important to get the product launched during its window of opportunity, but it might not be important to get an inferior product out in time for a small trade show. An accurate assessment of what the market window really is will help.

You can ensure you get the proper resources by demonstrating (with numbers and metrics if you must) the proper importance of the project to the organization. Of course, that means you too must come to terms with what its proper importance is; after running the numbers, you might realize it isn’t nearly as high-priority as you thought.

Without enough resources, even if the product does launch, there might not be enough organizational support to really maintain and support the product once it’s on the market. And that too will make the product suck.

Last week, we presented our top five concepts to our clients at SVA (you can sneak a peek at the thumbnail sketches). The concepts ranged from manipulating 3D objects to ambient hanging objects that projected images to monitors that viewed invisible objects.

SVA selected a concept that employs a large touchscreen and multiple additional sensors to respond as traffic moves down the hallway. This week we’re pricing large (6′x3′) touchscreens and other hardware and putting together a project plan to design and build the installation over the next few months.