A CONTEMPORARY BESTIARY

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As it happens I once related the 15 seconds anecdote to someone else from Apple, and they looked at me then said (I paraphase): HA! 15? One! You’ve got one second! Maybe two!

a good product is explainable in a sentence. We’ve since refined this: we ask ourselves how whatever we’re designing can be described in 140 characters or less.

It’s so significant that physical things now have computation inside them, and access to the network. It’s insane what this means.

So it is a product or a service? I don’t think it’s possible to make that distinction, you wouldn’t separate the two.

the object/interface separation! The user interface is an interface because it’s the surface of the thing, the interface between the thing and the world. The controls of a physical thing used to be on the interface, the surface. The design cue for a control surface was the idea of affordances. No longer. I control Little Printer through a portable screen, separate from the object itself: my smartphone. To control a thing, you no longer necessarily look at the thing. Weird.

little brain/big brain! So how do you do product design when the physical shape of the product no longer bounds what its functionality, and the behaviour of a product can be side-loaded from the network, entirely changing what it does without the product physical altering at all?

Metaphorically of course, according to all my “product” thinking, the entire thing - publications, marketing, brand, smartphone interface, plastic and silicon all - is the “product,” because it’s the entire “product” by which the market will judge our success.

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