The Future of Innovation: The World is Your Controller

 

We interact with the world even when we don’t realize it. 

The act of breathing changes the chemical composition of the air in our immediate vicinity.  Standing in the sun casts a shadow – the area in the darkness gets momentarily deprived of light.  Jump up and down and the floor vibrates.  Walk in a crowd and other people magically move out of the way (hopefully 😉 ).  We tell people we love them (or we don’t) and they respond on an emotional level causing chemical and electrical processes to be initiated in their bodies and in ours.

Go to any Home Depot or Lowes, and there are countless switches, knobs, buttons, sliders and more, that are used to foster interaction with the world around us.

Unfortunately, we’ve gotten so used to these mechanisms of interaction that we think these are the only ways to interact.  We call them switches, knobs, buttons, etc., but we no longer call them what they really are:

Controllers.

Interact with something and it controls something.

To the extent we can measure how the world reacts to our interactions, we can use those measurements to control other things.

Everything has the potential to be a controller.

Some Gamers have taken this truism to an extreme by using objects as diverse as fishing reels to bananas to LED strips to control the games they’re playing.

This video shows the bananas in use.

 

What can we use as controllers in the game we all play: Life?

It’s important that we suspend all judgement of what makes a good controller, at least in the beginning.  It’s important that we play, that we experiment. After all, controllers are used in games.

In our increasingly connected world, the Internet of Things enables controlling systems in unimaginable ways.

The controllers of the future don’t need to have an obvious relationship to the things we want to control (bananas?!).  We only have to design the means for interpreting  our interactions with controllers and sending that information to whatever it is we want to control.

That’s my challenge to you.

Start seeing the everything in the world as a potential controller. Get wild with your ideas.  Think of it as a game, have fun!

Radical innovation may only be a banana away!

 

***If you’d like to learn more and want to structure a class on alternate controllers, take a look at this paper from the folks at the Rochester Institute of Technology who had a class in building alternative game controllers.

 

Dear RadioShack, It didn’t have to end this way…

It’s official.

RadioShack has filed for bankruptcy.

Call me naïve, but I really don’t think this had to happen.  I realize I’m ‘Monday Morning quarterbacking’ (Why DID Seattle throw that pass on the one yard line?!?!  I digress….) but RadioShack had made some bad choices.

RadioShack’s bankruptcy, which has been expected for months, follows 11 consecutive unprofitable quarters as the company has failed to transform itself into a destination for mobile phone buyers. Its sale agreement with Standard General could spare it the fate most retailers suffer in Chapter 11 – liquidation.

A destination for mobile phone buyers.  Seriously?  You can get a cell phone at WalMart for pete sakes!

RadioShack made multiple attempts at rebranding, as if a logo or name change was going to pull them out of obscurity. It wasn’t enough.

As someone who has literally gone to RadioShacks my whole life, the one thing that RadioShack fell away from was what made it famous in the first place.

RadioShack was trailblazing as a Maker store long before people even used the term “Maker.”   Yet, as the years passed, the only things that qualified as maker-esque were buried in the far corners of the store, literally collecting dust.  Most employees, it seemed, liked techie stuff, but weren’t that well versed in maker-esque components that were on their shelves.

I went over to Google Trends and looked at a few search terms to see how often people were Googling certain terms since 2010 (I didn’t put these all on one graph because there were scaling issues)

3D Printing

Arduino

DIY

Maker Space

Raspberry Pi

 

Every trend is going up.

But, not this one:

Maker Faire Coming to Milwaukee, Wisconsin!

 

At last!

Every year I’ve bemoaned the fact that there wasn’t a  large, local Maker Faire in Northern Illinois/Southern Wisconsin.

This year will be different.

Thanks to the vibrantly creative Milwaukee Community and the sponsorship of the Brady Corporation, Milwaukee will be home to a two-day Maker Faire. The event will be held at the Wisconsin State Fair Park on Sept. 27th and 28th, 2014.  Admission is FREE!!  If you’d like to do some making at the Faire, they are currently excepting applications.

For more info there is the official press release here, and be sure to check out the website.

If you plan on going, please let me know. I hope to see you there!

 

Minds.com – THE Open Source Portal to the Social Web

I clicked on the link in Facebook and was brought to a matrix of videos, pictures, words…information.  I scrolled down, clicked…

Amazing… share it…

Scroll…

Click…

Wow…share it…

Welcome to Minds.com

Who are they?

We are organizing the world’s free information and liberating the people of the net through dedication to decentralization, creative commons and digital democracy.  You are a co-creator of this network.

We want to build an app with every active free and open source project on the Internet in order to create a legitimate universal alternative to closed-source surveillance corporations like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon and so on.  This includes search, social networking, clouds, video, images, docs, maps, video chat, markets, mobile and even alternative currencies.  We still want to share and interact with those networks in many cases, but we don’t want to be reliant on them at all.

Motivated by the centralization of power of the Twitters, Facebooks, Googles, etc., Minds.com will decentralize the social web and offer people choices – three of them when you sign up:

1. Create a channel on Minds.  (Just like you would make a profile on other social nets)

2. Launch a social network on Minds. (Your own customized version of our entire site that we host for you)

3. Download the code and host it all yourself.  (The decentralized option at Minds.org)

A great description of their philosophy and everything they’re doing is here.

This isn’t what everybody’s been calling Web 3.0

This is disruption

Co-creating and empowering

A Maker Movement for the Social Web

Think about a future where social networks are democratized, where information is shared across platforms, where the control is in your hands…

~Dream~

As of the time of writing, there was 352 days, 6 hours & 20 minutes until the free code would be released.

Until then, head on over to Minds.com, join in the fun and start building the social web that you want.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. How do you envision this being used?

 

The First Day of the 2013 IDSA International Conference in Illustrated Form

Industrial Designer and Illustrator, Craighton Berman, put together these “sketchnotes” of the 2013 IDSA International Meeting – Breaking the Rules.

Thanks Craighton for the great summaries! (Click on them to open them in a new window at full size)

Thoughts from the “Inside 3D Printing Conference and Expo” in Chicago

I was extremely excited to check out the Inside 3D Printing conference.  I had forgotten to put it into my calendar and almost missed it.  While the speaker lineup for the conference looked interesting and provocative, for someone like myself who has been using 3D rapid prototyping technologies for somewhere between 10 and 15 years, there wasn’t enough to catch my eye for the price tag. So, I opted for registering at the door and walking the ‘expo’ portion of the conference. Besides, I had a few questions on some newer materials that I was hoping someone could answer.

When I walked through the doors I was, to say the least, underwhelmed.  I believe I counted 14 exhibitors. Some of the exhibitors I was already well acquainted with (e.g. Stratasys, 3DSystems, netfabb), others, not so much.  Nevertheless, there was some cool stuff at the show and below are some things I found really interesting, as well as some pictures of the event.

First and foremost, I was really impressed by the folks of www.thre3d.com. Check out the website.  There you’ll find what they call (and what most likely is!), “The biggest interactive 3D printing directory.”  It is a great resource for all things 3D printing.  Research manufacturers, compare products, learn about different types of 3D printing.  It’s a great resource.  While you’re browsing, if you see something that you think needs improving, let them know via the feedback tab.  They are very open to improving the service and genuinely nice people!

When you want to communicate to others what a finished design might look like, high-caliber rendering requires some serious computing power.  It’s not uncommon to start a render before going to sleep and hope that when you wake up, the rendering program hasn’t crashed and you can see the finished result.   Lagoa changes all that.  Lagoa is a cloud based rendering system – lightning fast (minutes and seconds, not hours!), real-time, reasonable pricing and even has a free subscription!  This needs to be seen to believed.  I already have a free account and am starting to play with it.

There was also a very cool 3D paper printing technology from Mcor Technologies. Using a regular ream of copy paper, this technology is much cheaper than plastic printing and great for form and fit type models – plus you can print models in full color.  You can also use them to make investment castings.  And when your model isn’t needed anymore?  Recycle it or compost it. Check out these models, and remember, that’s paper!

Here is a video of me using this slick

Finding the Real Niches for 3D Printing

3-D printing is cool and it has its place, but we keep asking it to do everything.  We want it to be the go-to technology for making toys, utensils, art, food, etc.   And yes, there are companies like Ponoko that are built around these technologies, and they’re quite successful, but the question still needs to be asked:

Are we using 3-D printing tech to its strengths?

Neil Gershenfeld of MIT, and author of Fab:The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop, sums it up well by saying:”…The killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication. Not to make what you can buy in Wal-Mart, but to make what you can’t buy at Wal-Mart.”

To “make what you can’t buy at Walmart.”

That’s exactly the point!

Yet, if you look at what 3-D printing is being used for, with the exception of some creative art and its use by architectural and design firms, 3-D printing is, by and large, being used to make what can be bought at Walmart, or some other store.

Recently Nokia, in its attempt to ride the buzz of 3-D printing, started providing files so that people can print their own phone cases. Yes, people with some 3-D design software acumen can make their own cases, and no doubt will come up with some really cool ideas.  But, the point remains, these same parts can be bought finished and then customized with colors, overlays, etc., and (this is a biggie) no software knowledge is required.

So that brings me to the main point of this post.

If 3-D printing is ever going to truly blossom and be a force to reckoned with, it needs to be more than just another way to do something that is already being done.  It needs to stand on its own as a technology that says, “Only I can do this and without me you will never see this come to fruition!”

For that statement to be made, we first must truly understand the strengths of 3-D printing technologies.  Once we know what can and can’t be done, we can then look for those problems for which 3-D printing is the ultimate solution.  It’s a little bit backward to think this way, but it often happens that new technologies start as solutions looking for problems.

So, let’s put the power of the web to work and crowdsource the future of 3-D printing. To do that, we need to answer the following questions:

What is it that 3-D printing can do that other technologies can’t?

Where are 3-D printing’s strengths?

What can 3-D printing do that molding technologies or machining, or thermoforming can’t do?

Here’s a quick, short list to get the ball rolling:

• Make things in layers
• It can create by controlled melting/bonding and curing type processes
• Can make hollow objects
• Can make objects within objects
• Can reproduce digital data in 3-D (This enables us to hold something that otherwise can’t be held, i.e. Using CT scan data to build skulls for surgical planning)
• ???

I’m sure there is more that can be added to this list.  Please share what you think 3-D printing does well.   Feel free to either comment here or on twitter, use  #3Dstrengths.  I’ll compile the responses and let’s see if we can’t find a niche for 3-D printing that brings real, sustainable value beyond what 3-D printing is being used for today. If you have a niche idea, use #3Dniches.

Thanks and looking forward to the responses!!

Thoughts on 3D Printing and…

Zintro recently blogged on the future of 3D printing. My thoughts are quoted in the article along with those of some colleagues.

In short, 3D printing (in all its facets) still isn’t on the ‘verge’ of launching into the mainstream.  Don’t get me wrong, there is definitely a place for 3D printing in the world.  I use it myself for testing product fit and function.  But, even with newer materials being developed all the time, there are still limitations, especially for the ‘home printing’ demographic.

There’s also the problem with designing parts on your computer.  Before anything can be printed it needs to first exist in the digital realm. In other words, the part needs to be built twice- virtually before it can be made in actuality.

The expertise to do this isn’t there yet.  Computer Aided Design programs are pretty complicated.  Even newer ones like Autodesk 123D, while they’re simpler, are not suited to anything other than the simplest parts.   At the end of the design process, if someone isn’t willing to plunk down from $500-$5000,  the model has to be sent to a place like Ponoko to be made.

So what does that mean?

There are some cool applications for 3D printing, especially in the medical realm. Still, the perfect fit for something that’s built layer by layer hasn’t been found.

Which brings me to another technology that’s slipped under the radar.  While 3D printing’s promise of “You can make anything for yourself at any time!” is capturing headlines, this other technology is low-cost and capable of creating more than just toys.

~Arduino~

Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform.  The parts are easy to find at a Radio Shack or online.  To bring those parts to life, one needs to learn to program, and programming is a language.

Learning this language is within the reach of anyone with access to the internet or bookstore.  With some basic knowledge, and tapping into a wealth of online expertise, you can design interactive products and environments.

Here’s a video from one of the founders of Arduino.  He echoes many of my sentiments but one line is particularly memorable:

“You don’t need anyone’s permission to make something great.”

The whole concept of intellectual property and patents will face some serious reckoning in the next 10 years.