You might wonder what design can possibly have to do with the success of a jet engine or an MRI machine. But hospitals and power plants are now linking their machines into ecosystems. And well-designed iPad apps are the simplest way to manage them. "If we don’t do it, someone else will," says Greg Petroff, general manager of user experience and design at GE. "GE could be relegated to not having the top relationship with the customer," Petroff says. "Our hypothesis is that we can build a better solution."
Designers are the ones best situated to figure out how a kit of parts can become something more--they’re the ones who can figure out the human interface for a vast chain. If they do their job right, the result--a working ecosystem--is a far better platform for innovation than an isolated product. Just think about Apple and how its products have expanded from iMacs to iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and iPads, all linked via its iCloud.
Commoditization Pushes Designers to the Fore
Innovation usually cycles between periods of raw, technical inventiveness and the finer task of packaging it for mass adoption.
Consider Bump, an app that lets users swap data between phones simply by bumping them together. Its cofounder, Dave Lieb, notes that in the first dotcom rush, online enterprises had to build their infrastructures from scratch, so engineers were paramount. In our app economy, everything has changed. Bump had 1 million users before it spent $1,000. It didn’t need infrastructure, thanks to Amazon’s server-hosting service; it didn’t need advertising because of social media; and the App Store solved any distribution problem. Development was a breeze, too, because of Apple’s software developer kit. "These are all things that used to cost millions," Lieb says.
mms://203.69.69.81/studio/20130423ada69372f27239b4d66f2457a15c0ab492a.wma
No comments:
Post a Comment