Smart tech: only smart when it improves human experiences

The word ‘smart’ has become a blanket marketing term, with little consensus or definition of what a smart product actually is.?

Often, anything that can be operated remotely or connect to an app on your phone seems to be understood as smart. A camera for your pet that can also dispense treats when you’re at work or away from home. Speakers in the living room that you can turn on from the kitchen for example.

In my view, smart products should have evolved to the level of Industry 4.0 and they should have four key features which have been summarised as Digital, Connected, Responsive, and Intelligent.?

The last feature is where smart becomes really useful.? Products that can ‘think for themselves’ is the hardest concept for most people to accept and understand ethically, but therein lies their real value.?

When the products and platforms we use day to day can learn from us, respond, adapt and even make suggestions on how to use them better and more efficiently, we all benefit.?

Digital, connected products

More and more companies are transforming to be smart-home platforms where non proprietary collaborations are happening with IoT devices. Today, getting groceries as one example - has completely transformed. The minute you unlock your door, they are scanning what you have in your bag, and when you put the shopping in the fridge, the fridge weighs and recognizes all of the items.?

When you dispose of unused items into your garbage bin, the garbage is tracked and weighed so your devices can now understand the output, and calculate your rate of consumption. Next time you go into the shopping cycle, your list is written up for you, because it will already know what you’ve run out of.?

Such business models are realized with companies like HP, where devices are aware of the consumables and instantly refills items for you via subscription.?

As more and more connected products standardizes our spaces, stability of connectivity becomes a fundamental design problem and possesses various implications to how we curate our IoT experiences. For a connected smart home with congestions interference, various bandwidth frequencies depending on regions, and routers/hubs/installation locations to concern for, organizations like Huawei are pushing for Power Line Communication (PLC) IoT which traditionally was designed for commercial application.?

But what is involved in the development of smart or connected products vs traditional, non-connected products in today’s data-centric environment? How do the discovery and ideation phases differ with the pervasiveness of data added into the picture?

Development process

Traditional development processes leveraging qualitative and quantitative research methodologies have a high dependency on physical observation. Deciding the frequency of usage for instance, often relies on a small data set, fixed by the duration of the observation. With smart devices, behaviors of product usage are tracked digitally, thus extending far deeper and more accurately.?

While most part of the development process for smart devices is similar to that of non-connected devices: both will involve ideation and concepting phases, and rigorous testing - but the data aspect is what sets the two apart.?

Smart devices require a development stack that is device hardware, software, operating system, applications, and connectivity that is foreign to non-connected products. In short, the object has been computerized.?

Image credit: Intuz

Smart devices collect and stream large amounts of information straight to the cloud. One of the biggest challenges then, is defining the scalable parameters that will help the architects to define the correct data management solution. (What data is relevant to collect, and at what cadence) This should be solved from the very early stages.

Analytics is considered as one of the important components of the IoT solution. It has the capability to uncover the insights from the data collected, that will make your product or solution valuable.?

Future of Smart Air

Innovative ideas can come from discovering and solving customer problems, or it can come from eureka moments that we have as designers, developers and product managers, somewhere along the roadmap above, that will require a totally new value proposition.?

Smart in industrial design language translates in many different ways, but the end goal is the same. It is no use to anyone if their AC unit is Digital and Connected, or even Responsive and Intelligent. We are trying to improve air quality to help people live more comfortably and sustainably, so a smart AC unit only becomes smart at the point where it interacts with a human.?

If you’re sitting at home and have an AC going in one room and a fan in the other, it’s far more useful for these systems to communicate with one another because they’ve calculated that they could deliver the same result with less power.?

If an AC unit is already measuring environmental temperature and air pressure, and making optimisations for different zones in your home, why couldn’t someone with asthma connect their smart inhaler using the same bluetooth technology so that it administers their medication before they find themselves short of breath? The future of energy consciousness in BMS is driven by AI (machine learning + deep learning) making preventive/predictive decisions to ensure this increased efficiency and sustainability of building assets. Johnson Controls OpenBlue is our answer to this, working to apply data from both inside buildings and beyond, so that our customers can manage operations systemically.

Finally, it is important to mention that in our mission to improve health and comfort - it is our duty to leverage all of the knowledge that’s already out there. Whilst we are aspiring to solve these bigger, world problems - we may reach for breakthrough solutions or core technologies that have already emerged, but not necessarily by us.?

Sometimes product development will require the creation of proprietary technologies, but indeed other times it will be about adapting the usability of existing technology and figuring out how to use it in new ways. But how intelligent should our products be anyway? What by-products are we left with? I recall the days when the ‘remote control’ was invented where television channels could be changed with so much effort as lifting a thumb. We have since created generations of couch potatoes. We are only making these experiences more effortless through voice. Is it good that we are providing efficient value to energy cost and consumption for comfort?

Regardless - business innovation comes from figuring out how to deploy what we know in new ways in the language of HVAC, in order for us to achieve our goals so that the user at the end of the switch benefits.