Tech

A podcast playlist on design for emerging technologies — from the IoT and AI to genomics and synthetic biology.

Emerging Technologies

O'REILLY

O'Reilly Media is exploring the role design will play in the Internet of Things and the future of business. Learn more: http://oreil.ly/1vH96Vb

O'Reilly Experience Design

big data

O'Reilly Ben Lorica chats with Ion Stoica, UC Berkeley Professor and Databricks CEO, about the rise of Apache Spark and Apache Mesos.

Apache Spark's Journey From Academia To Industry

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica chats with David Blei, co-author of the seminal paper on topic models, and who remains one of the leading researchers in the field. They talk about the origins of topic models, their applications, improvements to the underlying algorithms, and his new role in training data scientists at Columbia University.

Topic models: Past, present, and future

John Follett, editor of "Designing for Emerging Technologies" sits down with Dirk Knemeyer, founder of Involution Studios, who contributed to the book. Knemeyer discusses the changing role of design and designers in emerging technology.

Designers are engineers

O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with John Carnahan, executive vice president of data science at Ticketmaster, about Ticketmaster's evolving approach to data analysis, the avenues of user engagement they're investigating, and how his genetics background is informing his work in the big data space. Also, Three Questions with Michael Abbott, a general partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Bridging the gap in big data silos

Jonathan Follett, editor of Designing for Emerging Technologies, chats with Scott Stropkay, founding partner at Essential Design Service, and Bill Hartman, director of research at Essential Design Service to talk about the relationship dynamic between humans and robots, and ways designers are being stretched in an interesting new direction.

Designing the Dynamic Human-Robot Relationship

The age of bio-inspired technology is upon us. Whether it's DNA as data storage, transparent displays based on mollusk shells, or surveillance robots modeled after swarming bees, the possibilities abound for natural systems to serve as patterns for the products of the future.

In this episode of The Digital Life we consider the evolution of the designer as technologist and engineer in conjunction with the ever expanding importance of bio-inspired technologies.

Get the full transcript: 
http://thedigitalife.com/bull-session/designing-bio-inspired-technology



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Designing Bio-inspired Technology

Jon Follett, editor of Designing for Emerging Technologies, chats with Matt Nish-Lapidus, partner and design director at Normative, about the evolution of design, characteristics of post-Industrial design, and aesthetic intricacies of designing in networked systems.

Design's Return to Artisan, at Scale

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica chats with Erich Nachbar, founder and CTO of Virtual Power Systems, about the ease with which Nachbar integrates new open source components into existing infrastructure, his contributions to Mesos, and his new “software-defined power distribution” startup.

Redefining Power Distribution Using Big Data

Angela Rufino chats with Jonathan Follett, principal of Involution Studios, about creative class workers, product life cycles, and enhancing company-customer relationships.

Emerging Technologies are Disrupting Product Design Life Cycles

O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Phil Gilbert, GM of design at IBM about how he's helping to lead the transformation to a design-first company within IBM.

IBM is Banking on Design's ROI

O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Scott Jenson, who is currently developing the Physical Web Project with the Chrome team at Google, about empathy, interaction on demand, and Google’s Physical Web Project.

Empathy: The Designer's Superpower

O'Reilly's Mary Treseler talks with information architect Jorge Arango about the state of IA and the importance of designers' understanding of context and perspective.

Information Architecture's Role in UX Design

O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with PARC's Mike Kuniavsky about PARC’s work on IoT and the mindset shift the IoT will require.

Designing for Ecosystems: Making Meaningful IoT Products and Services

O'Reilly's Nick Lombardi chats with Laura Klein, designer, researcher, engineer, and author of "UX for Lean Startups" and the popular design blog Users Know.

Design for Success: Manage Business and User Goals

Joe Biron, VP of IoT technology at ThingWorx, on how the IoT entails a flexible platform approach to accommodate new applications that haven’t been conceived yet.

Joe Biron on Whats New About the IoT

Katie Dill on designing for seven billion people, hiring good people, and the triforce.

Airbnb's Design Approach

Mike Kuniavsky, a principal scientist in the Innovation Services Group at PARC, on designing for the Internet of Things ecosystem and why the most interesting thing about the IoT isn’t the “things” but the sensors. He also talks about his deep-seated love for appliances and furniture, and how intelligence will affect those industries.

Mike Kuniavsky on the Tectonic Shift of the IoT

Our guest on this week’s episode of the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast is Robert Brunner. Brunner was director of industrial design at Apple from 1989 to 1996, overseeing the design of the PowerBook. He was the chief designer of Beats by Dr. Dre, the design-driven line of headphones that Apple acquired for $3 billion last year. And he’s the founder of Ammunition, which has worked with startups and large companies on a wide range of innovative consumer products.

Robert Brunner on Designing and Building Great Products

This episode of the Hardware Podcast features Jon Bruner's second discussion with Joe Biron, VP of IoT technology at ThingWorx, a PTC business that offers a platform for rapid deployment of Internet of Things applications.

Joe Biron on IoT Platforms

On this episode of The Digital Life podcast we discuss how bio-inspired technology is beginning to intersect with information technology in big ways. With the exponential increase of digital data, we face an ongoing problem of information storage. Today most digital information is stored on media that will expire relatively quickly, lasting a few decades at most. Because of this, we require new methods for long-term data storage, and biotech might just have the answer. DNA could be the storage media of the future: It can last thousands, even potentially tens of thousands of years. And the tech industry has taken notice. For instance, last month Microsoft agreed to purchase millions of strands of synthetic DNA, from San Francisco based Twist Bioscience to encode digital data. Of course we may be years away from a commercial DNA storage product, but the potential for a revolutionary, even disaster proof media is there.

DNA As Data Storage

Jon Bruner and Mike Loukides talk about the classical music publishing industry and how it's being disrupted by projects like the Petrucci Music Library (http://imslp.org/) that make public-domain scores available online.

The future of classical music

Jim Stogdill, Edd Dumbill and Roger Magoulas have a conversation about in-memory databases and the impact on real time analysis. Leave questions and comments for us at http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/05/talking-about-in-memory.html

Talking about in-memory

Jon Bruner, Mike Loukides and Jim Stogdill from O'Reilly Radar muse on the return of software to the physical world.

Software and the physical world

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about anthropology in big data, advances in JavaScript, searching for ancient civilizations, the importance of context, and good sites for checking the weather.

Related blog post: http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-anthropology-big-data-and-the-importance-of-context.html

Anthropology, big data, and the importance of context

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about what's been on their minds this week: the NSA's surveillance programs, what defense contractors will do with their technology as defense budgets dry up, and a Californian who isn't doing what you think he's doing with hydroponics.

For more on these topics, and links to the things we talked about, see http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-the-internet-of-things-prism-and-defense-technology-that-goes-civilian.html.

The Internet of Things, PRISM, and defense technology that goes civilian

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.