The boundaries between product design and engineering for software, hardware, and biotech are blurring. Powerful technologies are creating an environment of constant change for the creative class knowledge workers; In the coming years, those who began their professional lives as industrial designers, computer engineers, user experience practitioners, scientists, and system thinkers, will find that the trajectory of their careers takes them into uncharted territory as the cross-pollination and evolution of these fields in parallel creates new opportunities for influencing humanity’s progress.

Emerging Technology and Design

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

Emerging Technologies

O'Reilly Radar tracks the technologies and people that will shape our world in the years to come. Each episode of O'Reilly Radar features an interview with an industry thought leader, with topics touching on everything from programming to data to experience design. We also take a step back from the breathless pace of the latest tech news to examine why new developments are important and what they might mean down the road.

O'Reilly Radar Podcast

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Jenn Webb and Mary Treseler chat with Involution Studio's Jon Follett, covering the magnitude of the coming disruption in the design space -- including design's increasing role in genomics and synthetic biology, robots taking our jobs, embedded sensor networks, policy as a design problem, and scientists growing burgers in labs.

Emerging technology and the coming disruption in design

While many end-of-year shows do predictions for the coming year, at The Digital Life, we're not satisfied with that, because we just can't contain our excitement over emerging technologies. In this episode, we share our thoughts on technology for 2014 and the decade beyond, covering three areas desperately in need of design help: the Internet of Things, genomics and synthetic biology, and robotics.

The Digital Life - Episode 57 - Designing for Emerging Technologies in 2014 and Beyond

Technology is not an end in and of itself. Our job as designers isn’t about the thing we're creating, but rather about connecting people to themselves, other people, and the world around them in more meaningful ways. In this episode of the Digital Life, we discuss with Charlie Erdman, Experience Design Director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the trends in digital impacting our sense of community and place. Are we really connecting less? Or just differently — broad, but not deep? How does this new understanding impact our work as digital designers? How does it impact consumers of digital products? Join us as we explore these questions, and consider the concept of making technology and our digital and physical spaces more humane.

The Digital Life - Episode 58 - Community and a Sense of Place in Our Digital Lives

In this episode of The Digital Life, we explore the convergence of digital and industrial design with Jenn Webb, editor of O'Reilly Radar and Jon Bruner, co-chair of the Solid Conference. 

As emerging technologies — from wearables to the Internet of Things — cause the boundaries between digital and physical interfaces to collapse, this intersection of HCI and ID represents the first step to a multi-disciplinary design future.    

Our discussion covers great examples of new products pushing the envelope, the future of product design and the skills that will be required, and what the design firm of the next decade might look like.

The Digital Life - Episode 59 - The Convergence of Digital and Industrial Design

O’Reilly’s  talks with IDEO's Arianna McClain about storytelling through data and the human-centered, data-driven design approach at IDEO. Jon Follett also talks with Involution Studio founder Dirk Knemeyer about the changing role of design in emerging technologies, and the convergence of the engineering and design disciplines.

A Human-Centered Approach to Data-Driven Design

O’Reilly’s Roger Magoulas chats with Tricia Wang, a global tech ethnographer and co-founder of PL Data, about how qualitative and quantitative data need to work together, reframing "data-driven decision making," and how to build the ideal team.

An alternate perspective on data-driven decision making

We often talk about designing security into a product from the get go, but we don't often discuss what that means. In today's podcast John Kestner, a principle with Supermechanical, the company behind the Twine sensor and the Range thermometer, shares his thoughts on how he designed Twine and range to be more secure but also how we might design our devices to indicate that what was once a humble lock is now a connected computer with all the pros and cons that entails.

Before Kestner and I dig into security, Kevin Tofel and I talk about my experience playing with the Logitech Harmony Ultimate Remote and home hub and then we dig into CSRMesh and the Bluetooth SIG's creation of a working group to add mesh networking to the Bluetooth Smart standard. That could put Bluetooth in closer competition with thread, Zigbee and Z-wave. So kick back and listen up.

Hosts: Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Tofel
Guests: John Kestner, principal with Supermechanical

Thoughts on the Logitech Harmony Hub and remote (it's pretty nifty, guys)
The Bluetooth SIG is forming a working group on mesh technologies. Why this is cool!
Should you rely on security by obscurity or hope your device doesn't do much that's scary as a way to be secure?
Thinking about how to convey connectedness in design

How to design security into your connected product

O'Reilly's Mary Treseler talks with Andy Goodman, designer and group director of Fjord’s US studios, about service design, embeddables, and predictive analytics.

Designing On A System Level

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

The Internet of Things is challenging designers to rethink their craft. I recently sat down with Claire Rowland, independent designer and author of the forthcoming book Designing Connected Products to talk about the changing design landscape.

During our interview, Rowland brought up three points that resonated with me: interoperability and the Internet of Things, experience designers and networks, and the IoT’s latency problem.

For more on our interview and for related links, check out the related post on O’Reilly Radar: oreil.ly/1EoyfUV

The complexity of the IoT requires experience design solutions

Chris Clark discusses the blockchain's potential to disrupt the financial industry, from contracts to mortgages to government taxation.

Blockchain and decentralization hold big implications for society

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

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica talks with Angie Ma, co-founder and president of ASI, about the concept of the ASI, the structure of their training programs, and the data and startup scene in the UK.

Turning Ph.D.s Into Industrial Data Scientists and Data Engineers

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

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

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

This week, I sit down with anthropologist, futurist, Intel Fellow, and director of interaction and experience research at Intel, Genevieve Bell. We talk about what she’s learning from current AI research, why the resurgence of AI is different this time, and five things that are missing from the AI conversation.

Genevieve Bell on Moving From Human-Computer Interactions to Human-Computer Relationships

This week, I sit down with Tom Davenport. Davenport is a professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a senior advisor for Deloitte Analytics. He also pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics.” We talk about how his ideas have evolved since writing the seminal work on that topic, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning; his new book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, which looks at how AI is impacting businesses; and we talk more broadly about how AI is impacting society and what we need to do to keep ourselves on a utopian path.

Tom Davenport on Mitigating AI's Impact on Jobs and Business

In this week's Radar Podcast, O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum chats with Sara Watson, a technology critic and writer in residence at Digital Asia Hub. Watson is also a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. They talk about how to optimize personalized experience for consumers, the role of machine learning in this space, and what will drive the evolution of personalized experiences.

Sara Watson on Optimizing Personalized Experiences

This week, I sit down with David Beyer, an investor with Amplify Partners. We talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence, the challenges he’s seeing in AI adoption, and what he thinks is missing from the AI conversation.

AI Adoption at the Atomic Level of Jobs and Work

This week, I sit down with Aman Naimat, senior vice president of technology at Demandbase, and co-founder and CTO of Spiderbook. We talk about his project to build a knowledge graph of the entire business world using natural language processing and deep learning. We also talk about the role AI is playing in those companies today and what’s going to drive AI adoption in the future.

Aman Naimat on Building a Knowlege Graph of the Entire Business World

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.