Listen Next

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

Changing design

O’Reilly’s Mary Treseler sits down with Martin Charlier, an independent design consultant and co-founder at Rain Cloud, to discuss the future of interfaces and the increasing need to merge industrial and interaction design in era of the Internet of Things.

Design to reflect human values

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

The best designers possess empathy for their users -- and data is key to gaining this kind of understanding. Mary Treseler, director of strategic content at O'Reilly Media, sits down with Rochelle King, vice president of global design and UX at Spotify, to talk about data, design, and user experience.

Big questions, good data, smart designs

Tom Greever, UX Director at Bitovi talks about the evolution of UX design, challenges that design professionals face today, and some of the keys to the success of the modern UX designer. For more on the interview, visit O'Reilly Radar: oreil.ly/11KrkYA

Today's designers are solving business problems

Jon Follett, editor of Designing for Emerging Technologies, recently sat down with Matt Nish-Lapidus, partner and design director at Normative Design, who contributed to the book. Nish-Lapidus discusses the changing role of design and designers in emerging technology.

The changing nature of design is coming full circle

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



Subscribe on iTunes

Designing Bio-inspired Technology

Is South by Southwest the big tent tech revival for the American creative class? As knowledge workers make their annual pilgrimage to Austin this week to participate in a giant festival filled with the latest in technology, music and film, it's worth asking if conferences like this one are the 21st century's communities of engagement.

As traditional organizations, civil and religious alike, like Lions Club International and Rotary International, churches, and even unions lose membership, there is a need for new structures to organize and engage people in meaningful ways, especially those in the creative class.

Witness the rise of the conference, the unconference, the meetup and the ascendancy of the professional group as one of the primary binding elements of our society — at least for those involved in the information economy. In this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss this phenomenon examined through the lens of the popular SXSW festival.

iTunes

SXSW and Social Organization for the Creative Class

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

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

In this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss rapid prototyping, the coming hardware renaissance and the Internet of Things with Technical Machine co-founder, Jon McKay. 

Disrupting Product Design

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

This week on The Digital Life, we explore the future of food. There are few things more personal, more intimate, more important than what we put in our bodies every day. We'll touch on a few areas at the intersections of food, science, and technology — from food as fuel where optimizing nutrition is key, to new food delivery technology like 3D printing, to the molecular gastronomy movement.

The Future of Food

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

The Internet of Things

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.