Product Design through times: Where does it go from here? | Prabhagaran Rakkiappan | TEDxIITGuwahati

The year is 2014. A guy named Peter Quill, aka the Star Lord, just landed in an abandoned planet called Morrok. And the first thing he does, he takes out a blue Sony Walkman and starts playing a song. So what's so special about the blue Sony Walkman? This is the first portable music player that Sony ever launched in 1979. Four years later, Nintendo Entertainment System was launched. The next year, Motorola launched the first commercially available mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. Fujifilm launched the world's first fully commercial camera in 1988. This decade was the most important period for for gadgets that we use today. This sparked a new revolution in the product design as people were adapting to new gadgets and new technologies. We were at the start of the new electricity age. The space design was its peak. Plastic moulding has been perfected. There was a rapid shift in product design to artistic, sculptural things, many of which put exploration over function. For example, a company called Veltron envisioned and launched this radio. This radio was designed in 1970s, thinking that this is how product design will look like in 2000s. I'm sure none of the product looked like this in 2000, but if they sell it today, I would buy it and put on a shelf. Another set of designers really started to explore function over form, with the emphasis on how the product engages the user to understand the function of the product. Initially, in the good old days, design was visibly beautiful and pronounced. Each aspect of the design could be seen and felt. A good design would stimulate minimum three senses of your body, if not all five. As I've set the context, let's get into the first part of the talk. I would call it the past, which is human, physical, because designers were trying to design physical products for humans and digital component was minimal. These are some of the Walkman that was designed from the year 1979 to 1990. Every time I look at this picture, I get a smile on my face. Look at the colors they've used, look at the shapes they've used. Look at the volume knob, look at the play button. Look at the ergonomics of the product. One thing that is very pronounced is the usability. Even if a kid picks this device up, the kid exactly knows which button to press to play a song and which button to press to stop a song. One thing that is really striking about all these products is the digital component is very less. Video games are most integral part of any kid's life because that's where we adapt to learn technology. Now we see kids playing games in iPad and watching videos. But all we had in our times was the portable video games. Even though Nintendo was not the first video game console makers, they found the optimal design for the video game controller. They decided to put the navigation keys in the left hand side and the function keys in the right hand side and the start and stop in the middle. And that was the optimal design for the controller which we still use. The only addition from that era was just to add a joystick to the controller. When people started to adapt to mobile phone, designers discovered that there are two important components of a mobile display and the input device. So display is the screen and the input device is the QWERTY keyboard or the telephonic keyboard or the joystick. Mobile designers explored the options with different combinations of screen and input device. Products were designed targeting specific group of audience and not one for all. I would say you'll be able to judge a person with the phone he was carrying at that point of time, whether he was a music lover, he was a gamer, he was a photography enthusiast or a businessman. The 1990s to the 2010 was the golden era for the mobile phone design. Now let's get into the second part of the talk, the present human plus digital plus physical, where the digital component takes the front seat and the physical component is minimal. When all this was happening and everybody were exploring different product designs, this guy wearing a black turtleneck and blue jeans got on stage and introduced the iPhone. The iPhone as the single most influential product was launched in the century. Some, like me would argue that this killed the experimentation of the product design. It was happening in 80s and 90s. But some would argue the other way around. We all know which way smartphone design took from here. It was the only way. From the first iPhone till today, almost all the phones that is launched looks exactly like this. A slab of rounded rectangle. If I were to show you a silhouette of these devices, you will not be able to tell the difference from each other. So does this mean that we cannot innovate anymore? The answer would be no. Designers and companies have found an optimal format of a screen and input combination, which also makes us spend much more time in the device. This is the optimal level, like the video game controller. Until we find something groundbreaking, the mobile devices will continue to be designed like this. And we the users are a reason for this too. We started to buy computers and mobile phones because they had a rose gold finish. And we started to care about personalizing them with stickers and cases. More than caring about how they looked when the product was launched. The exploration is happening in the internals rather than the external product design. With the morsel doing its thing, the microchips are getting smaller and smaller, so we are able to squeeze in more sensors and powerful chips into the devices. Designers are still pushing the boundaries with the design and technology with few devices. That will continue till we find the next optimal design. Let's take some time off and talk a bit about movies. Movies always try to predict how products will look like in the future. So this screenshot was taken from a movie, real steel from 2011. So this was a prototype designed by Nokia for this movie. This looks futuristic even now. If Nokia had actually successfully launched it, they would have won the smartphone wars, which never happened. This design is not even achieved now. But the idea existed way earlier and the designers had explored this option before. So if you see the Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness, which was launched in 2009, had a completely transparent display. This was groundbreaking for that point of time. Even though it is not a color display. Still, this is groundbreaking. Around the same time, LG launched LG Crystal, which had a completely transparent keyboard which also doubles as a trackpad. The beauty of this design is you'll be able to use the keypad as a gesture input device. For example, if you're inside a camera and if you want to zoom in the. The pinch in zoom did not exist at that point of time, but you'll be able to draw a circle or rotate and then that will zoom into the area that you want to. That was groundbreaking at that point of time. When I looked at these images, initially I thought this was straight out of a sci fi movie or a Daft Punk music video. And then I realized this is the spacesuit from SpaceX. SpaceX has shown that spacesuit can also be look like this and they can adapt and protect the astronaut from extreme temperatures and atmospheric pressure of the space. They've completely redesigned the cockpit with touch screens and the glove that astronauts are using is designed with that in mind. If you look closer, you'll be able to see an iPad in between the two astronauts. This is the cockpit, the last space mission for comparison. The touch screen allows you to give a contextual ui. This shows the control that you need at that point of time. You will have different controls when you are taking off and different controls when you are trying to dock your spaceship to another spaceship. So this is not possible with static buttons. This is the Orion crew survival system. Believe it or not, guys, this is designed in 2019 by NASA. Movies have tried to predict the future for years and some are successful and some outrageously absurd. But two movies that had arguably had more success predicting the future was minority report in 2002 and iRobot in 2004. They predicted artificial intelligence, self driving cars, augmented reality, wearable technology, voice assistant, human robots, and even to the point of personalized ads. Who would have thought about personalized ads? In 2002 they did. This is one of the prototypes that Audi built for the movie iRobot and it was called Audi RSQ. If you see the cockpit, it is strikingly similar to the Tesla Model S that is going to be launched in the near future. They have predicted what self driving cars could look like almost two decades ago. Now we come to the last part of the talk that is the future. This is human digital minus physical. We are heading towards immersive design or invisible design as we call today. A design is considered good when it is unseen and invisible. When I look at all these devices, it looks like history is repeating itself. With explorations with the product designers. There are three major components in wearable and first one is the viewable. Second one is hearing and third one is talking. So the exploration is on to find the optimal design. If you look closely you'll be able to see a lot of designs are looking like a glass with the audio device attached or the it looks like a headphones with the glass attached. So these are the two explorations and this will go on till they find the optimal design. Designers and developers are making use of all the technology in the devices like the advanced microchip and the advanced camera and all the advanced sensors like accelerometer, proximity sensor, gyroscope, motion sensor, GPS and biometrics to give you an immersive experience. If you see the example here, the top left one, the user can actually take his hands behind the UI and that is contextually possible because this is not a CG and this is a working prototype. So and if you notice it is also agnostic of its surrounding. And even if you move that particular sticky note is where it is. You see the bottom left, this is the eye tracking. You'll be able to make a decision or you'll be able to select anything just by looking or just by turning your retina towards that particular object in your screen. So if you see the top right, this is called the projection AR which where the content is projected to another object so that user will be able to make use of it with the combined power of the product design. And technology. We are traveling into a future like this, which is not far away. This looks straight out of a sci fi movie. But this technology already exists today. This is a contact lens that can communicate with your phone and give you all the smartphone capabilities within your eye. This is exactly like a contact lens, so you can take it off at night and put it in the liquid as you normally do with the contact lens. And that also doubles as a charging case which charges your contact lens for the next day's use. This device has a contextual ui, so when you're cycling or training, you'll be able to see contextual information like your heart rate monitor and your speed. And if you're navigating inside a city, trying to find a restaurant in, it will actually navigate you to that particular restaurant. And if you're guessing at the sky and trying to find out what star consulate it is, the device will also be able to communicate with the Internet and will be able to retrieve the data and give you the exact Star consulate information. So this is exactly like your browser, but in your eyes, or exactly like any other device but in your eyes. Part of this technology is actually used by firefighters even today. So let's say a room is full of smoke and the firefighter is trying to navigate inside the room and trying to put off a fire and save a child. He will not be able to see anything, but with this device, he'll be able to see the borders of the particular building and where the child is. So firefighter can put out the fire easily. The day is not far away that we don't have to carry a mobile device. There is a possibility which allows you to implant a chip in your body. The chip will communicate the data from the cloud and to the Internet, and in turn, it will communicate to you. With the contact lens and the earphones, you can communicate to the device using voice activation, or you will be able to communicate with it using eye tracking. The future holds something even more exciting. So like voice recognition and gesture recognition, there is something called thought recognition. So this is the future where you'll be able to just think of calling somebody or listening to a song, or watching a video, or navigating to a place or booking a ticket, anything is possible because the communication device is actually going invisible. So this might be the future again. Future holds a lot of surprises and let it unravel one by one. The future is really exciting. As Dr. Strange says, if I say what the future is, there is a possibility that it might not be. So let's be excited for the future and take it as it comes our way. Thank you, guys. Thanks all for listening.