Dominant Design

Dominant Design and the Future

The classic computer mouse.

From humble beginnings as just a set of two wheels, the mouse has gone through several designs to reach what we know today. The majority of it was there by the time the trackball was invented: two buttons, left and right. Nowadays, the main difference is in the tracking method: we use much higher precision lasers than the trackballs could ever hope to achieve, and we've added a scroll wheel. Sometimes, there are extra buttons on the side, which come in handy quite often. Sometimes, the mouse is wireless, sometimes it is wired. And although there exist some other designs that seeks to fulfill the same function, such as Apple's Magic Mouse and the Ergonomic mice that promise better form, I personally have never seen a single one of either in everyday use.

How you connect your peripherals to a computer.

The Universal Serial Bus interface has certainly earned its name. Before it came a time of much chaos, with printers, mice, keyboards, and monitors each having their own connection standards. External drives had quite the selection of possible connections as well, from eSata to FireWire. Sure, all of these still exist in some capacity today. One might need a PS/2 Mouse/Keyboard to access the BIOS before the computer can load USB drivers. And if you're one of the people with the first gen iPod classic, you can thank Steve Jobs for using FireWire. But we've seen quite the jump in USB recently. From a maximum transfer speeds of 480 mb/s with 2.0 to 5 gb/s with 3.0, and now 10 gb/s with 3.1, the technology is advancing quite rapidly. Printers are now almost exclusively USB enabled, as are mice, keyboards, and external drives. And with the advent of Thunderbolt 3 via USB 3.1 type C, we're even seeing power, video, and even external graphics processing all over this one tiny little cable. It took a while, and it still has a ways to go, but Universal is right.

Phones.

Yes, phones in general. Landlines have gone the way of the dinosaurs, at least for the average household here. As for mobile, we've gone through so many different iterations of designs, from the bulky and somewhat impractical cellphones of the past to the flipphones that everyone loves to make fun of, and even phones with pullout keyboards. But now, we're left with just one design: A touch screen, few physical buttons to interact with, and a sleek design that many would never have thought possible in the past.

The mattress you sleep on.

Sure, there might be different alternatives to what you put inside it. Springs, water, synthetic foams, all that stuff. But on the outside, almost every mattress is the same: a really, really heavy rectangular prism.

The shirt you're wearing.

Though it may be partly due to fashion changing, we've seen several different designs, from the loincloth to the toga all lose out to the simplicity of the t-shirt.

Designs Currently in Education and Healthcare

• Smartboard: From the chalkboard to the whiteboard, and finally the smartboard. In addition, it also replaces those slide projectors that were so finicky to get working.
• Flipped Classroom: This one's quite the innovation, I believe. instead of teaching every student the same way, then having them practice outside of class, reverse it. Change it up. Have students study outside of class, which gives them the freedom to do it however they learn best, and have them practice and ask for additional guidance in class. Perhaps this is the best way to implement Common Core.
• Big Data: As the world inevitably grows more connected, more and more data is going to exist, whether we like it or not. Healthcare has one of the fastest growths of metadata out of any industry, and it's not slowing down. More data does have some privacy implications, but ultimately it is a boon to those in healthcare.
• The Coming of AI: With all that data comes the responsibility to process it, however. Artificial Intelligence is definitely capable of doing just that. The biggest player is IBM's Watson, who claims to be capable of helping every position within the healthcare industry and beyond, something I am quite confident in.

So what's going to be the next big thing?

Education: Flipped Classroom

Healthcare: AI

10+10... Kind of?

Lighting is hard.

This is the 10+10 sketching method, or at least my take on it.

How do you accurately control a computer's sleep state?

This first page deals with broad ideas:

This second page deals with one concept that I decided to  zero in on: An internal positioning system, akin to GPS.

 Finally, another focal point: triangulation of position using WiFi/Bluetooth.

Reading + Reflections on the iPod introduction video from 2001

Entrepreneurial Design, or Philosophy?

I never signed up for Philosophy, yet here I am doing somewhat philosophical stuff. I guess I don't have much of a choice.

The Nature of the Beast:

It's important to keep in mind the truth about the field of innovation and entrepreneurial design. For every success story, there are hundreds, or even thousands of failures. History only remembers the successful ones. For those who can't quite make it, it's quite the opposite. No matter how many articles are written and press releases held for them, they are destined to fail. Perhaps due to mismanagement of the project; perhaps due to - no fault of their own - being simply glossed over and forgotten. In a few decades, we might see a few of these still surviving and thriving. But the final destination for the vast majority of these is far from million or billion dollar valuations.

Playing the Cards:

Ideas are a Dime a Dozen; Execution is Key:

In this startup world of ours where anyone can get funding (beit from Kickstarter, its shady counterpart Indiegogo, or the plethora of sites that somehow manage to be even shadier), ideas are worth quite little. There is no such thing as the million-dollar idea anymore. In a world with over 7 billion people, chances are there's someone else who's got the same idea you do. The trick, then, lies in how you see that idea through. It doesn't matter if you've got the idea for solving world hunger, global warming, and P=NP all at once if you can't execute it. Need any evidence? Basically any episode of Shark Tank will do just fine. There's almost always someone who has mismanaged an idea badly enough that Kevin O'Leary tears them apart for it, and rightfully so. Completely viable and marketable ideas have been flushed down the drain due to poor execution. Shame.

Competition, Competition, Competition:

Making execution all the more important is the fact that competition exists. With ideas out in the open thanks to the internet, there's little chance that someone else isn't doing what you are already. The free market, then, is what decides which products float, and which ones sink. Take package delivery via drone, for example. Amazon has promised its new "Prime Air" service as "a future delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less," a lofty premise that nonetheless seems to be getting more real every day thanks to advances in technology. But of course, they're not the only ones exploring that market. Mercedes-Benz and Matternet are now also in the mix, working together to achieve something quite similar, and there are bound to be countless other companies scattered throughout. The competition is intense, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. Who eventually gets that comes down to consumer preference, of course, but there are several factors that directly correlate to that:

• Marketing
• Form
• Function
• Release Date

These factors all play quite an important role in products and the market. It does not matter how good you product looks and acts if nobody knows what it is, or there are already plenty of similar products on the market. At the same time, releasing an incomplete product early while spending important R&D dollars on marketing instead leads to an underwhelming product, disappointed customers, and a tarnished reputation (*ahem* No Man's Sky, though there are plenty more examples out there). It becomes a delicate balancing act, one which startups may not be able to sustain on their own. But with startups at the heart of innovation due to their "nothing to lose; everything to gain" mentality, it may well be worth the risk. For those that don't quite make it, well, in a few decades, the world will have forgotten entirely of their existence.

The Steve Jobs Way:

Few can deny that Steve Jobs was a legendary innovator and businessman. Even being kicked out of his own company didn't phase him, and he made his eventual triumphant return. Just what made Jobs such a brilliant orator, though? What did he do right?

Let's examine his introduction of the first generation iPod. Such a product was completely new, and was given a target market of everybody, because it's "A part of everyone's life." And Jobs does this quite well. He introduces the market, and the fact that there is no market leader. He mentions the digital music revolution, and how he believes that Apple will lead it.

He gives several alternatives to the iPod, and dissects exactly why each alternative cannot stand up to the iPod in terms of price/song, essentially telling the consumer in the most objective way possible that the iPod is the best way to get portable music.

As if that wasn't enough, he seems to never run out of ways in which the iPod and all the other products of the Apple ecosystem it's built around are better than anything else. Automatic integration with iTunes. Comparability with iMac. Long battery life. Fast file transfers. And all that in the contained in a device the size of a deck of cards.

For the time, this device truly was revolutionary. And Steve Jobs did quite a good job telling the world exactly why it was.

Sorry I had to.