Year in Review: 2017
recapping the last 12 months/sharing a bit about what I learned last year
2017 was a big year for all of us at CLEAR design lab, a time that saw some of our most successful client work to date. We designed new devices for about a dozen companies, built thousands of units in-house for client beta-testing, and products developed in years past went into production, with hundreds of thousands of units shipping out into the world.
We also made the big change from running our little consultancy full-time to taking jobs at some amazing Boston-area hardware startups. Kat and I signed on for a mix of engineering and research work at Formlabs, and Rachel joined up with longtime CLEAR design lab client RightHand Robotics.
Some reasons I decided it was time to switch things up:
- After being entirely focused on consulting for about five years, I wanted to be in a position where I could work on a project with more comprehensive scope, on a longer timescale, within an organization.
- I want to be even more selective about the kinds of consulting work I do. There’s plenty of well-funded, bad ideas in the world, and scaling up a consulting business usually means saying yes to more and more of those ideas the world would be better off without. I really, really did not want to to grow the company that way.
- I’ve learned a great deal about how physical objects and systems get designed, developed, and manufactured, and I want to make information informed by those experiences available to improve practices broadly. Opening up some of what I’ve learned and increasing process visibility helps create better resources to achieve those aims, but full-time consulting makes it hard to practice a more transparent approach.
- I’m fascinated with the how and why we make things. It’s a subject I’ve written about a bit here and there. While I have been (and remain) deeply skeptical about many of the marketing messages related to how 3D printing will change the world, it’s impossible to deny that it is unlocking new, significant opportunities that are still unfurling. To me it feels reminiscent of the 1990s, with home computing being fairly established but with many digital revolutions (good and bad) still just around the corner. I want to work within that problem space to better understand the possibilities and try to steer things towards better futures.
Additionally, the design consultancy model is undergoing some pretty serious changes, with many companies opting for acquisition, selling off partial ownership of their business, or narrowing their focus. While these trends didn’t start in 2017 they continued, indicating the pressures of faster-moving markets, the waning defensive powers of established hardware brands, and the rise of startup like product development cycles. Companies are attempting to make products faster than ever before, for less money, because the staying power of those products is not what it once was. The value that software provides has increased steadily, and tangible goods are more and more principally portals for software.
Fortune 1000 companies that were once dependable, bread-and-butter clients for big agencies are facing disruption to their well-worn business models, and have altered how they engage with consultancies in a way that many design firms are ill-equipped to deal with.
At the same time, in 2017 the boom of hardware startups faded a bit: available funding went up, but anecdotally many first-time founders are having a more difficult time getting early money, and many well-funded startup products died out, some without ever shipping a single unit.
This funding environment along with general consumer hardware pessimism was reflected in what we saw in clients and prospects at CLEAR design lab:
- In 2017 we worked mostly with a client base of semi-established, expanding startups or large corporations rather than teams of 20-somethings trying to build their first product we had seen a lot of in years past.
- We saw a big increase in startups focusing on b2b products, eschewing the flashier (but more difficult) consumer side of things.
- The startup teams we talked to in 2017 were on average more experienced. Most teams had founded companies before or spent significant time in advanced roles at hardware companies. There was a huge reduction in the amount of non-technical founders we met.
- Many large companies have figured out internal processes akin to startup-style product development. They have become more nimble at finding product-market fit and reduced project costs by bringing more development work in house, all while leveraging their strong sales/distribution/marketing in a way that no startup can. This is great for the large organizations that have picked up these lessons, but the agility advantage that new startups have over established companies is quickly dissolving.
Besides joining Formlabs and doing client work at CLEAR, I started a few personal projects to investigate some subjects that have been of interest to me for awhile. Among the personal projects I started in 2017, there are three in-depth ones (involving research, writing, design, and fabrication) that will continue through 2018:
1. (Mass) Customization: this was one of the major themes at The Digital Factory event back in June, but the question of how well we are served by mass-produced goods vs. custom ones has been on my mind for years, ever since I briefly worked for a furniture maker who builds custom cabinets from scratch. I was struck then at not just the quality of custom-built over mass-manufactured, but the literal and figurative fit-ness of the things he makes. Those elements of furniture were site-specific, and community-specific. Personal preferences and needs were embedded into the structure, meeting aesthetic and utilitarian concerns in as perfect a way as is possible.
The high cost of custom goods compared to mass produced remains a serious impediment to adoption of bespoke items, but digital technologies impacting fabrication tools are gradually changing that, if only in limited areas for now.
2017 saw one of the world’s largest retailers, Amazon, acquire the body-imaging startup BodyLabs with a plausible aim of eventually using that technology to enable easy, reliable sizing of clothing if not total customization. Being the mega-sized market that it is, Amazon may do more than any other company in the coming years to make customization a typical process rather than a noteworthy exception.
As part of getting more personally familiar with customization and oddball digital markets, I had a custom jacket printed and started a subscription to Vadik Marmeladov’s project LOT 2046, which initially seemed like a cryptic, genericized, goth subscription box, has early indicators of ambitions to turn into something much more compelling. The first shipment contains a fabric measuring tape to get accurate dimensions for the simple, to-the-point online profile for customization and customer prompts like “How often do you travel?” with no indication of why that information is being collected or how it might be used.
The opacity of the service has a sort of esoteric charm or intrigue, the gap between what is expected and what is delivered creates a space for speculation.
In a time of seemingly endless consumer choice, the limits and prerogatives of LOT 2046 are refreshing and pragmatic. In most cases, our lives are not made better by having the choice of 50 laundry detergents (the endless advertising from competing commodities is only one of many forms of waste that consumer choice propagates). The price of LOT’s subscription is hard to justify from a cost-to-value of goods standpoint, but there’s enough interesting stuff going on that I’ll be continuing the experiment for the foreseeable future.
2. Standardization: Where mass customization appeals to practical and performative elements of human needs and desires in equal measure, standardization is as bland as it is pervasive.
Whether it’s the spacing of wood within the walls of your house, the fairly reliable fit of shoes, or easily sourced screws, standardization is one of history’s huge ideas: one that impacts people the world over, across political identities and cultural lines. Standards lead to greater efficiency for producers and lower costs for purchasers, but can also be impositions, drowning out localized options.
The long waning of customization that I touched on above is a direct result of standards expanding to ever more aspects of life. For things like screws, standards are incredibly useful and have minimal downside, in more personal (clothing) and social frameworks (education), the spread of standards creates discomfort, limits possible futures, and suppresses cultures.
In the context of durable goods (small appliances, computers, bicycles, etc.) standards go a long way to reducing environmental damage and enabling more sustainable practices like repair and component replacement, rather than the hot-swapping dance of designed obsolesence.
Unfortunately, in the 21st century, many companies focused on crafting uncrackable black boxes and walled gardens, creating standards that only they and a few select partners can access or leverage.
In the coming year I’ll be sharing more project work on the subject of standards and how today’s design and fabrication tools can be used to create more perfectly fitting solutions for individuals and communities, while building on a scaffolding of low-cost, widely availability standardized components. Which brings me to the third project.
3. Short Run Production (sub ~5,000 units of a thing)
If you’ve worked as a product designer or engineer that deals with hardware or tangible products, you’ve encountered the difficult math of producing a product at any kind of scale. Investors, contract manufacturers, and the overhead costs of running a business favor products that can be cranked out in the tens of thousands to millions annual quantity range.
Creating a few dozen of something has become relatively easy due to the widespread availability of low-cost 3D printing and improved material science, but producing units cost-effectively in the hundreds to low thousands range remains difficult (that post from Bolt is more about the fundraising side, but the numbers and general points are valid beyond that).
That kind of short run production became one of our specialties at CLEAR design lab, enabling product development efficiencies for clients like RightHand Robotics and Trimble, where we could produce a few dozen units in order to test them with real customers. A rapid cycle of design-produce-test improves the fit of a product for the people using it in the field, shapes product management practices in guiding feature development, and ultimately reduces waste by ensuring products with poor fit don’t get manufactured at massive scale.
Most short run manufacturing practices are in the guild-knowledge category, with contract firms developing clever workarounds and workflows to make short run production possible and most product development texts dedicated to mass production, there’s little in the way of guideposts for small companies to take on production themselves. I’m working on illuminating some of those process paths in hopes that it will enable possibilities for useful things to find their way into the world, outside of laborious craft production or massive venture-capital scale as the principal options. Basically a more tutorial-style approach to what I had written about previously with my recap of The Digital Factory:
The irrepressible movement towards greater flexibility (of design, of markets, of business models) is the goal of The Digital Factory.
It’s a shift in production powers towards a leaner, more automated system that can provide the right things, produced at the right time, in the right place — which means less waste from overproduction, in terms of fuel consumed in shipping goods long distances, scrap material from the goods themselves, and misspent human labor.
The mere existence of the technologies that underpin those changes is not sufficient for real change. Knowledge has to be shared, methodologies fermented, practices honed for those technologies to reach their potential, and I believe with my experiences working on everything from custom furniture to consumer products produced in the hundreds of thousands I’m in a good position to help that along a bit in 2018.
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