Design for Digital Twins
Digital Twins are here, but so far, they’re not very human-friendly.
If you don’t know: What is a Digital Twin?
Digital Twins are poised to help businesses capture big value from their big data, but implementation is crucial when creating one. Designing with humans at the core, like with most systems, is the essential ingredient to getting the most from your Digital Twin.
So far, most Digital Twins have been created using ‘Big Bang Implementation’: implement all the software at once, install all of the sensors, integrate everything at once, spend all of the money, yet understand nothing about how you’re going to use it. This is creating some really big problems.
Typical large scale implementations gain hardly any end-user buy-in, have highly exaggerated and imaginary benefits, very little or no return on investment, minuscule increases in customer experience, and really no true value for anyone. We’ve heard this story over and over again, it’s tarnishing the Digital Twin name, and it’s totally avoidable.
Avoid big bang, Design is the answer you’re looking for
That statement may seem like an obvious solution to doing anything in business, but Design hasn’t yet been globally adopted in business. It will, but until then, Design is the answer you’re looking for.
Design should always be used as an implementation method for something that needs to be incredibly human-friendly. The Design Process lends itself to creating small collections of things that people will use, rather than large systems that try do to everything, and no one wants to use.
From a Human standpoint, Digital Twins are fantastic. They’re the virtual visual representation of millions of data points, seen in a way that helps us understand, and react, to things going on in the real world. They’re our portals into the world of big data, and they’re the machine enhancing our decision making in real-time. I want a Digital Twin of myself (the quantified-self movement does this).
For organisations to gain ROI from Digital Twins, and derive immense decision making power from them, Humans must be at the centre of the decision process, the Digital Twin should be built for people, and it should tackle one use case at a time.
Digital Twin Labs: At Deloitte Digital, we’re focusing on Digital Twins for Property, where there are millions of different use-cases available. Choosing the best use-case to start with is not easy, in part because there are so many people within the Property ecosystem: tenants, visitors, security, building owners etc. Using a Human-centred Design approach lets us prototype our way to the best value for these people. We create lo-fi prototypes of the organisations’ ecosystem and then overlay what we know about data, sensors, and systems, and then, we let people play.
Who doesn’t want to play at work?
We ask our clients to play the role of a ‘Digital Twin’ in the physical ecosystem. What would you enhance, how would you give these occupants a better experience, what would you do in an emergency. Playing the Digital Twin role helps people understand that the data and systems are constrained by physical action in the real world, you can’t affect much.
This is where the ah-ha moment happens: I need people to act, I need to inform people, and then somehow ask or entice them to do something. I need to interact with them regularly, so they trust me. Trust is significantly important when using IOT enabled technology.
This is where the use-cases become real. But we’re not talking a use-case that would take millions of dollars to implement. We’re talking baby-steps, dipping your toe in the water, small tweaks that lead to giant leaps.
In the future, adoption of Digital Twins will be 100% across all sectors, it’s the only way for us to make sense of all the data (we should also have Digital Twins of Machine Learning algorithms so we can understand what they’re up to).
The organisations who reap the most significant benefits from Digital Twins will be the organisations that implement small twins now, use them in daily activities, and build on them as technology advances. Those that wait, and try big bang, will get nothing but complexity and an expensive block of code.
When augmented reality really starts to proliferate the business world, those with functional Digital Twins will be best placed to take advantage of AR. The integration of the digital and the physical will be seamless, the data is already there, it’s already represented spatially, and people are already making decisions based on this real-time data.
If you’d like to go on a Digital Twin journey in your organisation, or you’ve got a Digital Twin you want to get some value from, reach out, we’re happy to help.
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