On Good Inventions & Good Intentions

Note / Disclaimer: this has been sitting in my drafts for months. It took me a while to polish it and actually write the last couple of paragraphs because I didn’t have a landing. These ideas have been simmering in my head for half a year when I realized that there is no conclusion, only an invitation for others to add to this hotpot in my brain.

Flight Home

Six months ago, I spent a week in Hong Kong for #RISEconf. It was my second time to go and on the flight back, I was thinking about how I was going home recharged. I was so excited about technology and business and actually about a lot of things in general, which restarted my heart on the work I do at a locally-grown tech startup.

Being exposed to that much innovation and discovery and passion also validated how I felt about the path I decided I wanted to take (eventually): learning more about how the human brain works so we can inch closer to real AI. Meeting Sophia and learning about how she has improved, hearing about data science applied to smart cities, talking about how robots can help us become better humans… all that had me bright-eyed about the future of the world thanks to technology.

On that redeye flight back to the Philippines, I was also thinking about the Friday schedule that was about to greet me when I get back. I had an interview lined up, catching up with our (then) customer success head, and then Product Champs* with our STORM Scouts** — which was something I’ve been looking forward to because it was always a good venue for our interns to share their own ideas.

*Product Champs = initially an effort orchestrated by our CEO to encourage product-thinking in everyone in the organization, it became a weekly session where STORMers pitch their own ideas and collect feedback from peers to flesh out the idea further.

**STORM Scouts = our interns. They’re called Scouts because the goal of the program was not just to give them work experience that they can add to their resumes, but to equip them with skills and lessons to make sure they thrive (not just survive) startup life.

I smiled to myself as I remembered that the pitch of one of our Scouts last year was about AI and visual impairment, and how just the day before, Microsoft President Brad Smith was just talking about Seeing AI, an AI-powered app for the low-vision community, which was more or less the same thing.

Flashback

Great minds think alike! I might have given myself a pat on the back for bagging such a brilliant batch of students to be interns at STORM, but that was only for a split second because my mind drifted back to a thought I had while Brad Smith was talking about Seeing AI: how long will it take for life-changing technology like this to reach people in far-off communities of third-world countries? People in NLAB***, for example?

***the North Luzon Association for the Blind is a place I had a chance to volunteer at as a child in my hometown 300 kilometers away from Manila

While Microsoft’s product is way more advanced than what our STORM Scout Mikay would have come up with on her own, I was thinking that if she had the opportunity to develop and test an MVP of her pitch locally, perhaps it could reach end users who aren’t actively searching for tech like this sooner. Perhaps it could be designed in a way that’s specific to a community’s context? Certainly the language, the scenes, the currency would be different from what Seeing AI is being tested with.

I have always been a firm believer that a product is not just the tech (a lengthier discussion I’ll save for another time), but the user’s entire experience of interacting with it: from how they first hear about it to the way they talk about it with other people. I mention this because I was thinking about how if Mikay had indeed developed her idea with the right guidance, we could have learned more about how a visually impaired person in a far-off community in a third-world country would actually use this technology (because I’m pretty sure it’s not to scan legal documents or products in a grocery store). So we can design not for the sake of a cool idea, not for the sake of expanding technology’s use, not for the product’s sake, but for the people it will help.

Realistically, I guess I also knew no one would readily fund this project. Not when they know that 1) there’s more advanced technology out there, and 2) there’s no explicit way to make money off of it. And therein lies the rub: funding goes to “sexy” technology, funding goes to high-return businesses. Little to no funds go to curiosity and empathy. I can already think of a couple of well-meaning ideas that had to die because of this.

Guiltily, I felt this with myself: (at the time) I wanted to take up further studies in neuropsychology because I lusted after playing a part in taking AI another notch higher, without really drilling down on how it helps a wide range of people. I guess being around zeroes and ones too much made me sit down and take a look at real-world applications from an ivory tower. My fascination with technology lacked empathy.

And so with these musings, I pushed my cart out from arrivals and simply accepted that I will have to wait a bit longer to see (pun not intended) Seeing AI help the people at NLAB.

Friday

I went to work just a couple of hours after that flight and welcomed the 2018 batch of Scouts into one of our meeting rooms. I started off the Product Champs session by explaining to them what it was for (because it’s always a good idea to start with why). In hindsight, I guess I should have told them the story of Mikay, Seeing AI, and my musings that morning. Instead, I told them that the objectives of Product Champs were to 1) hone their pitching skills and 2) get feedback to flesh out their ideas further.

We started the session with Paula, one of our mobile development interns, who pitched an “IoT Smart Mattress” to her peers and a panel of STORMers. She began by explaining to us what Smart Beds were and how it would cost a hospital upwards of $4,000 to get one. Equipped with sensors, it allows nurses to keep track of a patient’s sleeping (or laying) position on the bed from an online console. This saves them time from doing frequent rounds to be able to check up on patients constantly.

Her pitch was a smart mattress that instead costs waaaay cheaper (think: PHP350 per sensor and it only uses twelve sensors). The roadblock was that hospitals weren’t really interested in her product — which could be because hospitals here don’t really have enough budget, or because of a tech adoption issue in general — so her team just settled for a prototype and passed on the project to other students.

My heart sank. I would have paid for a product like that! I told her about my situation at the time: we were watching over my ailing grandmother at the hospital or at home and we couldn’t leave her for too long; she was a stubborn lady, my Lola, and she’d attempt to leave her bed when she was strong enough. There were times we’d find her on the floor already because we just went to go to the bathroom or kitchen. Me and my family would have benefited from being able to check up on her from our phones, and it’s a really small fraction of the cost of a smart hospital bed!

There was no interest from institutions like hospitals for her MVP, but here I was, a private individual, already willing to pay her for a prototype. It surprised me that it surprised her that there’s this alternative market for her pitch. It was precisely for that reason, providing a different perspective from a second (or a third or a fourth) pair of eyes, that Product Champs was an important part of their internship curriculum.

I remember leaving that room feeling guilty again. Paula’s solution did not use cutting-edge technology. Although, they did apply machine learning to correlate which laying positions triggered which sensors, and optimized the placement of those sensors so that they use only enough to give the best results: if I recall correctly, they found that additional sensors after 12 only marginally improved accuracy. But I digress. I felt guilty because I travelled more than a thousand kilometers to get excited about technology, to see how much we’ve developed AI and blockchain to further the quality of our daily lives, when I could have just listened to an idea that was brewing just three tables away from where I sat in the office. A simple tech solution to a real pain I was experiencing in my own daily life.

Here was a product that, with minimal tweaking, could be designed with empathy towards real-world needs, not theoretical pains. But once again, I asked myself: who would invest in this? This is not “sexy” technology. And to be fair, though the product would have impacted my life and my family’s greatly, we’re a very small market. It saddened me that a simple invention like this wouldn’t get the traction to attract enough attention, and this made me ask another question: why is traction that important? Why can’t we just look at products like this for what they are: improvements to our quality of life — whether it’s for two people or two billion?

As a product designer, I know that it is i̶m̶p̶o̶s̶s̶i̶b̶l̶e̶ impractical to create a product that answers each and every potential user’s needs. I’m upset that something like Mikay’s pitch won’t get funding, or something like Paula’s pitch won’t get enough attention because there are already better (at least in tech complexity and potential for revenue) products out there. Most people are of the notion that good inventions have to be original and have to solve the world’s big problems. I disagree. The two batches of STORM Scouts’ Product Champs have brought to the surface something that I guess I have always known to be true: good inventions simply come from good intentions.

Food for Thought

My world is so unbalanced that I feel so guilty for being on this teeter totter of belonging to a community of tech conference attendees, applauding advancement that I know full well will take my country (especially those outside of the urban areas) about a decade to appreciate and adopt. I think that because we know for a fact that someone else in a city in a first-world country is already working on, or has already come up with a more technologically advanced solution, we’ve become complacent. We do not make our own solutions or even if we did, we do not fight to get support for them to impact more lives. We kill the fire even before it’s even a spark.

I feel guilty because even if I wanted to see more individuals or communities be empowered to design solutions to their own problems, I’m not doing anything to reinforce this behavior — I’m not even modelling it. I am smack right in the middle of those two worlds but I’m not doing anything to bridge the gap between technology complex enough to fly right above the average reasonable person’s head, and the needs of the average reasonable person that fly under the radar of the lofty goals of engineers, designers, and investors.

Holding Product Champs sessions for young inventors and innovators is obviously not enough to tip the scales. If maybe advocating for a paradigm shift in the way we look at what should get support and funding, what we should direct our efforts towards (which, if it hasn’t been clear throughout this entire piece, is: smaller-scale good intentions), perhaps more Mikays and Paulas of the world can get their ideas running and change the lives of people who aren’t at the centers of all the crazy tech innovations. Perhaps the average reasonable person would be more active in designing their own solutions to their own problems instead of waiting for someone else to come up with something on the other side of the globe.

I leave you with these musings — and if you look at the publish date, I also start the year with these musings — because I know I’m not the only one thinking about this and if you haven’t before, I ask you to think about it too. Surely, there’s something we can do about this and I’m all ears for any thoughts or ideas. Whatever it is, it’s gonna be a lot of work, but talking about it is a good place to start.