Internet of Things Expected to Quadruple in Size by 2020. Many local governments are making budgets go further with LED smart street lighting that automatically reports when it needs to be repaired, such as this light pole on Santa Monica Blvd. in Los Angeles.Flickr/Ericsson Organizations are seeing measurable benefits from Internet of Things (IoT) projects, and the number of overall IoT connections will more than quadruple between 2014 and 2020, according to a Verizon Enterprise Solutions report released Feb. 23. State of the Market: The Internet of Things (IoT) 2015: Discover How IoT is Transforming Business Results is based on data from a variety of sources, including Verizon usage statistics, customer insights and third-party research.
The report delves into adoption trends and predictions for the future of the IoT market (Verizon defines IoT as to machine-to-machine technology enabled by secure network connectivity and cloud infrastructure, to reliably transform data into useful information for people, businesses and institutions.) In the Programmable World, All Our Objects Will Act as One. In our houses, cars, and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do.
Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives. On a 5-acre plot in Great Falls, Virginia, less than a mile’s stroll through exurban scrub from the wide Potomac River, Alex Hawkinson has breathed life into a lifeless object. He has given his house, a sprawling six-bedroom Tudor, what you might describe as a nervous system: a network linking together the home’s very sinews, its walls and ceilings and windows and doors.
He has made these parts move, let them coalesce as a bodily whole, by giving them a way to talk among themselves. Open a telnet session in the house’s digital hub and you can actually spy on his chattering stuff, hear what it says when no one’s listening: Why a New Golden Age for UI Design Is Around the Corner | Wired Design. Innovations like this present great challenges for designers. Today’s app and software designers already have a deep understanding of how customers interact with their products. They know down to the pixel where to place a button, how fast a screen should scroll, and how to make an app simple without making it simplistic. But as designers move off of screens and into the larger world, they’ll need to consider every nuance of our everyday activity and understand human behavior every bit as well as novelists or filmmakers.
(Otherwise they may engender the same kind of backlash as Google Glass, a potentially cool product that has unleashed a torrent of privacy concerns.) That will require a shift in how tech designers view the world. Matt Webb, CEO of Berg, a London design firm that has created forward-looking prototypes for clients such as the BBC, Google, and Nokia, says it will demand thinking beyond today’s standard scenario of a person working on a computer.
Constant Connections. The Mobile Future: Wearables. Eran Kinsbruner, Director, Product MarketingPerfecto Mobile Mobile is everywhere today — there is no denying it. And just as enterprises are catching up to the trend, another twist is coming into play: wearables. But these new technology advancements aren’t totally revolutionary; they are simply an extension of mobile. In fact, everything is starting to mobilize. 2014 will truly rewrite the rules of mobile engagement between enterprises and customers, employees and each other. Preparing for wearables Enterprises still need to properly test, deploy and monitor mobile applications. From consumer electronics, mobile health, industrial equipment to military applications, all areas will have use cases for comparable mobile functionality and this new wearable technology. Regardless of the industry, consumers will expect the flawless user experience that they are accustomed to, and testers will have to devise more complex testing strategies to ensure they meet consumer demands.
Adjusted strategy. How The Business World Will Make Wearables Mainstream. Google Glass has been featured in so many news stories that it’s easy to forget, there are still only a few thousand units floating around outside Google HQ. Wearables, while expected to take off, simply aren’t all that popular yet. So when should we plan to duck and cover for the new era? 2020, according to a new report published by Forrester Research. “This is a rough estimate,” Forrester VP and Principal Analyst J.P.
Gownder tells Co.Design. “The enterprise space--though certain innovations find their way in quickly--requires all sorts of changes to infrastructure. By the nature of it, you can start to see what’s going to happen, but it takes five to seven years before it becomes pervasive.” Consumer electronics products like the Nike+ Fuelband fitness tracker have already had some measure of success. But when you take similar specialized devices and build them for an enterprise context, the possibilities of scale shift, he says. You may be skeptical about Gownder's argument.
The future of advertising. The Future Of Smart Things Is Dumb. Last weekend, I spent several hours updating the firmware for some lightbulbs in my home. Yes, I did a firmware update for lightbulbs. They’re smart lightbulbs, and I’ve programmed them to do a kind of sundown fade at the end of the evening, and that’s pretty cool. But still, they’re just lightbulbs. That overhead speaks to one of the most vexing problems in technology today.
Familiar objects are getting smarter. Consumers can now choose from an array of intelligent lightbulbs, appliances, watches, and jewelry that deliver the convenience of computing without the clunkiness of a computer. To solve for this, we need to expand our concept of smart things by an order of magnitude: Our whole environment must become smart. Our environment--the rooms within the homes, offices, and public spaces we occupy--should become a computer that surrounds us. Take, for example, a typical wall-mounted lightswitch you can find in any home. Or say you want to change up the music at your dinner party. The Future Of UX Design: Tiny, Humanizing Details. Dan Saffer, like many designers, likes to quote Charles Eames. But unlike many designers, Saffer—Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design—wrote a whole book inspired by one of his favorite Eames quotes: "The details are not the details.
They make the design. " Saffer’s book, titled Microinteractions, takes Eames’s maxim to heart and then some. "For the last decade or so, designers have been encouraged to tackle 'wicked problems’ and to address systems," he tells Co.Design. "But when you’re working on such a macro scale, the details sometimes get lost, and it’s the details that make systems feel more human, and more humane. So I wanted to write a book that took a look, almost at the atomic level of design, of what makes details work. " So what is a "microinteraction," anyway? These atomic design moments, Saffer argues, are what whole products, and even whole systems and "wicked problems," ultimately boil down to. [Read more about Microinteractions here]