Enterprise IoT: Connected Product User Communities

A key hurdle point for any newtech’s becoming truly mainstream is adoption by the enterprise market. The newtech innovates its way into a variety of business applications geared to improve efficiency and save time and money. This is not just internally to the enterprise, but as a widespread feature of products and services offered. Some examples are the Internet, email, video conferencing, IP telephony, virtual worlds, and wikis.

One big shift is towards making all products connected. This means actually connected via sensors, not just a website to look up for product information and customer services. This is revolutionary to businesses because immediately, every product can be transformed from a one-off shelf purchase to an ongoing service that is part of social community.

Every product can be a relationship with the consumer. 

Connected products can phone home with continuous information about product usage and failure (most ethically with customer opt-in).

Just like the ability to interact with content on websites and engage in social networking with other users became an expectation with web properties, product user communities have already been evolving to be more interactive with product web sites, Facebook pages and likes, Twitter accounts, and sometimes fan fiction. Connected product user communities is the next step and it could be giant. If the requisite infrastructure is in place, connected products could deploy quickly because of the more intimate relationship vendors perceive as attainable with consumers from the high-resolution continuous information exchange.

IoT ecology design is crucial. IoT sensors must operate in concert with other communications networks, but their low power requirements could draw from the existing infrastructure of the user’s wearable ecosystem (smartphone, smartwatch, wearable display (Glass), wifi, cloud), smarthome (Nest, Hive, Tado, etc.), automotive data networks, and other IoT tracking infrastructure. With IoT sensors, the 10:1 ratio of person to connected devices could quickly exponentiate to 100:1. The IoT ecosystem requires an architecture that is quite different from the Internet’s packets, redundancy, lookups, and TCPIP switching, a design that can accommodate higher bursts in traffic, data input from sensor clouds (a sensor landscape acting like a school of fish), and more kinds and types of data transmission, but can also power share, massively distribute, and intercommunicate.

Pluralist Narratives in Digital Art and Philosophy

Much of contemporary human endeavor involves both art and technology. Objects are both technologized and aesthetically designed. Apple forever changed the expectation of high-quality technology and design in objects. Information visualization, 3-D printing, personal data, video games, and de novo biological design (e.g.; proteins, other molecules, synthetic biology) are some examples of the strong linkage between technology and aesthetic design.

Artists, scientists, and individuals alike are exploring these new venues of information, software, personal data, biology, and virtual reality for discovery and creative expression. Online tools facilitate the process and compress the required learning curves for proficiency.

As a result, there is a shift away from the institutional production of knowledge to include the more democratized production of art, science, technology, objects, and knowledge by individuals and crowds. This helps to enact change at three levels: a greater range of interesting and useful objects and technologies coming into existence; more fulfillment and expression of human creative potential; and new kinds of knowledge and meaning-making narratives about the world.

The ‘So What’ Interface – a Prescriptive Layer

When we see a calendar, we know what the information means, and readily map this to potential action-taking. This is not as clear with data displayed from the new era of the Health Internet of Things - the increasingly ubiquitous information climate of consumer biophysical monitoring and quantified self-tracking that surrounds us.

So far the main focus has been on Apple-y/iOS-y design and data visualization in health data streams such as 23andMe genomic data, Fitbit data, the Eatery food diary summarization data, or EKG data tracking across a smartphone screen when held up to the chest. However, we are all still scratching our heads as to what to do as a result of seeing the information.

The Prescriptive Interface
A whole new conceptual category of ‘what to do with this data’ needs to be articulated, named, and implemented – an intuitively-apparent prescriptive layer of suggested action-taking as a result of viewing the data. The two biggest challenges are first, these data streams are only nascently available and therefore meaning has not yet been determined in many cases, and second, there is little effort in determining and implementing a core set of principles for behavior influence and ambient suggestioning. Having these challenges solved could help constitute what is missing in the health data streams but not the calendar – knowing what the information means and what action to take as a result.

Design and the disruptive startup: dynamic pivoting

In the mashup world of life, business, and web 2.0, spurred on by the Apple-ification of the world (iLife - as a concept not a product), one new idea is applying design to business models, and really by extension, applying design to everything.

Unfortunately, this does not mean as one might think, applying aesthetic principles, conceptually and literally, to business, business models, or any life context, adding beauty to function, and thereby function to function, and questioning the right proportionality of form and function.

Rather, at present applying design to business models means more basically, using design tools and design thinking in a business context, specifically, in the conduct of an iterative prototyping process with users.

In business 1.0, an entrepreneur would dream up an idea and write a business plan. In business 2.0, the claim is that entrepreneurs should interview dozens of potential customers to pivot through value propositions for ideas that solve the biggest customer pain points. Customer acquisition is tantamount, in a 'get, keep, grow' cycle. Elliptical tools like the business model canvas are proposed as support for this iterative prototyping process.

Long-tail economics extended to physical objects

Chris Anderson, editor of WIRED magazine, gave an excellent talk on August 5, 2010 at the PARC Forum. He explained how the long-tail economic models which have driven digital content (allowing consumers to access books, music, and movies in the 80% of the market that is not blockbusters) are now starting to appear in the world of physical goods.

The process of realizing long-tail economics in any sector is that of going one-to-many; democratizing the tools of creation, then the tools of production, and finally the tools of distribution. This is what happened with internet content such as publishing, where it is now easy for anyone to create, produce, and distribute content with blogs, twitter feeds, YouTube, etc. This has also happened with other digital content and some physical goods that are ordered and distributed via internet models (e.g.; Amazon, Zappos, etc.).

The new industrial revolution, argues Anderson, is in opensource hardware factories. The supply chain has now opened up to the digital and the small. The ability to make and distribute anything massively decentralizes traditional manufacturing and could completely reorganize industrial economies…atoms are the new bits. Matthew Sobol’s holons (communities of local resilience and sustainability) are in the works. Goods can be self-designed or crafted from available digital designs (e.g.; communities like ShapeWays and Ponoko), and then printed locally on the MakerBot or ordered from Alibaba or other global manufacturies. Opensource manufacturing is starting to have an impact on industries like auto design and construction (e.g.; Local Motors), drones (e.g.; DIY Drones), and general hardware design (empowered by the Beagle Board and Arduino).

It is likely that long-tail economics can be applied to many other areas. Medicine is the next obvious example, where health care, health maintenance, drug development, and disease treatment are already starting to shift into n=1 or n=small group tiers of greater customization and ideally, lower cost as more precision is obtained in the measuring and understanding of disease and wellness.