Biggest pit-fall in IoT device design
During an interview with O'Reilly Radar Podcast,&nbsp;Robert Brunner, founder of the Ammunition design studio, spoke of the pit-falls companies fall into when designing an Iot device. The biggest being forgetting to focus on people and how they will understand and interact with the product designed.
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For this week’s Radar Podcast, I had the opportunity to sit down with Robert Brunner, founder of the Ammunition design studio. Brunner talked about how design can help mitigate IoT pitfalls, what drove him to found Ammunition, and why he’s fascinated with design’s role in the movement toward automation.

Here are a few of the highlights from our chat:

One of the biggest pitfalls I’m seeing in how companies are approaching the Internet of Things, especially in the consumer market, is, literally, not paying attention to people — how people understand products and how they interact with them and what they mean to them.

It was this broader experience and understanding of what [a product] is and what it does in people’s lives, and what it means to them — that’s experienced not just through the thing, but how they learn about it, how they buy it, what happens when they open up the box, what happens when they use the product, what happens when the product breaks; all these things add up to how you feel about it and, ultimately, how you relate to a company. That was the foundation of [Ammunition].

Ultimately, I define design as the purposeful creation of things.

While the underlying technology enables, it’s really design that establishes [a product] in people’s lives. So, you really have to treat design as important as software and hardware.

The biggest problem is that a majority of companies and people still think of design as a simple step in the process: requirements in, design out.

I envision myself getting in a self-driving car while drones are driving by with packages outside. That’s really cool, but I don’t know if we’re thinking it through well yet.

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Image on article and category pages via Paul K on Flickr.