Design Entrepreneurship

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 22 apr 2016

To build human-like machines that can demonstrate ingenuity and creativity, the race is on to develop next generation of advanced AI (Artifical Intelligence). AI is already tackling complex tasks like stock market predictions, research synthesis etc, and 'smart manufacturing' is becoming a reality where deep learning is paired with new robotics and digital manufacturing tools. Prof. Hod Lipson, director of Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, has embarked upon exploring a higher level of AI and develop biology-inspired machines that can evolve, self-model, and self-reflect - where machines will generate new ideas, and then build them. To build self-aware robots is the ultimate goal. Prof. Lipson explains, 'Biology-inspired engineering is about learning from nature, and then using it to try to solve the hardest problems. It happens at all scales. It's not just copying nature at the surface level. It could be copying the learning at a deeper level, such as learning how nature uses materials or learning about the adaptation processes that evolution uses...We are looking at what I think is the ultimate challenge in artificial intelligence and robotics-creating machines that are creative; machines that can invent new things; machines that can come up with new ideas and then make those very things. Creativity is one of these last frontiers of AI. People still think that humans are superior to machines in their ability to create things, and we are looking at that challenge.' He is working on a new AI termed as 'divergent AI', that is exploratory and involves creating many new ideas from original idea, and is different from 'convergent AI' that involves taking data and distilling it into a decision. ON SELF-AWARENESS IN AI: He says, 'Creativity is a big challenge, but even greater than that is self-awareness. For a long time, in robotics and AI, we sometimes called it the "C" word-consciousness.' ON AI IN MANUFACTURING: He comments, 'When it comes to manufacturing, there are two angles. One is the simple automation, where we're seeing robots that can work side-by-side with humans...The other side of manufacturing, which is disrupted by AI, is the side of design. Manufacturing and design always go hand-in-hand...When AI creeps into the design world through these new types of creative AI, you suddenly expand what you can manufacture because the AI on the design side can take advantage of your manufacturing tools in new ways.' ON TWO COMPETING SCHOOLS OF THOUGHTS IN AI: He explains, 'There's the school of thought that is top-down, logic, programming, and search approach, and then there is the machine learning approach. The machine learning approach says, "Forget about programming robots, forget about programming AI, you just make it learn, and it will figure out everything on its own from data"...I think the machine learning approach has played out perfectly, and we're just at the beginning. It's going to accelerate.' Read on...

Singularity Hub: The Last Frontiers of AI - Can Scientists Design Creativity and Self-Awareness?
Author: Alison E. Berman

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 29 feb 2016

According to World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution has become the world's biggest environmental risk, linked to over 7 million deaths a year. A global team of scientists (Farid Touati, Claudio Legena, Alessio Galli, Damiano Crescini, Paolo Crescini, Adel Ben Mnaouer) from Canadian University Dubai, Qatar University, and the University of Brescia (Italy), have developed a technology, known as SENNO (Sensor Node), that enables high-efficiency air quality monitoring, to help promote a cleaner environment and reduce the health risks associated with poor atmospheric quality. The technology promises to make air quality monitoring cost-effective. The research paper, 'Environmentally Powered Multiparametric Wireless Sensor Node for Air Quality Diagnostic', was published in Sensors and Materials journal. Prof. Adel Ben Mnaouer of Canadian University Dubai (CUD), says, 'Sensor networks dedicated to atmospheric monitoring can provide an early warning of environmental hazards. However, remote systems need robust and reliable sensor nodes, which require high levels of power efficiency for autonomous, continuous and long-term use...Our technology harvests environmental energy...it optimises energy use by the sensory equipment, so as to function only for the time needed to achieve the operations of sensor warm-up, sampling, data processing and wireless data transmission, thereby creating an air quality monitoring system that measures pollutants in a sustainable and efficient way.' Read on...

The Gulf Today: Dubai professor develops innovation to combat increasing air pollution
Author: NA

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 14 feb 2016

Make in India Week has now started in Mumbai and along with it India Design Forum (IDF) 2016 is developing strategies and advocating how a facilitating design environment and culture can be nurtured to enable growth of manufacturing. IDF is integrated into Make in India campaign's plan to demonstrate the potential of design, innovation and sustainability across India's manufacturing sector. Rajshree Pathy, founder of IDF, explains, 'Design is not merely about clothes, shoes, handbags and jewellery, as is commonly believed. Those are incidental. Design is, in fact, at the heart of the manufacturing process. It is not a 'thing', it is a way of thinking.' Satyendra Pakhale, an Amsterdam-based designer, citing Tata Nano's example says, 'It is a good example of Indian design, which combined engineering innovations with a careful consideration for the demands of the domestic market. In fact, one of India's most famous qualities - jugaad - is indicative of an innovative mindset.' According to Simran Lal, CEO of Good Earth, 'It's important that we bring rural design and India's rural design communities along on this journey.' Time is now ripe for India to upgrade to a design-driven manufacturing ecosystem, attract global investments, partner with global corporations and manufacture for the world, but without losing the focus on serving the needs of the large local market. Read on...

The Indian Express: Make in India Week - Putting design at the heart of manufacturing
Author: Pooja Pillai

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 31 jan 2016

Good designers often seek a balance between comfort and fashion while designing their clothes. They design to improve human lives. For most people jeans provide comfort and also fulfil their fashion quotient. Professor Elazer Edelman, a cardiologist and director of Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center, is going a step further and utilizing scientific approach to create 'FYT Jeans', that are designed for health and comfort. These jeans, developed in collaboration with designers from Portugal, are particularly suited for people who sit for long hours, like office workers. Initially the project was targeted for wheelchair dependent people, to provide them safe clothes. According to Prof. Edelman, 'There are a variety of modifications to the design around the knee...The zipper on the back is a very important and innovative design.' FYT Jeans don't bunch up behind the knee. He further adds, 'It's extra material, extra pressure. It's uncomfortable and it can actually be unsafe. It's everything from a little irritation to when people have diabetes or poor circulation, developing sores that never heal.' While explaining the future of healthy clothings, he says, 'You could certainly embed all kinds of sensors in them, and you could even give something, or embed something that was itself therapeutic.' Read on...

CBS Local: MIT Professor Designing Jeans Made For Sitting
Author: Kathryn Hauser

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 29 dec 2015

Although Business Intelligence (BI) and Big Data Analytics (BDA) are being successfully utilized for incremental innovation, but they are insufficient to provide breakthrough innovation, which is more challenging and requires uncovering latent needs, or even creating needs and meaning. Soren Petersen, author of the book 'Profit from Design', and Finn Birger Lie (Co-founder and Chairman of Northern Analytics AS), explains how combination of BDA and Small Data (SD) when integrated at the early stages of new product development process can create breakthrough innovation. The conventional design process includes steps that combine analysis and synthesis, prototyping, testing and learning to create unique and valuable insights. While more advanced design processes, like Design Thinking, include an element of design research or Design Science Research, to enable design teams gain better understanding of the current and future market, and technologies, leverage this knowledge, and then create roadmap that includes the concurrent building of new capabilities that assist them to design future offerings. Mr. Petersen says, 'Innovation is often ambiguous. The 'Market-Technology Risk Matrix' provides a useful mapping of new ventures and offerings according to their position in the market (Recognized Needs, Clarifying Needs and Realizing Needs) and their technology level (Current Technology, Applied New Technology and Development of New Technology). Different combinations of Big Data Analytics (BDA) and Small Data Analytics (SDA) may prove more productive, depending on where design identifies insights within the Market-Technology Risk Matrix.' With grounded research and vertical thinking, BDA can support incremental innovation, while through lateral thinking, SDA can utilize a combination of hypothesis and grounded research to support breakthrough innovation. Read on...

Huffington Post: Creating Breakthrough Innovations Through Design With Big and Small Data Analysis
Authors: Soren Petersen, Finn Birger Lie

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 18 dec 2015

Although government of UK states that the creative industries in the country now equal £76.9 billion per year, and the design sector seeing the biggest growth. But there is another debate brewing in UK regarding the condition of design and creative education. According to John Sorrell, founder of London Design Festival and Creative Industries Federation, 'Schools in UK saw a 50% decrease in students taking design and technology GSEC (General Certificate of Secondary Education) subjects in the 10 years leading upto 2013, and 25% drop in other craft-related GCSEs between 2007 and 2013.' He says that the government is reducing investments in creative education that would eventually lead to inadequate development of the next generation of creative talent. He explains, 'It is the government's calling card everywhere in the world...it's this amazing work we're part of which makes Britain so loved by the rest of the world - our creativity.' He further adds, 'If we can get our act together and work together we can take advantage of the opportunities in international development that certainly China is going to be doing in the next 20 years.' Similar sentiments were recently voiced by this year's London Design Medal winners, Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, who said 'UK government doesn't value the role of creativity.' Another angle to this debate was provided by inventor James Dyson, who criticized the UK government's steps regarding the foreign students to return home after completing their education. This immigration plan will threaten UK's status as a global design and architecture center. Read on...

dezeen: Design education in the UK is being "marginalised" says John Sorrell
Author: Dan Howarth

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 13 dec 2015

It has been observed in many cases that science fiction writers have talked about products that became reality later on. For example earbud headphones were first mentioned by Ray Bradbury in his classic novel 'Fahrenheit 451'. Emphasis on technological development and advancement is also part of economic agendas of many nations. Japan is one country that gives siginificant importance to merging technology with social and economic development. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his economic roadmap, often termed as 'Abenomics', puts technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), big data, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) at the core of his revitilization strategy. Japan leads the world with its strength in robotics by bringing out the first personal robot 'Pepper'. But the robot lacks the expected intelligence as it couldn't pass the Turing Test which is a benchmark in AI to determine how close the machine thinks like humans. Although Japan's strength in industrial robotics is visible but it lags the advancements in IoT, big data and AI. According to Prof. Mitsuru Ishizuka of Waseda University and University of Tokyo, 'Japan is considerably behind the United States in 'deep learning', a central technology in AI, although the country is working hard to catch up...These companies (Google, Facebook, IBM etc) can invest big money in AI and add the resulting new values to their services. In Japan, there are much smaller companies with specific AI technologies.' IBM developed Watson, an AI computer, and over the years it has evolved into multiple applications. The computer's core framework reflects human decision-making (observe, interpret, evaluate, decide) but its data crunching abilities are incomparable. William Saito, Japanese entrepreneur and professional cook, utilized Watson to prepare some unique recipes. Citing Watson's strengths in IoT, big data and AI, Mr. Saito comments, 'Combine Watson with a refrigerator, for instance. You go to your refrigerator and it gives you a recipe based on the food in the fridge prioritized by expiration date.' Japan's focus on creating cyborgs (humans with mechanical parts) is also understandable considering its ageing population and growing need for assisted living. Toyota is collaborating with Stanford and MIT on technologies with emphasis on creating automobiles that assist the driver for safer travel, contrary to the approaches of Google and Tesla Motors that are working on driverless cars. Mr. Saito believes that Japan has to come out of its 'Galápagos Syndrome' and strike a balance between logic and creative thinking and move from electro-mechanical robotics to thinking and self-learning machines. Prof. Masakazu Hirokawa, AI researcher at University of Tsukuba, expresses similar views on Japanese model that focuses more on technology that addresses social issues and is less about creating global solutions. He comments, 'We have the hardware to be able to do it, but the important thing is developing the software...I'm trying to create algorithms that help robots learn and predictively determine what and how humans want them to act through experience-based inferences.' Read on...

JapanToday: Artificial Intelligence - Can Japan lead the way?
Author: Richard Jolley

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 29 nov 2015

The fast-paced world of fashion and related consumption leads to generation of large amount of waste that leaves a substantial ecological footprint. According to the nonprofit GrowNYC, in the city of New York the average person throws out 46 pounds of clothings and textiles every year (totals 193000 tons for NY). While Council for Textile Recycling found that US generates 25 billion pounds of textile waste per year (82 pounds per person) and estimates that it will increase to 35.4 billion pounds by 2019. But only about 4 billion pounds (15%) gets donated and recycled and the remaining reaches landfills, contributing 5.2% to all trash generated in US. Elizabeth Cline, author of the book "Overdressed: The Shockingly High Price of Cheap Fashion", says 'There is so much waste being created and that has changed really dramatically in the last 15 years with the rise of fast fashion and disposable consumption.' Adam Baruchowitz, CEO of Wearable Collections, which coordinates textile recycling in partnership with GrowNYC, acknowledges the increasing rise in textile waste. While Nate Herman, VP of international trade at American Apparel and Footwear Association, have a contrarian view and explains 'People are actually buying less than they did 10 years. While there has been a lot of press about [wastefulness], the numbers don't bear that out.' But he acknowledges that the industry is trying to effectively handle the clothing's end-of-life issues. Some companies provide small credit to consumers who trade-in used garments, while others donate used clothings to charities. Some companies provide support and contribute to the recycle programs where used textiles end up in producing materials used in other industries like insulation in buildings. Moreover, there are a number of startups that are working to give a second life to used clothings. A small number of fashion companies are also incorporating recycled materials in their new line of clothings. Eco-friendly strategies are considered costly by the industry. According to Jill Dumain, director of environmental strategy at Patagonia, 'It's an industry-wide dilemma, for sure, on how do we do something at scale that the industry can participate in...The end result is that you have smaller-scale production that ends up to be more expensive.' She suggests that awareness about recycling is necessary and at the same time there need to be a thinking among consumers not to treat clothes like a cheap disposable item. Slow fashion might be the way forward. She further explains, 'I do think consumption is a big part. People need to learn how to buy less and companies need to learn how to be profitable in selling less.' Read on...

CBS News: Is the fast fashion industry ready to change its wasteful ways?
Author: Michael Casey

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 29 oct 2015

User experience is one of the most critical factor to be considered while designing a product or service. Great designs make customers feel good, enjoy and above all fully utilize the desired functionality of the product or service for their benefit. Scott Sundvor, co-founder of 6SensorLabs, explains that there are generally two schools of thought in the product design process - 'Design-First' approach, that promotes the process of initially designing look and feel of the product and then make engineering fit that design, and the other is 'Engineering-First' approach, in which the engineering aspects of the product are considered first while the industrial design works under constraints of the engineering specifications e.g. hardware, components etc. Apple generally applies the design-first approach and gives substantial importance to the aesthetics of the product, and of course without compromising on the engineering. Mr. Sundvor suggests that startups and companies with relevantly less funds as compared to Apple can find success by following the engineering-first approach. They should focus on the utility of the product i.e. providing better usability and functionality. Hardware startups that pursue crowdfunding to generate capital often sell products with a different initial industrial design while ship something else. This generally happends due to lack of convergence of engineering and hardware aspects with the industrial design. In other cases it might happen that original industrial design was not manufacturable or the cost to manufacture it was too high. Startups and companies on low budget can avoid such problems by focusing first on making the product work and then create aesthetic aspects of industrial design around it. Engineering team and industrial design firm should work together closely. Product leader should be created within the product/engineering team to coordinate collaboration between the two and should gather feedback from all sources including user's perspective and engineering constraints. The selection of the right industrial firm could be a challenge and should be done by doing thorough research based on budgetary constraints, product requirements and the design firm's capabilities. Once the selection is made product/engineering team should pitch their product vision and specifications to the industrial design firm. The design firm should be convinced regarding the long-term viability of the product. To raise funds after this would depend on the high-quality prototype design that comes through a partnership with the design firm. Startups should be prepared to spend right amount of money to create this prototype and if they don't have much funds they should consider giving equity to the design firm. This is the critical stage of product development and startups shouldn't shy away from pulling all the strings to get a good design firm to work on their product vision and specifications. Read on...

ReadWrite: Which Came First - Product Utility Or Design?
Author: Scott Sundvor

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 19 jul 2015

Wikipedia article on 'Emotional Intelligence' explains it as, 'The ability to recognize one's own and other people's emotions, to discriminate between different feelings and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior'. The article further categorizes EI into three models - (1) Ability Model (by Peter Salovey and John Mayer): Focuses on the individual's ability to process emotional information and use it to navigate the social environment. (2) Trait Model (by Konstantin Vasily Petrides): Encompasses behavioral dispositions and self perceived abilities and is measured through self report. (3) Mixed Model (by Daniel Goleman): A combination of both ability and trait EI. It defines EI as an array of skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance. While most people may believe that innovation and creativity are born traits and might not have any connection with EI, but Harvey Deutschendorf, author and EI expert, explains that EI plays an important role in innovative and creative thinking. He outlines 7 common EI-related traits that innovators have - (1) Innovators have their ego in check. (2) Emotionally intelligent people are confident, not arrogant. (3) They are continually curious. (4) They are good listeners. (5) They don't let their emotions affect their innovation efforts. (6) They can take direction. (7) They empathize with co-workers and customers. Read on...

Fast Company: 7 HABITS OF INNOVATIVE THINKERS
Author: Harvey Deutschendorf

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