"Industrial Internet of Things" entries
Defining and sculpting interactions between man and technology
Jonathan Follett on the future of design and designers.
Editor’s note: we’re running a series of five excerpts from our forthcoming book Designing for Emerging Technologies, a compilation of works by industry experts in areas of user experience design related to genomics, robotics, the Internet of Things, and the Industrial Internet of Things.
In this excerpt, author — and editor of Designing for Emerging Technologies — Jonathan Follett addresses designer’s roles as new technologies begin to blur the boundaries between design and engineering for software, hardware, and biotech.
Author and editor Jonathan Follett, principal at Involution Studios.
Technology extends our grasp, making it possible for us to achieve our goals rapidly and efficiently; but it also places its own set of demands upon us. The fields of industrial design, graphic design, and software user experience design have all evolved in response to these demands — a need for a human way to relate to and interact with our new tools. Graphic design makes information depicted in printed media clear, understandable, and beautiful; industrial design makes products elegant, usable, and humane; and user experience design makes the interaction with our digital tools and services efficient and even pleasurable.
The future of design is to envision humanity’s relationship to technology and each other — whether we’re struggling with fear and loathing in reaction to genetically altered foods, the moral issues of changing a child’s traits to suit a parent’s preferences, the ethics guiding battlefield robots, or the societal implications of a 150-year extended lifetime. Now, more than ever, designers have the opportunity to help define the parameters of and sculpt the interactions between man and technology.
The Industrial IoT isn’t the same as the consumer IoT
We need a better approach to build bridges to the IIoT.
Reading Kipp Bradford’s recent article, The Industrial Internet of Things: The opportunity no one’s talking about, got me thinking about commonly held misconceptions about what the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is — as well as what it’s not.
Misconception 1: The IIoT is the same as the consumer Internet of Things (IoT), except it’s located on a factory floor somewhere.
This misconception is easy to understand, given that both the IIoT and the consumer IoT have that “Internet of Things” term in common. Yes, the IIoT includes devices located in industrial settings: maybe a factory floor, or perhaps as part of a high-speed train system, or inside a hotel or restaurant, or a municipal lighting system, or within the energy grid itself.
But the industrial IoT has far more stringent requirements than the consumer IoT, including the need for no-compromise control, rock-solid security, unfailing reliability even in harsh (extremely hot or cold, dusty, humid, noisy, inconvenient) environments, and the ability to operate with little or no human intervention. And unlike more recently designed consumer-level devices, many of the billion or so industrial devices already operating on existing networks were put in place to withstand the test of time, often measured in decades.
The differences between the IIoT and IoT are not just a matter of slight degree or semantics. If your Fitbit or Nest device fails, it might be inconvenient. But if a train braking system fails, it could be a matter of life and death. Read more…
The Industrial Internet of Things
The opportunity no one's talking about.
Photo: Kipp Bradford. This industrial burner from Weishaupt churns through 40 million BTUs per hour of fuel.
Admittedly, the Internet of Things (IoT) is all the buzz right now. Echelon, like everyone else, is trying to capture some of that mindshare for their products. In this case, the product is a proprietary system of chips, protocols, and interfaces for enabling the IoT on industrial devices. But what struck me and my colleagues was how really outdated this approach seems, and how far it misses the point of the emerging IoT. Read more…