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Thank you Joe for inviting me tonight. As soon as I sawyour logo, I knew I had to participate.

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First, let me tell you a bit about my background. Im a userexperience designer. I was one of the first professional Web

designers in 1993, where I was lucky enough to be present for the

birth of such things as the online shopping cart and the search

engine. This is the navigation for a hot sauce shopping site I

designed in 1994.

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Im proud of the fact that 16 years later they were stillusing the same visual identity. These were some of theoldest pixels on the Web.

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Heres one of my UI designs for the advanced search forHotBot, an early search engine, from 1997. If yourewondering why Googles front page is no minimal, I thinkit was because we were doing this.

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Since then Ive consulted on the user experience design ofdozens, maybe hundreds of web sites. Heres one forcredit.com, who were fantastic clients a couple of yearsago.

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I sat out the first dotcom crash writing a book based on thework I had been doing. Its a cookbook of user researchmethods. It came out in 2003 and the second edition justcame out last month. Buy a copy for everyone on yourteam!

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And 2001 I co-founded a design and consulting companycalled Adaptive Path.

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ThingM is a micro-OEM and an R&D lab. We design andmanufacture a range of smart LEDs for architects,industrial designers and hackers. Our products appear oneverything from flying robots to Lady Gagas stage show.This is an RFID wine rack that we did about four yearsago. The different light colors represent different facets ofinformation thats pulled down from a cloud-based service,such as current market price. This is a capacitive sensingkitchen cabinet knob we did two years ago. It glows when

you touch it to creates a little bit of magic in your everydayenvironment and was an exploration in making a digitalproduct that would still be useful 20 years after it wasmade.

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In 2010 I wrote a book on the user experience design ofubiquitous computing devices, which I define as thingsthat do information processing and networking, but arenot experienced as general purpose computing orcommunication devices.

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I also organize an annual summit of people developinghardware design tools for non-engineers.

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However, ThingM, books and conferences are not my dayjob. Theyre entertaining sidelines. My primary day job isas an innovation and user experience design consultantfocusing on the design of digital consumer products. Hereare some Ive worked on for Yamaha, Whirlpool andQualcomm.

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The last couple of years my clients have been largeconsumer electronics companies. Ive worked with them todesign new products and services and to help them createmore user centered and company cultures. I cant give youany details, but Ill tell you that big data analytics, real-time image recognition, distributed processing, andmachine learning are pretty awesome.

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This spring I finally got to do a project I can talk about. Iworked with Sifteo, the game company, to design all of thenon-game UX of their second generation platform. It was agreat project. Stock up on these for Christmas.

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Thats where this comes from.

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Imagine Amazon 8 years from now. It looks like this. Yes,it looks exactly like the Amazon today. It has all of thefamiliar ways to discover new products, to compare them,to see what people think of them, to see what goes withwhat. It has wish lists, Gold Boxes, the whole thing. Buttheres a crucial difference. Instead of Amazon being thefront end to a fulfillment system, as it is today, the

Amazon of 2020 is the front end to a set of factories.

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The back end doesnt look like UPS, but Ford MotorCompany. When you click on on buy you start amanufacturing process at the factory nearest you, insteadof a delivery process from a warehouse far away.

River Rouge photo by Lotus Carroll, creative commonshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/thelotuscarroll/6695794423/

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I know what youre thinking: Mike just saw a MakerBotand got all excited. Weve heard this all before, its calledmass customization, and its never worked out. Why talkabout this again? Because I think that the presentation ofmass customization as configurators for everything (suchas this 1998 project from Levis) missed the point. Thattotally gets the user motivation wrong: most people dontwant to be designers of everything, they want to design acouple of things, but be consumers of the rest. Some people

want to make their own clothes, but those people typicallydont build their own cars, and vice versa. Most peoplehave better things to do than figure out what colors andpatterns look good together, what makes them look sexy orpowerful, how much firmware will fit into the onboardmemory. Theyre busy. They want someone who is aprofessional to do that research, to think really hard aboutwhat they need, to be really fluent in the tools that makeit good, then to create a solution.

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Im also not talking about desktop manufacturing. Asmuch as all us geeks want a Star Trek replicator, its notthat useful in practice. We just dont need that much newstuff all the time. Paper printers are useful because theyrepresent high density information that fits into a richexisting culture of information use, and even theyre notused nearly as much as ecommerce sites. Outside of work,people probably shop a lot more than they print.

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I think more importantly, both mass customization anddesktop fabrication imagine a new world thats differentthan ours. I have nothing against envisioning new worldsand working toward their creationthats one of thethings I do for my clientsbut my experience has taughtme that creating new worlds, changing the behavior ofmillions of people, is really hard and takes a really longtime. If we look to a world 8 years into the future, odds arethat its not going to have changed that much, the odds are

that most of us are not going to have a whole bunch moretime on our hands to become mechanical engineers,electrical engineers, software engineers, and materialscientists, as much as wed like to.

Makerbot photo by Scott Beale

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2020 will actually probably look and works exactly like ourworld today, when seen from the outside. Itll still bedriven by the thrill of finding something awesome whenyoure bored surfing the Internet and then making it yoursby buying it. The relationship between the consumer anddesigner will remain intact. Designers still design,ecommerce sites still help people find stuff they like,people still buy.

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However, there will be a crucial difference behind thescenes, and it will be this difference that changes ourworld from one of centralized warehouses to a world ofdistributed factories.

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The difference is analytics. When you order from theAmazon of 2020 a counter is incremented that registersthat you, a human being with a set of well-knownbehaviors and a demographic background, decided to buythis specific version of this specific idea. Moreover, sincethe world of 2020 is a world of ubiquitous computing,every product has a small bit of digital hardware in it thattracks how the product is used and, with your implicitpermission, sends that information back to a central

server, which aggregates and anonymizes the results.

This is of course exactly how large-scale Web designworks, but now we will map it to all products.

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When you have rapid, cheap, distributed low-volumemanufacturing capability AND real-time analytics youhave a new way of designing products. You can take thoseIndustrial Age design processes that took years to testhypotheses, and you can speed them up by orders ofmagnitude.

Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tailfins-evolution-1957-1959.jpg

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Tight loop iteration between an idea and marketvalidation of that idea is the core of Eric Ries LeanStartup approach. This is a slide from Steve Blank, who isthe patron saint of Lean Startup, that illustrates this basicidea.

My vision--MY hypothesis--is that its possible to do thiswith ANYTHING by applying the ideas, practices andtechnologies we developed for the Net to everything else.

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Lets start by assuming we have low volume digitalmanufacturing, such as this Form1 printer that just gotfunded through Kickstarter. We know thats coming.

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The next piece is hypothesis testing. How do you validateyour idea without investing a lot in manufacturing? Well,that component is also coming online.

Even though they sometimes deny it, Kickstarter is acatalog for products that don't exist yet. It gives developersfeedback about the popularity of their idea and teachesthem how to position it for a market before theyve made asingle final product. It provides two kinds of hypothesistesting: do people even want your idea? and what do theysay they want it for?

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Etsy allows very small run electronic products (as long astheyre made of felt).

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Even fab.com, which sells limited-edition high designproducts like rugs and backpacks, sells small runelectronics.

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Heres a new store opening on Valencia in about a monthcalled Dijital Fix. They are a New York-based boutiquespecializing in limited-run electronics.

These channels are immature, but theyre becomingincreasingly popular. In effect, theyre doing an end runaround the traditional consumer electronic saleschannels--at the same time that Dijital Fix is opening newstores Best Buy is strugglingand giving developersdirect access to their customers so they can test theirproduct hypotheses directly.

This is bringing product development closer to what wevebecome accustomed to when deploying software on theWeb.

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The key missing piece we still need to borrow fromsoftware is distributed collaborative design tools. To makebetter hypotheses we need to be able to take advantage ofall of those specialized skillsall the different kinds ofengineeringwherever they are, and to work together tocreate a shared understanding of what that hypothesis,that product, is.

For purely digital products we have Github, Basecamp,WebEx, Balsamiq and similar products, but the physicalworld is way behind. Commercial CAD systems are hugeand incredibly difficult to learn. Product LifecycleManagement systems assume that youre always buildinga commercial airplane, and are also insanely complex.

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We are getting new tools, Autodesks 123D, Ponoko haspublishing tools, you can kind of fork projects onThingiverse. But these tools are really immature.

Sunglass just pivoted a couple of weeks ago from being anonline CAD system to being a Github for 3D. When theseproducts mature, this is going to open creative possibilitiesimmensely.

But its going to take time. Github got to where it isthrough an evolution of tools and practices that beganwith makefiles. The physical world isnt even at themakefile stage.

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To me, the whole ecosystem looks like this. Here come thebuzz words, so excuse me in advance.

Digital fabrication, we know what that is. It will allowus to make all kinds of things in small batches.

Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things isleading to everyday objects that send a stream oftelemetry when we bring them home. They have aninformation shadow in the cloud that can be datamined.

Big Data Analytics crunches all of that data to createinformation about peoples behavior.

Social commerce creates sales channels that sell smallnumbers of products by finding niche markets andletting them market to each other

And finally, cloud-based design tools will allowdesigners and engineers to collaborate on thedistributed development of physical products.

This is my ecosystem vision: a world where design directlydrives product creation, and where data informs design.This is a world where products are made in small numbers

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I intend to make this vision my next focus as a designerand entrepreneur. At ThingM we just did the first iterationon Kickstarter of a product we hope will become differentand more interesting as we iterate on it. Its the worldsbest indicator light. Its a highly configurable USB LEDand it gives you peripheral awareness of things that arehappening on the Net and your local machine. You can pre-order one from us today.

However, I dont expect that we will be able to do all of thisby ourselves.

I need your help: tell me what I dont know, where Imwrong. Tell me who I should talk to and where theopportunities are.

I think this will change the world. I want to change theworld. Interested? Talk to me.

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Thank you.