TipoD emplaca o PraLimao em prêmio de design nacional. Produto é exposto em Nova York na semana de design week que ocorre naquela cidade.

Matéria extraída do ESTADÃO.

Informações ainda sobre a indústria editorial, sua importância e a mudança do mundo do PC para um novo mundo POS-PC que se inicia agora.

Onstage at D8, Jobs talks with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg about the connection between the iPad and the iPhone.

Extraído de Wall Street Journal.

By Sam Martin - April 9, 2010

At the end of last year, Forbes magazine asked frog to help them envision the future in 2020. In December, we held a workshop in San Francisco that brought designers, futurists and journalists together to think about the current state of computing, how we might experience it 10 years from now and, perhaps most importantly, how we might make the transition into these possible futures.

The day-long event led to an extensive online feature: “Your Life in 2020,” a collection of illustrated concepts and videos that envision the future of ubiquitous computing. In that future,  your computer is not only incorporated into every aspect of your life but is a part of you. With this in mind, we imagined how future technology would influence the key areas of Social, Travel, Commerce, Healthcare, and Media. Here's what we came up with.

Our Second Brain or "ThingBook"

In the future nearly every visible thing will be cataloged and indexed, ready to be instantly identified and described to us. Want to go shopping? In the future we won't need big retail stores with aisles of objects on display. We'll be able to shop out in the world (see image, above). Do you like that new car you saw drive by? Or those cool shoes on the woman sitting across the room? All you’ll have to do is look at it and your mobile handset or AR-equipped eyeglasses will identify the object and look up the best price and retailer.

Bodynet

Like Google for our bodies, future technologies will allow us to monitor our body's vital conditions and compute the outcome of our actions on-the-fly. So you'll know right away what it's going to take to work off that Burger and Coke.

Whuffie Meter

Curious about the future of social networking? Whuffie is a conceptual social Metric based on what others think of you. In the future this Metric might actually be usable as real money. Why not? Celebrities are used to getting things for free based on their popularity. This is the same idea taken to its democratic extreme. Socializing will take on completely new dimensions when we can see everything public about a person right as we are talking with them. Think dating is difficult today? Imagine the hoops we'll have to jump through when everyone in the bar can see your complete dating history the minute you walk into the room.

The term “whuffie,” by the way, is a word coined by author Cory Doctorow in his book Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom. It refers to the measurement of respect or karma a person gains or looses in their lives. In Doctorow’s future, humans have implants in their brains that visually project their whuffie, which has replaced money as currency.

Envisioning Your Future in 2020By Sam Martin - April 9, 2010

At the end of last year, Forbes magazine asked frog to help them envision the future in 2020. In December, we held a workshop in San Francisco that brought designers, futurists and journalists together to think about the current state of computing, how we might experience it 10 years from now and, perhaps most importantly, how we might make the transition into these possible futures.
The day-long event led to an extensive online feature: “Your Life in 2020,” a collection of illustrated concepts and videos that envision the future of ubiquitous computing. In that future,  your computer is not only incorporated into every aspect of your life but is a part of you. With this in mind, we imagined how future technology would influence the key areas of Social, Travel, Commerce, Healthcare, and Media. Here's what we came up with.
Our Second Brain or "ThingBook"In the future nearly every visible thing will be cataloged and indexed, ready to be instantly identified and described to us. Want to go shopping? In the future we won't need big retail stores with aisles of objects on display. We'll be able to shop out in the world (see image, above). Do you like that new car you saw drive by? Or those cool shoes on the woman sitting across the room? All you’ll have to do is look at it and your mobile handset or AR-equipped eyeglasses will identify the object and look up the best price and retailer.
Bodynet Like Google for our bodies, future technologies will allow us to monitor our body's vital conditions and compute the outcome of our actions on-the-fly. So you'll know right away what it's going to take to work off that Burger and Coke.

Whuffie MeterCurious about the future of social networking? Whuffie is a conceptual social Metric based on what others think of you. In the future this Metric might actually be usable as real money. Why not? Celebrities are used to getting things for free based on their popularity. This is the same idea taken to its democratic extreme. Socializing will take on completely new dimensions when we can see everything public about a person right as we are talking with them. Think dating is difficult today? Imagine the hoops we'll have to jump through when everyone in the bar can see your complete dating history the minute you walk into the room.
The term “whuffie,” by the way, is a word coined by author Cory Doctorow in his book Down And Out In the Magic Kingdom. It refers to the measurement of respect or karma a person gains or looses in their lives. In Doctorow’s future, humans have implants in their brains that visually project their whuffie, which has replaced money as currency.

Fonte: Design Mind - FrogDesign

http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/envisioning-your-future-in-2020.html

O projeto foi uma resposta aos carros orientais que chegavam no mercado europeu, mas o carro caiu muito bem no Brasil, onde é um sucesso de vendas comparável aos feitos do VW Fusca e VW Gol. O conceito do veículo original foi desenvolvido por 2 times de design; um dentro da própria FIAT (Centro Stile FIAT) e outro terceirizado com o famoso Giorgio Giugiaro (Italdesign) que desenhou inúmeros sucessos de venda e público, aliás a terceirização é muito comum na Europa e América, algo que ainda lutamos no Brasil para que se torne uma prática.

Uno 1980, o guerreiro. Trouxe diversas inovações em design e acabamento. Projeto realizado dentro da FIAT e em escritório terceirizado.

Já o novo Uno é outra história, veio prioritariamente para comer mercado da concorrência utilizando uma marca de sucesso, o UNO e aproveitando uma plataforma derivada do Pálio. Se será um sucesso de vendas como o primeiro, apenas o tempo poderá dizer. Mas vejo como vitória ao menos o novo Uno ser desenvolvido no Brasil dentro do Centro de Stilo FIAT, em Betim Minas Gerais.

Projeto Uno 2010, parabéns Peter, JP e todos da equipe de design e engenharia!

Falando francamente, espero muito que a FIAT trabalhasse aos moldes da matriz, onde os projetos são levados aos escritórios de design mais compententes através de um concurso. A FIAT teria a força para iniciar esta prática que já é uma realidade nos mercados maduros, afinal, ela já realizou com a Mueller plásticos um concurso de design de interiores onde inclusive ganhamos na categoria escritório... Quem sabe a FIAT inove na próxima também para os designers?

Clique aqui para assistir o vídeo inserido.

Quanto aos meus comentários sobre o Novo Uno, bem, aguardem meu test drive, análise de acabamento e conforto! Vamos acelerar o bichinho e ver se ele dá conta do recado.

Pásmem, o aparelho é basicamente o mesmo; um pouco mais fino, teoricamente com entrada para MiniSD e aprimoramentos básicos em câmera e flash.

Seguem abaixo as matérias publicas e fotos do aparelho perdido.

From NYTimes

For anyone who has ever lost a cellphone, remember this: it could be worse. You could be the person who left his phone in a bar in California. And it wasn’t just any phone; it was a supersecret version of the next iPhone. That model is not expected to be formally unveiled for a couple of months.

For the people at Apple, it must be like a bad version of the guy walks into a bar joke.

The company is known as the most secretive in Silicon Valley, and leaks are rare. But after the phone prototype was left in a bar in the Silicon Valley town of Redwood City, photos of the device began appearing over the weekend in technology blogs, sparking a frenzy of hype among the Apple-obsessed.

Before long, pictures of the product appeared on Gizmodo, a technology news site, whose editors ripped it apart — as if it were an alien from another planet — to dissect its features. The Web site said late Monday that the phone belonged to an Apple engineer.

The phone’s authenticity was hotly debated, but most bloggers concluded it was real. And a person with knowledge of Apple’s hardware plans who was not authorized to speak on behalf of the company confirmed to The New York Times that it was real.

Apple declined to comment.

“It is very stunning,” said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, who has been following Apple for nearly three decades. “Apple has such tight control on new products, and they are kept under wraps diligently and religiously until the day of their release. If it is true, it is really a first.”

Some wondered whether the phone was planted by Apple’s formidable publicity machine.

“For the sake of the person who dropped it, I hope this is a devious marketing scheme,” said Paul Saffo, a veteran Silicon Valley forecaster. “But I think it is unlikely. There is no one else on the planet whose shoes I would less like to be in it at the moment.”

In a blog post on Monday detailing how it obtained the phone, Gizmodo said it was left by an iPhone software engineer at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a German specialty store and beer garden in Redwood City.

The person who found the phone peddled it to Gizmodo, which bought it for $5,000, Nick Denton, chief executive of Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, said by instant message.

His company’s sites have had a longstanding practice of paying for scoops, and the windfall was tangible. Traffic spiked on Monday, and at midday more than one million visitors stopped by the site in one hour to see pictures of the coveted gadget.

By late in the day, reports began to surface on the Internet that Apple’s chief executive,Steven P. Jobs, had called Gizmodo to get the device back. Mr. Denton declined to comment, saying any conversation between Mr. Jobs and Gizmodo would most likely have been off the record.

“We haven’t had any formal communication with Apple,” he said. Brian Lam, the editor in chief of Gizmodo, said his publication would “probably” return the device to Apple.

From the front, it looks similar to the current iPhone, but it has sharper edges and is a little thinner. The volume and power buttons are stylistically different, and the back of the phone appears to be a ceramic glass, which would enable better reception. That would address a persistent problem that has plagued the iPhone since its inception three years ago.

Late Monday night, Gizmodo said that it received a letter from Bruce Sewell, Apple’s senior vice president and general counsel, requesting the phone back. "It has come to our attention that Gizmodo is currently in possession of a device that belongs to Apple," Mr. Sewell wrote in a letter that Gizmodo published.

"This letter constitutes a formal request that your return the device to Apple," the letter said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/technology/companies/20apple.html?src=me&ref=technology

Florianópolis /Branch Office (Novo Endereço)
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Está disponível o endereço comercial e mapa das 2 unidades da TipoD de Brasília e Florianópolis. Estaremos publicando o novo mapa com o endereço de Juíz de Fora tão logo estejamos com toda a infra-estutura pronta para receber nossos clientes e parceiros.

Entre em contato conosco, marque uma visita, estaremos prontos para recebê-lo.

"Necessity is often not the mother of invention. In many cases, it surely has been just the opposite. When humans possess a tool, they excel at finding new uses for it. The tool often exists before the problem to be solved." Nye, D. E. (2006).

Don Norman, PhD. Northwest University.

I've come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn't happen.

New conceptual breakthroughs are invariably driven by the development of new technologies The new technologies, in turn, inspire technologists to invent things, not sometimes because they themselves dream of having their capabilities, but many times simply because they can build them. In other words, grand conceptual inventions happen because technology has finally made them possible. Do people need them? That question is answered over the next several decades as the technology moves from technical demonstration, to product, to failure, or perhaps to slow acceptance in the commercial world where slowly, after considerable time, the products and applications are jointly evolve, and slowly the need develops.

Are flush toilets, indoor plumbing, electric lighting, automobiles, airplanes, or modern telecommunication essential needs? Civilization got along quite well without them for thousands of years. Today, many consider them not just needs but essentials. And every one of these was driven by technology.

Revolutionary innovation is what design companies prefer, what design contests reinforce, and what most consultants love to preach. But if you examine the business impact of innovation, you will soon discover that the most frequent gains come from the small, incremental innovations, changes that lower costs, add some simple features, and smooth out the rough edges of a product. Most innovations are small, relatively simple, and fit comfortably into the established rhythm and competencies of the existing product delivery cycle.

Successful revolutionary innovation is rare. In any given arena, it happens only a few times per decade. Why? In part because it is difficult to invent a new concept that truly fits people's lives and needs. In part, it is because existing products already satisfy most people and when the new concepts appear, the older, existing technologies have a remarkable way of rising to the challenge and sustaining themselves for years - decades even - long after people thought they would disappear. How long did it take the train to overtake the canal as a means of shipping goods? How long did it take the automobile to overtake the horse and carriage as a means of transportation? Think decades. Even simple innovations take decades to gain market acceptance. The path of diffusion of innovation has been well studied, well documented. Most radical innovations fail. Those that succeed can take decades before they are successful.

The grand, breakthrough innovation is what professors love to teach their students, love to write about, and to discuss. But not only is it rare, even the occasional brilliant concepts are difficult to pull off. Yes, it is exciting to contemplate some brand new concept that will change people's lives, but the truth is that most fail. The failure rate has been estimated to be between 90 and 95%, and I have heard credible, data-based estimates as high as a 97% failure rate.

In reality, innovation comes in many shapes and forms. Most new product development is innovative, but at a very tiny, incremental level. Costs are trimmed. Manufacturing and distribution efficiencies are introduced. Costly features of little use are removed, new features thought to enhance competitive value are introduced. Simple, small, yet very important in the life cycle of a product.

Myth: Use ethnographic observational studies to discover hidden, unmet needs

To achieve major conceptual breakthroughs, we should do ethnographic field study to understand the hidden unmet needs of our potential customers. Right or wrong?

It all sounds logical: study people. Discover hidden, unmet needs. Fulfill those needs, and leap ahead of the competition, producing yet another wondrous advance. This is the mantra of the design research community. The research community does a wonderful service. It investigates the way people live. It makes voyeurs of all of us, and the results of their studies provide important titillations to our understanding of human behavior. And it's fun to do: you get to go to exotic locations, to watch people do intimate acts, and then to come back and tell the world what you have seen, carefully disguising the identity of the "informants." Oh yes, I know it can also be dull and dreary, exhausting and depressing, and sometimes even dangerous: but even these aspects can serve to embellish the final story.

But the real question is how much all this helps products? Very little. In fact, let me try to be even more provocative: although the deep and rich study of people's lives is useful for incremental innovation, history shows that this is not how the brilliant, earth-shattering, revolutionary innovations come about.

Major innovation comes from technologists who have little understanding of all this research stuff: they invent because they are inventors. They create for the same reason that people climb mountains: to demonstrate that they can do so. Most of these inventions fail, but the ones that succeed change our lives.

Take a look at the powerful inventions that have changed society and ask what role design research played:

• The Airplane
• The Automobile
• The Telephone
• The Radio
• The Television
• The Computer
• The Personal Computer
• The Internet
• SMS Text Messaging
• The Cellphone

What role did design research play? What role did marketing research play? No role. All were driven by technology. In his recent study of technology, the economist Brian Arthur reached a very similar conclusion: technologies evolve from earlier technologies, driven by science, driven by engineering, driven by tinkerers of all sorts. Needs follow so slowly, that Arthur does not even cover them.

Consider the cycle. First comes a new technology. Perhaps it is a new idea or perhaps an old idea that has finally reached a commercially viable state where inventors can consider it. Note that the time here varies. Edison launched his first phonograph company within months of his invention: he never questioned the need. He had invented the paperless office, he announced, and launched his product. The notion that the phonograph was better suited for playing back pre-recorded music came much later, and from Emile Berliner, a competitor (whose company morphed into RCA Victor and succeeded whereas Edison's several attempts all failed). Technology first: needs last. Multiple-touch interaction with displays took roughly two decades to move from the research laboratory to its appearance in everyday products, and even so, it is not yet common outside of a few limited product categories.

New ideas face two different kinds of hurdles. The first is in the company. Brand new ideas are strange and foreign. If developed within a company, they often do not fit. They compete for scarce resources with other, proven products. New ideas have to fit into the competencies of a company, they have to fit the product schedule, the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution chains. Any new idea that goes outside of the norm has introduced more barriers to success: the innovator's job is not over until all these other barriers have been taken account of, so that the entire system will work smoothly. Innovation is a systems issue; it is not about product or process: it is about the entire system.

The second hurdle is outside the company. If the idea is done outside of a company, then the same hurdles exist in trying to convince people to fund the development. It is risky, unknown, untested. Why should anyone invest? Especially when the data show that most such investments fail. The history of innovation is filled with the stories of those grand inventors who persisted in the face of severe doubt and near financial ruin before they finally succeeded: The xerographic copier, early automobile companies, the development of television, and then color television. The videophone. For that matter, history would be filled with the even greater story of all those who followed similar paths but had to give up for lack of finances: they didn't make it to the history books.

A revolutionary product is fraught with peril: it may not fit people's life or work styles. It probably is too expensive, too limited in power, at least in its initial instantiation. Within an established company, it probably is disruptive of the orderly method of product development, manufacture, and development. It causes strains within the organization.

When I was at Apple, I watched many innovative products fail. Badly done? No, simply ahead of their time. For example, from 1992 to 1994 Apple developed one of the first commercial digital cameras, the Apple QuickTake 100, one of the very first smart pen-based computers (the Newton), and innovative software applications (e.g., CyberDog, Activity Based Computing, OpenDoc). In my consulting practice I helped develop the first digital picture frame and an extremely high quality distance education system for MBA courses. All failed. Were they bad ideas? No. Were they badly implemented? No. All were excellent concepts: they were ahead of their time. The first company to make automobiles in the United States failed. The first commercially sold computer that used a graphical user interface and that helped develop many of the ideas now central to today's world of computing, the Xerox Star, failed. The second commercial attempt to use a similar philosophy, the Apple Lisa, failed. The third attempt, the Apple Macintosh, almost failed, saved only by the fortuitous arrival of Adobe's development of Postscript and Canon's introduction of low-cost laser printing.

Why did the Macintosh almost fail? Was the world ready for the concept? Not really. Apple didn't help with its advertising campaign that snubbed business as dull, dreary, and not worthy of a Macintosh, yet business should not only have been Apple's biggest customer base, but families wanted to buy their children the same computer they would be using in business. As a result, a far inferior computer, the IBM PC, running a command-line, baroque operating system (MS-DOS), swept the market. Within Apple itself, the Macintosh caused huge internal disruption between the Lisa, Macintosh, and the Apple II groups. The Apple II was where Apple was making its money: the other groups were losing money. Internal politics? Massive. Interdivisional rivalry? Yup.

New technological advances inspire inventors to dream of applications, from the silly to the reasonable: examine patent applications over the last century and most are mundane, many are silly, and some hint at broad breakthroughs. New products arose through the tinkering and experimenting of inventors. Most fail. But some were accepted as people discovered their value. Often they had to be nurtured, tamed, modified, but over time, a small number found their niche: the technology launched the products. The products discovered needs. People slowly adopted them, leading to more changes in the products.

Technology first, invention second, needs last.

Where does design research fit into this cycle? Design research has many definitions, but within the product cycle, it consists of studies aiming to understand the activities, desires, and needs of the people for whom a product or service is desired. Design researchers use a wide variety of methods, but all of them, whether it be ethnographic observations, systematic probes, or even surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups aim at one thing: to determine those hidden, unspoken needs that will lead to a novel innovation and then to great success in the marketplace.

In the product world, innovation comes in many forms. The least interesting innovations to the university and company research community are the small, slow enhancements that gradually lower costs while improving performance. But in fact, not only is this where most product enhancement takes place, it is also where the research community can add the most value. This is where ethnographic observation can be powerful, discovering the difficulties people have in everyday use, the workarounds and hacks they invent that suggest product modifications. This allows existing products to be modified at low cost, low risk, yet making them ever more attractive, ever more valuable to the customer base.

But even though incremental improvement is the most powerful and important mechanism for a company, all the excitement revolves around the dramatic breakthrough. And yes, the payoffs from these inventions are so large that their success cam compensate for the risk. But the initial products are almost likely to fail, so it takes a company with money and patience to succeed in these markets. And in these domains, although creativity and imagination are essential, design research, market research, and our beloved careful assessment of people's needs, whether visible or hidden, are largely irrelevant. The inventors will invent, for that is what inventors do. The technology will come first, the products second, and then the needs will slowly appear, as new applications become luxuries, then "needs," and finally, essential.

Once a product direction has been established, research with customers can enhance and improve it. Beforehand? Leave it to the technologists. They will get the grand ideas running, but their implications are apt to be complex, overwhelming, and just plain horrid. Horrid applications? Yes, but that's good news: we will forever be indispensible.

Don Norman wears many hats, including co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group, Professor at Northwestern University, Visiting Professor at KAIST (South Korea), and author: his latest book, Sociable Design: Why Complexity Is Better Than Simplicity is scheduled for publication in Fall 2010. He lives at jnd.org.

READINGS

Arthur, W. B. (2009). The nature of technology: what it is and how it evolves. New York: Free Press.

Kaplan, J. A., & Segan, S. (2008, July 18). 21 Great Technologies That Failed: The most innovative tech doesn't always succeed. Here we present 21 great technologies from both Apple and Microsoft that were simply too far ahead of their time. PCmag.com.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2325931,00.asp

Nye, D. E. (2006). Technology matters: questions to live with. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Column written for Interactions. © CACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. It may be redistributed for non-commercial use only, provided this paragraph is included. The definitive version will be published in Interactions.

Link para o Primeiro Capítulo do Livro >>

Extraído de: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/technology_first_needs_last.html

Fonte: Wall Street Journal

Alvin Toffler:
A visão de Alvin Toffler à respeito do mundo. Escrito na década de 80, apontava como a civilização iria evoluir para uma cultura OnLine, digital, e os impactos na sociedade de massa.

Link para o Livro no Submarino >>
Biografia Wikipedia de Alvin Toffler >>

COP 15:

A fracassada conferência do clima, onde os estados não avançaram nas políticas de combate ao Global Warming. Cabe à sociedade agora resolver os problemas apontados. De que lado você está? Do discurso ou da Ação?
Link para o COP15 >>
Vídeo no YouTube, Ação! >>

IBM:
Nesta década alcançamos o ponto em que a tecnologia humana permite corrigir os erros do passado; ambientais, trabalhistas, sociais e humanos. Este vídeo apresenta a ponta do iceberg, vale conferir.

Link: http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2010/03/the-internet-of-things.html

CNI
O que a Confederação Nacional da Indústria apresenta como Agenda para a indústria brasileira? O que fizemos, quais os desafios, quais as metas do futuro brasileiro?

Link para as publicações >>

BRICS

S&P 500 >>
S&P Indices /Quantitative Analyses >>

TipoD:

A FILOSOFIA DA TIPOD

Um bom exemplo de algo que não pode dar errado, um lançamento espacial. Tudo deve ser planejado, dos projetos dos diversos equipamentos e sistemas até o conhecimento adquirido. Se um lançamento de satélite falha, o empreendimento perde dinheiro e afeta a população e instituições que iriam se beneficiar do tal satélite. E quando uma nave falha? Vidas estão em jogo, ponto final.

De onde buscar maior inspiração para as ações do cotidiano em uma empresa de projeto? De onde buscar maior fonte de conhecimento? De onde buscar melhores práticas de organização, de métodos? É fato que "rocket science" para o design e engenharia de produto pode ser demais, porém a postura de inovação diante de desafios destes projetistas e cientistas é um fato. Vide o que a humanidade conseguiu com esta postura:

Voyager - Fevereiro, 21 de 2010. A Nasa celebra 20 anos de operação da sonda Voyager. Saiba Mais >>

Projeto Mercury - Iniciado em 1958 lançou um astronauta americano em 1961, saiba mais >>

Programa Apollo, Projeto Apollo - colocou o homem na Lua em 1967, saiba mais >>

Isto sem citar outros tantos feitos de diversos outros países. Portanto estudar os projetos, as missões, programas sempre nos inspirou profundamente.

Diante do conhecimento de gigantes, desenvolvemos uma onde devemos com todos os esforços cumprir as metas estipuladas. Nada menos que isso seria aceitável. De modo a atender esta premissa, necessitamos de uma base comum para colaboradores e sócios, para tal desenvolvemos os 3As que são a filosofia comum para a conduta na empresa:

1 - ANTECIPAR
2 - ANALISAR
3 - AGIR

Esta filosofia, dos 3As trabalha, para nos, em harmonia com os ciclos PDCA (plan, do, check and action) e o Iniciar, Planejar, Executar, Controlar e Encerrar do PMBOK. Ou seja, a simplicidade que cataliza todas as operações cotidianas: tarefas, estudos, planejamento, execuções, contratações, análises...

A METODOLOGIA DE PROJETO INTEGRADO DE PRODUTOS DA EMPRESA

1 - Gerenciamento de Projeto, baseado no PMI, link >>
2 - Organização do Projeto, ROZENFED & FORCELLINI, link >>
3 - Referência de metodologia /ferramentas, Baxter >>
4 - Metodologia de projeto de engenharia, escola semântica de Pahl e Beitz, link >>

Bem, os demais livros podem ser vistos nas fotos da "estante" apresentada na palestra... Qualquer coisa só perguntar que enviamos a bibliografia, negócios, projeto, referência...

As more products are loaded with technology, tangled IT designs can undermine product strategies. Product managers and technical specialists need a better game plan.

MARCH 2010 • Marcus Schaper
Source: Business Technology Office

Today, it seems that just about every product contains some sort of embedded computing technology. Cars, phones, even washing machines boast interactive features that would not have been imaginable, much less affordable, a decade ago.
That such products have entered the mainstream is easy to understand (Exhibit 1). Smart phones, electronic navigational equipment, and Wi-Fi-enabled TVs offer convenience, portability, and personalization at reasonable prices. But the price of such progress is growing IT architecture1 and design complexity.

Consider the fact that in the past five years, the average number of tech-enabled engine control units in each new vehicle produced by the automotive industry has risen to 80, from 20. In the mobile-phone sector, the number of IT-based updates per year is about 40, more than twice the level back in 2000. And despite challenging economic times, the number of avionics features—from cockpit VoIP and wind sensors to the electronic flight manuals introduced in newer aircraft—has doubled in recent years. The growing demand for electronics-based product enhancements finds companies across industries struggling to keep costs in line amid fast-changing technologies and the constant pressure for product upgrades.

The problem of technical complexity

The pace of product development is creating enormous engineering and technical-development challenges. Traditional product development was driven largely by hardware considerations. When you pressed a button on an analog telephone, the button dialed one number, and that was the limit of its functionality. Today’s tech-enabled products depend on the successful integration of multiple hardware and software components—a multidimensional process. Now, a single button on a new smartphone may connect, in different ways, to a dozen distinct applications.

Software is by nature more abstract—strings of program code are pieced together in interconnected layers. The IT architecture underlying new product designs is thus far more intricate than the specifications of traditional products. In the predigital world, for instance, one vacuum cleaner operated more or less like any other. But throw in a silicon chip, and today you might have a Roomba: an intelligent robot vacuum cleaner guided by sensors and processors.

Poor product architecture
Development teams, beset by demands for customized features, may fail to realize that poor product architecture decisions upfront can have costly downstream consequences. Those teams, often led by electrical engineers, sometimes lack the specialized software-engineering skills needed to anticipate potential programming, upgrade, or reuse issues. This problem can create a vicious cycle, where poor design decisions and architecture lead to unmanageable code and greater complexity. In the auto industry, for example, a recall resulting from electronics issues cost a manufacturer close to €300 million. These design mistakes can tarnish a company’s reputation—as a high-end automaker learned after introducing new user interfaces that proved overly challenging to operate and broke down as a result of software problems.

Juggling a range of technical requirements for any single product can hinder a company’s ability to think more broadly about how certain features and functions might be leveraged across its product portfolio. This failing can force companies into a series of “one-off” applications. The Apple engineers who designed the iPod touch successfully combined new hardware (a touch screen) with better software logic (an intuitive, user-friendly interface), but others struggle to create flexible, integrated architectures. A home-electronics supplier, for instance, had to design a new user interface each time it upgraded a product—which put it at a disadvantage to competitors that took a more modular (or plug-and-play) approach to product development.

Weak linkage with business priorities

For some organizations, the bigger issue is that the technical challenges of tech-enabled products often conflict with business strategy.
Many companies have decades of experience developing mass-produced hardware-oriented products, such as televisions, radios, and home appliances, with relatively long shelf lives. Design and R&D processes have therefore been optimized around volumes and efficiency. The new era of tech-enabled products, with their niche features and faster pace of product change, requires a different set of processes and skill sets, as well as a longer learning period while organizations reshape traditional ways of doing business. The result is a significant risk of escalating costs, cycle times, and mission creep. Product managers seeking to eclipse the competition may push for next-generation design changes that stretch the limits of current technology. IT developers keen to leverage an application’s reach may overengineer a group of features.

For product strategies to be successful and sustainable, business considerations must drive technical ones. In an effort to deliver a consistently high-quality gaming experience, for instance, Nintendo deliberately kept the architecture underlying its Wii system simple, limiting the feature set in favor of rigid quality and control standards. Those traits delighted consumers and made the platform a best seller. Other companies may overlook the importance of ensuring that business audiences understand the far-from-intuitive choices that go into a product’s underlying architecture.

The abstract nature of many embedded IT systems makes functionality hard to describe. Nontechnical managers in the business units can struggle to determine which set of features and options is suitable from the standpoint of cost, ease of use, and process time. A mobile-phone company, for example, learned this lesson when unclear lines of authority led its product-development and engineering teams to argue over which of them was responsible for the features, costs, and timetables of a certain product. The confusion resulted in long lead times in completing it and a failure to offer technology matching that of the company’s rivals.

Cost management is also far more complex in the tech-enabled-product environment, where life cycles for software and hardware components often don’t align, making architectural integration difficult. The present tough economic environment exacerbates this problem. Managers are under intense pressure to bring new products to market quickly while also saving costs. In the absence of a clear development framework that brings both technological and business considerations to bear, development teams too often resort to quick fixes or “strokes of genius” rather than more sustainable solutions. To meet a launch date, for example, engineers at one company built a device with readily available, function-rich, but expensive third-party software. That helped the company meet its release target but exposed it to higher-than-expected costs.

Capturing greater value
With consumer demand for tech-enabled products continuing to grow across industries, some manufacturers are addressing these issues and optimizing electronics architectures.

Align business and engineering goals
Underlying the success of some companies in industries such as automotive and high tech is an integrated approach to designing the architectures of electronics products. In practice, that means aligning the product vision with design, the road maps of individual products with the broader electronics platform strategy, and, ultimately, the business side of product management with the engineering side. Only when companies set clear goals that demand such an alignment will customer and commercial considerations remain squarely in the center, grounding the development process and minimizing unnecessary complexity. The difference between a well-run and a poorly run development unit can vary overall productivity by a factor of ten.

A good architecture has a number of important characteristics. It is modular, allowing sections to be tagged, stored, and applied in different products. It is built on standards, providing for easier integration. It is configurable, letting one system serve many customer requirements. And it is updatable, allowing new features to be implemented without any need to discard large parts of older releases.

This list may seem straightforward. But it’s one thing to recognize a good architecture, another to build one and keep it in good shape. Setting the right goals also requires clarity about the dimensions of the task. Consider what goes into the body of a typical tech-enabled product. Hardware, plastics, resins, nuts, and bolts make up the skeletal frame. Transistors, microcircuitry, and other kinds of electronics manage the flow of information, much as tissues and veins do in living things, and software provides the neurological connections that direct and control operations. The layered architecture defines that anatomy, specifying everything from the user interface to the way the product functions to its interactions with other systems and components.

Adopt a transparent process
Companies must adopt a management process that optimizes the way these layers work together. The process involves a new form of collaboration among engineering, marketing, product design, and other product functions. Interaction helps IT- and engineering-development teams balance what the market demands in a feature set against what the business requires in costs and cycle times—all, of course, within the realm of what is possible technically. As Exhibit 2 illustrates, the best solution usually involves balancing multiple trade-offs.

Along the lines of this framework, teams from both business and IT begin by mapping their product requirements and addressing such questions as, “Who is the buying audience?” “Where is the greatest opportunity?” and “What are the right features?” Factoring in cost, budget, and other constraints, teams emphasize features likely to have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction. Those features are translated into a range of architectural components, each with its own strengths and weaknesses from a cost and performance perspective. As teams toggle through which component options make the most business and technical sense, the answers define the underlying product architecture.

With the business requirements sorted out, the teams examine their architectural design options. They may find that what they need is not yet commercially viable or that it requires too much customization for mass production. Such constraints oblige the teams to toggle between what they want and the real-world options in order to find the most suitable architecture. This iterative process forces business and IT perspectives to fuse, creating an alignment between the product’s overall strategic objective and the appropriate tech-enabled architecture.

Focus on a subset of possible architectures
One mobile-phone maker needed to create a low-cost handset for sale in emerging markets. Business requirements dictated a rugged design and a limited feature set. After a series of iterations, the engineering team presented a number of design options that emphasized electronic and mechanical components that could withstand harsh physical conditions, coupled with a small and relatively inexpensive processor. Another mobile-phone maker, with plans to compete for the iPhone demographic, had a different set of business requirements, which favored a more complex, memory-intensive architecture supporting a variety of features, despite the higher costs.
The ability to balance different design options in accordance with business strategies is the basis of an optimized tech-enabled architecture. Yet different facets of an architectural framework support different aspects of product performance—for example, those that govern customer-facing processes, define how software and hardware relate, or guide the interplay among applications (Exhibit 3). We have found that teams can simplify the process by focusing on a few specific architectural facets, weighing their relative importance to the overall set of business objectives and product capabilities.

Consider what happened at an automotive supplier struggling to improve its fuel injection system. In the company’s original siloed world, engineers built custom IT components from scratch for each product upgrade. This approach bogged down the production timetable and prevented the company from keeping pace with other market leaders.

With improvements in time to market as the main business goal, the company established a cross-functional product team that sat down to work through the iterative process described here. To stop building everything from scratch, the team agreed to create an internal library of resources to make better use of existing technologies. These embedded software systems and widely used electronic components were governed by the architecture’s capabilities (domain) layer. To streamline development and reduce component costs, the team sifted through the list of required fuel injection hardware and identified basic components that could be standardized across multiple engines. To speed up development time, engineers and product managers decided to take advantage of modular software and electronics elements. These could be plugged into a variety of different applications that made the fuel injection system work.

The resulting electronics architecture brought products to market twice as quickly as the older, more labored one. By optimizing the interior electronics, thus replacing a complex architecture with a simplified one, the company saved a few euros for every car it built. This savings added up to more than €10 million over the entire series. In addition, the platform, initially designed for four-cylinder engines, can now be used in eight-cylinder engines as well, saving the company additional costs and development time.
In another example, a power-equipment supplier was eager to get its new windmill product line up and running. But the advanced control facility for these windmills faced a sizable hurdle. The company needed to find a cost-effective way to monitor how much power the windmills were supplying to the grid. The business requirements for this feature made it clear that the best solution would be a cheap control device with an architecture that allowed it to be scaled up easily across a network of windmills.

The technical team decided that the domain-based architecture layer was the place to concentrate efforts to meet the product requirements. It met with the team from the business unit and presented three options for managing the system’s processes: a general-purpose processor, a microcontroller, and a digital signal processor. All three would measure power output, but each solution had its own costs and benefits. The technical team needed to make sure that the product managers understood the various trade-offs so that together the technical and business sides could make the optimal choice for the new tech-enabled architecture.

Weighing the three alternatives, the team found that the general-purpose processor had the advantage of being easy to install and upgrade, but the hardware supporting the processor had to be purchased separately, making it too costly. The digital signal processor offered a stripped-down operating-system architecture that was cheap to develop and could monitor basic power use, but it could not provide needed billing and reporting features. This left the microcontroller as the best option. It cost more but gave the product team the flexibility of a complete off-the-shelf solution, since all the needed hardware and software was built right in.

Building a better product-development organization
Integrated development of tech-enabled products requires an equally integrated management approach. One successful company began by creating a project steering group led by the overall product group manager and the chief technology officer, who together outlined the product platform strategy and directives. Working below this leadership level, business and engineering teams mapped out the consumer and technical requirements and then came together to discuss and prioritize the elements of the final approach. The teams shared the resulting architecture with the product group manager and the CTO to confirm that the solution would meet the company’s consumer, cost, and market delivery objectives. They also established a series of performance metrics to quantify cost and productivity gains and to further refine their ideas about where improvements could be made. This holistic procedure helped ensure that both the business and the technical team focused on the features that mattered most—those tied to the product’s overall strategic objective.

Establishing the right architecture for tech-enabled products is not a one-time effort. It’s an ongoing process that is especially important to support the product life cycle. When the search for the right architecture is elevated to a discipline followed by both engineers and the business side, companies with tech-enabled products can experience gains in productivity, quality, and costs.

About the Author
Marcus Schaper is a principal in McKinsey’s Frankfurt office.

Notes
1 Architecture refers to the technical and business model used to plan and govern the design, functionality, and integration of software, hardware, and IT.