[This is an updated version of an earlier presentation with some of the images, but none of the content, removed] Corporate Research and Development is evolving, and it increasingly incorporates user experience design, design research, and service design into the earliest stages. The historical separation between basic research, applied research and productization erodes as research horizons shorten, technology diffuses more rapidly, and companies want to take bigger risks sooner. When this changing market is coupled with rapidly changing technology that blurs the boundaries between hardware, software, materials and processes, the role of design fundamentally changes. Design influences technology research earlier in the creation of a novel technology, whether it’s a new application of artificial intelligence, or a new material. In this PARC Forum, Mike Kuniavsky and other members of PARC’s Innovation Services Group will present how they participate in early-stage research and development, and discuss the methods they developed when working alongside PARC’s researchers in developing printed sensors, AI-enabled IoT services, and deep learning computer vision products. We will show how we systematically explore the impact of technologies before they exist and how we try to look beyond hype and our own excitement to see how a new technology can actually solve business and human problems.
5. PARC’s other resume
The original start up culture:
• Openness, tolerance, meritocracy…
• Disinterest in “conventional goals”
• Eating our own dog food
• Willingness to turn “!” into “?”
Centering technology around people:
• Ethnography to ground innovation in a deep understanding of actual practices,
beliefs, and desires
• Social science (psychology, behavioral economics…) to contextualize
technology with its impact
• Open Innovation as a business model
We are also part of the original Silicon Valley DNA. PARC has been part of Silicon Valley counterculture since the beginning. Perhaps
because of the distance from established East Coast institutions, and certainly because of direct influence by the 1960s
countercultural movement in San Francisco and Berkeley, the philosophy here has always been to take transformative risks and to
use a combination of social science and hard science to challenge not just what a technology does, but why it exists in the first place
to solve human problems and maximize human potential. Rather than working within existing boundaries and with existing
constraints, the Silicon Valley counterculture philosophy, which I certainly buy into, has been to find new ways to do old things and,
when necessary, to replace those old things, whether they’re technologies, assumptions, ways of working, or entire industries. The
Facebook philosophy of moving fast and breaking things started here.
9. PARC INNOVATION SERVICES
We help clients manage risk and extract maximum value
from technology innovation.
▪ STRATEGIC ANALYSIS to identify opportunities for novel products and services.
▪ SOCIAL SCIENCE to obtain a deep, nuanced understanding of people’s behaviors,
motivations and needs. We specialize in ethnography and social psychology.
▪ USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN to systematically structure how technology brings value
into people’s activities. We specialize in interaction, experience, product, industrial, and
service design.
We help our clients frame and prioritize potential growth directions, identify needs, test value with prototypes, and develop novel
technologies and business models that differentiate the new service. We often mediate between our external partners and PARC’s
researchers. To do so, we use our capabilities in social science, design thinking, and business strategy to assess both business and
user needs at the front-end.
10. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
We mostly define ourselves as user experience designers in our group, although we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, from
architecture and industrial design to social science and hardware development. When we hire people in our group we look for people
to be able to wear multiple disciplinary hats and be able to comfortably work across disciplines from chemistry to anthropology.
13. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
Henry Dreyfuss, 1955
Frankly, though, it’s not like it’s a problem that’s unique to us. Here’s Henry Dreyfuss, one of the founders of modern industrial design,
complaining about how hard it is to define design in 1955.
The fact of the matter is that the meaning has always been ambiguous and since it’s culturally-defined by people with a self-interest
in either aligning themselves with it or distancing themselves from it, the definition has shifted over time and geographically in the last
half-century. In the middle of the 20th century, design was regularly seen as the application of engineering to problems. Thus,
mechanical engineering was design, structural engineering was design, and electronics engineering was design.
14. That’s why you get magazines with titles like “Design Engineer” which focus on what I would consider primarily mechanical
engineers, but the practitioners self-define as somehow part of the design continuum. In Dreyfuss’ time what we today call industrial
design may have been called styling, and he was probably fighting against that, too.
15. At some point in the last quarter century the definition of design, at least here in Silicon Valley, has shifted to implicitly refer to only the
visible aspects of a product, the interface, the appearance, the brand. Just look at the front page of the design subreddit: it’s all about
logos and photoshop, not novel enabling technology. Thus, in today’s Silicon Valley definition, it seems a designer working on
something that’s not just the surface has to be called something else. A front-end engineer, a creative coder, etc., because design is
seen as something that’s not as core to functionality as code or engineering.
However, if you look at the goals of traditional design engineers and how we define user experience design today, there’s significant
overlap.
19. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
For me this puts design at an interesting counterpoint to science, as largely practiced since the beginning of the Enlightenment when
Francis Bacon first laid out the principles of empiricism. The goal of the scientific method is to define questions as clearly as possible
so that empirical evidence can be gathered to identify universal truths as they exist right now.
20. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
This means that most scientific practices, and how way people in science are rewarded for their work, tends to favor descriptive
precision. Scientists are rewarded for defining a question such that it can be unambiguously investigated and where the results are as
clearly distinct from other results as possible.
Design, on the other hand, has a different goal. Rather than describing what exists now, how the world works today in absolute terms
everywhere in the universe forever, design’s aim it to use whatever tools are available to make a future that’s relatively better for
people tomorrow. The push people toward the preferable end of the future cone.
Designers are rewarded, they are incentivized, by successful synthesis across disciplines to create and revise near-term positive
futures, usually in collaboration with a client. Using the universal truths that are uncovered by the scientific method as its building
blocks, design aims to continuously create better near-term futures.
We see design as a synthetic future envisioning approach that complements the analytical approach taken by science. This is where
the notion of design method, as a complement to the scientific method, arises. It’s different, and complementary.
22. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
Design also does an interesting thing when in combination with science. By looking at more positive futures, it helps identify the
building blocks of the world that we currently don’t understand well, it helps define new goals for basic research.
When people ask me what we do, I say that PARC researchers often do fantastic work finding answers about the way the world
works, and what our group has to do is figure out what the question was.
23. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
Now that we’ve defined design, let’s look at research, specifically corporate research.
Systematic long-term corporate basic research is expensive and only happens in a few specialized circumstances.
Primarily, it happens when the organization conducting the research has a monopoly or near-monopoly, and wants to maintain that
monopoly.
When the Bell System (AT&T and Western Electric) was granted a natural monopoly by the US government, they were told
they had to spend 1% of their research in the public interest (I believe!), and so Bell Labs was born. Information theory, the
transistor, cosmic background radiation were all amazing discoveries, but let’s make it clear that AT&T wasn’t doing that
research on its own, it was obligated to if it wanted to keep its monopoly from being broken up, and as soon as that
monopoly ended, so did the golden era of Bell Labs.
When Xerox created PARC in the late 60s, it was the Google of its era. It had invented a new way to create and distribute
information, and then it cornered the market, and the intellectual property, on the business around that communication
method. It had a near monopoly on the technology to such an extent that just a couple of years later the US government
forced it to share its patents with direct competitors. When PARC was created, it wasn’t just an intellectual playground for
smart people. Peter McColough, then the chairman of Xerox, had a vision for an architecture of information that would begin
with the corner of every office that Xerox already owned and extend to the way that information was created, manipulated
and transmitted in the rest of the office. He knew computers had something to do that, but didn’t know what. PARC was
created to explicitly address that vision of an office of the future. Anything that didn’t fit the vision, which was documented in
a 1971 conceptual blueprint that imagined the office of 1980 called the Pendery Papers, wasn’t pursued. It was a big enough
vision that many projects that you wouldn’t think fit, such as Lynn Conway’s invention of VLSI, were pursued, but it was not
an open-ended project, it wasn’t a university without teaching responsibilities, although perhaps that’s how it may have
seemed to many of the people involved. There was a client, Xerox, there were end users, office workers, there was a set of
enabling technologies (novel materials, manufacturing mechanisms, software architectures and artificial intelligence) and
products. Most importantly there was an iterative approach to finding the right people, setting appropriate goals, and
meeting those goals, which happened over a decade, cost Xerox $4B in today’s dollars, and produced a fantastically
profitable product, the laser printer
24. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
This kind of monopoly-driven corporate research is ending. With a global market, you no longer have the kinds of monopolies that
can fund open-ended basic research the way it was paid for 30 years ago. Google X and Facebook’s Building 8 may be the last of
their kind. Meanwhile, US universities, which used to predominantly focus on basic research, increasingly do applied research with
the intention of licensing their own patent portfolios. Finally, the maturing startup ecosystem has meant many large companies, even
those with near monopolies, choose to innovate through acquisition, rather than in-house R&D. They let investors and founders take
innovation risks first, rather than taking those risks themselves.
25. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
In addition, as historical linear waterfall methods of doing research disintegrate, there is significant competitive pressure to work
across disciplines. Manufacturing companies need to understand about AI. Cosmetics companies need to understand both computer
vision and the social use of images. Raw material companies need to understand about machine learning distributed sensor
networks.
This is a mouthguard PARC developed with UCSD. It required the knowledge of people who knew about biology, chemistry,
electronics, manufacturing and AI to be able to put together something that can identify different kinds of things in saliva and then
makes sense of it.
Today basic research needs to be market tested much more quickly than previously to justify continued investment, and research
agendas have to adapt much more quickly in the response. It’s still important to think in the long term, largely because so few people
are doing it, but now that thinking has to be much more rigorously, and continuously justified, to continue to be pursued.
Researchers no longer have the luxury of assuming that someone else will figure out how to apply their work to their sponsor’s
business model through some vaguely defined commercialization and technology transfer process. Now it’s everyone’s job, all the
time.
26. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
10 YEARS
YESTERDAY? 2 QUARTERS
Traditional research looked for return on investment 7, 10 years into the future, which given today’s shifting markets and technologies,
might as well be forever.
Startups on the other hand, are highly incentivized, especially in the highly instrumented Lean market of today, to demonstrate market
traction as quickly as possible. They tend to focus on incremental change mashups based on mature technology stacks.
Meanwhile for existing products PM practices emphasize traceability and predictability in agile companies, and compliance with
roadmaps with ones that are more waterfall. Basically, they’re looking at 12-18 months.
There’s a big gap between the near-term traction-driven incremental development and long-term open-ended investment. Both of
those are necessary for a balanced portfolio, but they’re the extremes. Design practice is what enables that middle zone, the
practices that enable 3-5 year out disruptive transformation based on bleeding edge scientific knowledge. It’s how you create novel
new experiences, how you connect the discoveries of today with near-term business transformation.
Design practice creates a mechanism to justify the necessary sustained investment to bring risky, disruptive, transformative
technologies that are not based on existing tech stacks to market, and then have the patience to wait until their impact can be
understood.
28. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
CUSTOMER
NEEDS
TECHNOLOGY
CAPABILITIES
BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITIES
Design is an iterative exploratory process, a search through nonlinear multivariate possibility space, to find the intersection of
people’s needs, clients’ desires, and technological capabilities.
30. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
[ DISCOVERY ] [ EXPERIMENTATION ][ DESIGN ]
PARC TEAM:
• User needs research
• Technology options
PARC and client teams
collaborate to generate
multiple solution options
• Rapid design iteration
• Testing with real consumers
RESEARCH OPTIONS RAPID EVALUATION
Our approach fuses user-centered research, experience design and Lean Startup methods, and our clients use it to take bigger risks,
waste less time and money, and be more confident in risks they do take.
Our approach involves some fusion of the following elements:
Simulation of nonexistent technologies
Direct observation of behavior
Synthetic solutions that work across scientific disciplines, so it’s explicitly encouraged to work on a solution that brings
findings from medicine, microelectronics and behavioral economics together to create a single product (I’m thinking the
Fitbit).
Cross-disciplinary collaboration
Evocative artifacts
Rigorous methods for exploring possibility spaces
A focus on client value and systemic impact
31. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
OUR PROBE PROCESS
1. Observe the world to understand human and
business problems and generate idea spaces
(ethnography)
2. Create hypotheses about customer value and
how technology can create it
3. Make probes to test hypotheses; try not to
overlap hypotheses in probes (difficult in early
stages)
4. Deploy probes with potential users for
extended periods (3 days to 2 weeks)
5. Interview users to evaluate hypothesis based
on their responses and your observations
6. Revise and repeat.
Here’s our version of the probe process. It’ll look familiar from various new product development and user centered design practices.
We try to emphasize explicit hypothesis generation and evaluation because when you’re making an unknown product in a novel
category for an untested market, which is where we work, one of the only points of stability is an clear statement about what you
think the value of the idea is, and that’s the hypothesis, so that when the probe process calls it into question, that provides guidance
about how to iterate it.
What: We generate and validate new product and service concepts, utilizing novel technology, and illustrate new business models for
use
How: Utilizing PARC’s Experience Probe Platform, we identify and test the customer/user value through the iterative development of
experience probes of increasing fidelity
Why: Combines the best features of design thinking and lean startup by rapidly developing user-tested options for innovation
Work in progress, constantly evolving the methodology
32. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
AIR QUALITY SENSING – PRODUCT DESIGN & PROTOTYPING
Functional prototypes
Our design artifacts range across fidelities, from finished-looking to completely rough, and include things that look like industrial
design, hardware prototyping, and digital user interface design for things like apps and websites.
33. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
PRINTED ELECTRONICS IN HEALTH MONITORING
1 Envisioning patient experiences
of the future
2 Finding printed electronics applications in women’s health through assessing technical feasibility and user pains
We use concepts and tools from service design, customer journeys, service blueprints, etc, to structure multi-touchpoint experiences
across different contexts, devices and ways that people interact with the technological systems we’re exploring—but always guided
by explicit value hypotheses we develop. For us, these artifacts aren’t prototypes of final products we’re eventually going to make.
We use these artifacts to ask questions and throw them away when we’ve moved on to different questions.
34. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
Everything we do is driven by close investigation of people’s experiences, but we don’t ascribe to the user research myth that there
are these magical well-formed unmet needs out there and if we just found them it would be obvious how to make a product to
address them. That’s a convenient story to tell when you’re trying to sell user experience research, but it’s never that straightforward,
in my experience. The diffusion of technology into society is much more complex than that, and people’s behaviors and attitudes and
technologies coevolve.
36. Copyright 2018 PARC - All right reserved
ISG CLIENT EXAMPLE – OLAY SKIN ADVISOR
• In the mirror the consumer sees the impact of both intrinsic (age- and gender-related
biology) and extrinsic (lifestyle, environmental) factors on her facial skin
• Many feel a lack of consistent control over their skin, leading to uninformed
experimentation with different products and regimens
• This happens because she lacks an understanding of how different factors affect her
unique skin
• What if she could, without an expensive consultation:
• Understand why her skin is the way it is, right now?
• Know she has the right products to keep her skin in control?
• Could track her skin’s progress over time?
37. THE WORK WE DID
• Image analysis is the credibility-defining feature.
• The solution must allow her to see things she can’t
see with the naked eye.
• Skin recommendations based on this diagnostic
process are a conduit of trust.
Probe hypothesis: e.g., Guiding her to
produce a better selfie will lead to better
diagnosis and therefore better UX
[Some images were removed at client request]
38. Xerox ConfidentialPARC Confidential
P&G Compass Example Technology
[Some images were removed at client request]
Requires understanding of light beyond computer vision
44. • Largely pallet-based
• Temperature sensing at the container level
VACCINE COLD CHAIN
EXAMPLE:
CURRENT LOGISTICAL SYSTEM
(Simplified)
45. SENSOR-BASED
DYNAMIC REROUTING
EXAMPLE:
• Dynamic product rerouting based on storage condition
• Package-level temperature sensing
• Readers distributed throughout supply chain
Time and temperature-sensitive
products are dynamically
rerouted to align product shelf-
life to client needs.
+
+
+
VACCINE COLD CHAIN
