Most of us only think of energy in terms of how much it costs. But if we want to decarbonise our energy supply, make the best use of renewables, and ensure everyone has the power they need, when they need it - that will have to change. The lovely people at Method London invited me to speak about this back in January. Here's the video.

As a designer working in IoT, you’ll be able to be a lot more effective if you understand some fundamentals about the technology and business aspects of connected hardware and services.

IoT is a team sport, requiring many types of expertise, and no one person can know all of it. So understanding the concerns of your technical and commercially focused colleagues will help you understand context, be a better collaborator, and create user experiences that are feasible and viable as well as nice to use.

This is a transcript, with slides, of a talk I gave at Future London Academy’s Product Design Week in 2021.

I’ve chunked up my YConf keynote into clips, which serve as short introductions to key topics:

• Technology

• Value propositions

• Designing for distributed systems

• Fostering effective collaboration for cross-functional IoT teams

I gave the keynote at YConf, an online conference for designers, developers and product managers organised by the lovely people at ThoughtWorks Germany.

It’s a whistle stop round the following topics:

• Why is IoT hard?

• Technology: what non-tech people need to know about distributed systems

• Value propositions: balancing value and risk

• Design: distributed UX

• Fostering effective collaboration in IoT teams

My friends and regular collaborators at Method London invited me in to join them for an episode of their podcast: Now, Near and Next.

Host Matt Millington and I had a great chat across a ton of topics, from setting up and running IoT product development teams, the many ways IoT can go wrong, what’s coming next with the rise of 5G and beyond, and why the digitisation of the energy system is a super interesting use case.

The IoTUK team at the Digital Catapult invited me to write a practical guide on designing IoT products and services for UK businesses, covering key UX considerations, guidance on ensuring effective team collaboration and lots of practical examples.

As well as my own experience the report also draws on interviews with British IoT design thinkers and organisations who’ve taken innovative approaches to IoT products, such as Elvie/Chiaro, Professor Paul Coulton, Ding/Ome, Stannah, and Ross Atkin.

(Report is a PDF).

The super people at UXScotland invited me to give one of their 2018 keynotes, for which I gave an introduction to what I call ‘big picture’ IoT UX.

Fellow O’Reilly author Elecia White invited me onto the embedded.fm podcast to talk about UX and IoT.

I wrote this article as part of Method Perspectives in early 2018, covering a few fundamental questions for IoT experience design:

• How does your product work… and how can it fail?

• Is your business model a good fit for user expectations?

• How often do devices connect? How responsive are they?

• Design not just for individual UIs but for interusability

• How can we prototype experiences in parallel with technical feasibility?