When you create an object, it is important to think before to design or to electronics?
It may sound like a partisan question but in fact our experience we see mediators in a similar controversy, it is true we are specialized in product design but the partnership established over time with companies that make electronics on its core business has opened our horizons of this reflection.
For years, we have done our Alina Wheeler maximum: “Design is intelligence made visible“, with it we identify the creative process for product development in co-design with the customer. In fact for an object expresses the most of their intelligence, the designer cannot neglect either of these two aspects. The external form is the first point of contact between “man and machine” and for being smart has to communicate immediately, even in offline mode, the aesthetic and functional values, which will then be confirmed by the electronics in the online mode.
Hyperconnectivity of modern objects and the constant advancement of applied technology research feeds an innovation race that crowns the product “hybrid” as the new market king. We talk for example of the possibility of producing objects that have already an electrical conductivity on their skin that is waiting to be activated. During these days many players are talking about this in Milan in the “Innovation Square” at the Technology Hub, where in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) there will be presented important research projects including PRINTFIT, which is aimed at creating a platform for the electronics printed on the object.
The main purpose is to give life to a new hybrid and flexible technology by developing a set of fully printed integrated circuits and sensors with techniques inherited from the graphic arts, by common inkjet printers to rotary flexographic machines. Special inks, which are conductors or insulators, lead intelligence on the surface of objects that normally, and for various reasons have none such as chairs, tables, lamps. All this will revolutionize the old idea of the object and fruition relationship that exists today with the end user.
You cannot underestimate the importance in this context of a perfect electronic design who has the tough job of coordinating the object input and output as in the best classical ballets, where the competence and creativity of the artistic director makes a difference.
Enjoy your new project using new technologies and materials!
