"Video Lecture _ Lecture 17 How to Design Hardware Products”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4K_qVlYQkg

   This blog post is about the main ideas and takeaways of the 17th lecture 'How to Design Hardware Products' by Hosain Rahman. Some information about the lecturer: Hosain Rahman is the CEO and founder of 'Jawbone', a world-leader in consumer technology and wearable products. Hosain has led the company to build innovative and elegantly-designed products for the way we live today. Hosain has been honored in: Fast Company’s Most Creative People, Vanity Fair’s New Establishment, and Fortune’s 40 Under 40. Moreover, in 2014 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. The lecture is a little bit of an overview of 'Jawbone': what they do, how they think about the world, and how that informs how they build products. Next part is the process of how they design, develop, and how that all comes together through what they do to change categories. The way they look at the world is they think of themselves at that intersection of really crafted innovation in engineering. That's almost invisible to the user in terms of its functionality, even beyond design.  Thus, the whole point is to support people have a better life with technology. They have smart devices that have computing power and connectivity with sensors that are measuring all kinds of things. Therefore, they concluded to build consumer products around that. So, their first consumer product was the headset. Then they invented the wireless speaker space around Bluetooth and audio. The lecturer and his team thought about where the world is going. If there is going to be such a world that everyone's talking about on the internet of things which is happening, you seriously need these organizing principals so that it's easier for users to understand how to come in and interact with these services. Furthermore, wearables are going to be the center of that revelation around everything being connected and smart. He mentioned that they are going to drive what a lot of those interactions are going to be and how they’re going to work. That's the first principle that they think about. Where are things going? What should we build and how should we think about new categories. In order for this vision to happen, you actually need to be great at almost everything. So how do they study about and how do they create products? How do they change categories? First of all, everything for them was a system. They take into a consideration the whole spectrum which is an example with 'Up'. What does the actual process of creation look like?  Usually, it keeps confidential and private and it's a quite deliberate process. There exist some steps for this process:

1. The exploration phase is very wild. It's imaginative.

2. Development phase it's a hand-off between various stages and very functional teams in the company.

3. Validation phase this is when you start formulating an important tool in the company, which is what they call 'WHYS' and its definition.

4. Concept phase this is when the responsibilities shift and at this point, you start to really resolve the 'WHYS'.

 How do they think about it at a broader level?

The answer is that they do the user dilemma through that operation whether it’s in hardware, software, data, platform. The secret of their success is that once they solve it, people just can’t live without it. Furthermore, they work within their system the hardware gets to a level of emotional connection where you feel that without it you’re lost. Due to those principles which direct all these things they keep asking and broadening their lever.