Peter Bihr

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product design

Keeping it small

By: Peter Bihr
12-02-2012
product design

In a recent article, the WSJ looks at the way many things are imported to Japan and then perfected way beyond the original quality.

The author asks Shuzo Kishida, chef and owner of Quintessence, one of Tokyo’s 16 restaurant adorned with three Michelin stars, about why the place is so small and Mr Kishida personally takes care of so many aspects of running the restaurant:

When the maître d’ pours a glass of sweet, crisp French white wine to go with the next offering, I ask him why he wears so many hats in a restaurant that could afford to take on more staff. “If I just manage this place but don’t serve dishes, then what’s the point?” he says. “I want to see exactly how each customer responds to what we put before them.” (…)

Later Kishida joins me for a coffee. Thirty-seven and slightly built, he carries himself in a way that manages to be both authoritative and humble. After we discuss the details of the dishes, I ask him about what the maître d’ told me. “I bought this restaurant myself just a few months ago from the group that owned it since it opened,” he says. “I did that for one reason: to cook how I want in a way that connects me to each customer. I refused to make this place any bigger. I need to personally taste every single dish that leaves my kitchen.”

I love this philosophy. It makes so much sense. Keeping the operation small it allows Mr Kishida to focus on quality over quantity and keep control in ways impossible in larger businesses. In a way, this allows to trade a certain financial margin for more personal freedom and a way to provide just the best experience possible.

It’s a philosophy I subscribe to 100%. It’s also why I wouldn’t want my company to grow substantially. If you want big money, you have to grow big; if you want to deliver the best, there’s something to be said for keeping things smaller, more nimble. And for making sure the person in charge knows in-depth every step in the process.

As a side note, after reading this article I can’t wait to see Bear Pond Espresso. Maybe I can even manage to score an espresso there. A godshot for sure.

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Will Wright’s Serendipity Machine

By: Peter Bihr
16-01-2012
How to work the internets, product design

In a recent interview, game maker Will Wright shared some ideas his upcoming game HiveMind will be built around:

If we had that much situational awareness about you and at the same time we were building this very high-level map of the world, and I don’t just mean where Starbuck’s is, but all sorts of things like historical footnotes and people you might want to meet. I started thinking about games that we can build that would allow us to triangulate you in that space and build that deep situational awareness. There will be all types of games, but the key will be focusing the experiences, including multiplayer, within the real world and away from the fictional world that games currently invest in.

To me that sounds like he’s building a massive serendipity machine, not unlike the net machines and pokkecon in Bruce Sterling’s short story Maneki Neko. Should this work, then it would be more than a game. A real game changer, so to speak.

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Nokia is back on the radar

By: Peter Bihr
16-01-2012
product design

Ever since the iPhone launched in 2007 and thereby kicked off the era of real smartphones as we know them today, Nokia has been pretty much dead for the geek crowd.

Today, I’m not so sure anymore.

Nokia has been struggling quite a bit with the smartphone market. Their products just didn’t live up to the competition, their platform choices seemed poor to say the least.

And still: More recently Nokia has put out some quite noteworthy products. They few and far between, but things are getting interesting once more. The top end of the Lumia series (particularly the Lumia 900 phone) is a package of both gorgeous hardware and a pretty cool interface. Nokia’s new route planner incorporates public transport data in ways far superior to Google’s attempts so far. The WebGL-based Google Earth-style Nokia Global Maps 3D is – despite limited geographies – fantastic, particularly for something that runs in your browser.

In Berlin, we’re close to where a bunch of Nokia’s mobile services are based. I would hope that there’s a connection there, Berlin influencing Nokia’s folks as Nokia’s talent imports influence the city. If that connection exists I don’t know, but I find it a strangely comforting thought.

It’s hard to tell if these positive hits recently have been more or less lucky or if they are the first manifestations of a larger change inside the company. And if it is a larger change, is it too little too late? We’ll have to wait and see. I just know that there’s something going on there that brought Nokia back on the radar – in all the good ways.

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Avoid creepiness

By: Peter Bihr
02-01-2012
connected world, product design

A couple weeks ago, the New York Times had a pretty decent article about the internet of things (IoT), The Internet Gets Physical. The focus was on the more industrial side of things as opposed to Arduinos and the maker culture.

And in between a number of pretty awesome-looking projects like the UN’s Global Pulse, I noticed this (highlights are mine):

Researchers at General Electric, the nation’s largest industrial company, are working on such applications and others. One is a smart hospital room, equipped with three small cameras, mounted inconspicuously on the ceiling. With software for analysis, the room can monitor movements by doctors and nurses in and out of the room, alerting them if they have forgotten to wash their hands before and after touching patients — lapses that contribute significantly to hospital-acquired infections. Computer vision software can analyze facial expressions for signs of severe pain, the onset of delirium or other hints of distress, and send an electronic alert to a nearby nurse.

So now there we have an interesting case. A scenario that both makes rational sense and is at the same time absolutely unthinkable. Yes, in this scenario we would use technology to reduce risk for patients. But it would come at the cost of the most severe privacy violations, particularly in a situation as vulnerable as a hospital stay.

The fact that the cameras are mounted inconspicuously on the ceiling only reaffirms the impression that they shouldn’t be there in the first place. (I also doubt that facial expression would even work reliably when, for example, you’re attached to a respirator, but that isn’t even the point.)

For IoT applications to get more widely accepted, they should be more human, humane, and human-friendly. The Nest thermostat is a good example. It’s helpful, looks good and is decidedly non-creepy.

Being non-creepy is good.

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Pocket watches & antique gadgets

By: Peter Bihr
25-12-2011
design, product design

While visiting my family over the holidays, I happened upon some old (as in very old) watches that have been in the household for as long as I can think. As it sometimes happens, I hadn’t really paid any attention to them, but had a closer look just now.

I’m going to investigate further, and try to find out where they come from. Are they old family pieces, from my grandfather or even his grandfather? Or did someone pick them up at a flea market at some point?

I don’t know much about these watches at this point. What I know is that they’re in relatively bad repair, and seem to be of very different age as well as build quality. But that’s all I could tell from a quick glance. If anyone here knows about this kind of pocket watches, let me know. I’ll collect more photos in this Flickr set.

The second thing I know is that I’m absolutely fascinated by the design, the intricate details and the working of these timepieces. Can’t wait to dig deeper.

Watch

Watch

Watch

Watch

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The NYTimes Reveal isn’t your usual bathroom mirror

By: Peter Bihr
07-12-2011
connected world, How to work the internets, product design

The New York Times R&B department, NYT Labs, just showcased the Reveal. It is a prototype of something we’ve seen before as design studies: an interactive bathroom mirror. But here we have a prototype, built more or less from off-the-shelf compontents. A screen, speech recognition, a Microsoft Kinect. It’s all there, combined into a new device that could blend right into our daily lives without too much fuss.

By using a special semi-reflective glass surface, the users of the mirror are able to see both a normal reflection of the real world as well as overlaid, high-contrast graphics. We’ve dubbed this “augmented reflection”. Conceptually, the idea is that our mirror can reveal the halos of data around real-world objects, including ourselves.

If you spot some interesting stuff while brushing your teeth, tap your phone against the mirror and you can read the articles on the subway. It is, at least in theory, a smooth, embedded experience. Not an interruption, but an enhancement of your daily routine.

It’s also a glanceable of sorts, a screen that wouldn’t necessarily require our focus, but gives us easy-to-access information at a glance, without drawing much attention.

As such, it’s quite amazing. In fact, I’m convinced that we’ll see a whole new market segment emerge of this type of thing: Highly networked devices that add an information layer to the things in our lives that have, so far, been quite passive and inanimate. Things that won’t stand out much, no major investments or eye catchers, but day-to-day objects. Like bathroom mirrors.

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Readmill launches, rocks, makes Kindle Highlights useful

By: Peter Bihr
07-12-2011
connected world, How to work the internets, product design

I love my Kindle. It’s a fantastic device for reading. For anything else, it’s ridiculously bad. The device comes with a keyboard and connects to the interwebs, yet trying to share quotes from the Kindle with the web at large is a pain.

Amazon implemented a feature called “Highlights“. Yet, it’s not entirely clear what they are for, and they’re awkward at best. Fred Wilson described how he hacks around the Kindle’s limitations. My friend Martin shared his Kindle woes. (Speaking of feature requests: As Martin pointed out, currently Amazon only lets you share highlights from books bought through Amazon; any document you transferred to your Kindle in another way won’t do. Change that, please, Amazon?) There’s many of us who would love to use Highlights, if it got just a little more love from Amazon than it currently does.

Enter Readmill, which officially launched today. (Congrats, guys – fantastic job!) And here’s a way to get the Kindle Highlights to where they belong: a reading community.

Today we take Readmill, tomorrow the world! Kidding. But once your quotes are inside Readmill, they actually become useful, both for use within Readmill and to export it from there to other places via the Readmill API and integration of other services like Tumblr. ‘s good! Go sign up.

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About me

My name is Peter Bihr. I live in Berlin, Germany. I founded Third Wave, where I think about strategies for the digital world.
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