Designing Connected Products

Preface

BY CLAIRE ROWLAND

My grandfather could probably have told you how many electric motors he owned. There was one in the car, one in the fridge, one in his drill and so on.

My father, when I was a child, might have struggled to list all the motors he owned (how many, exactly, are in a car?) but could have told you how many devices were in the house that had a chip in.

Today, I have no idea how many devices I own with a chip, but I could tell you how many have a network connection. And I doubt my children will know that, in their turn.

—BENEDICT EVANS^[1]

From “Internet of Things” to “Connected Products”

Most of you who are old enough to be reading this book will have first experienced the Internet on a personal computer (PC). Going online was a special activity, done sitting down at a desk. In time, computers became smaller and more portable. Since early 2014, mobile Internet usage has outstripped that on PCs.^[2] Most of us carry at least one Internet device with us all the time. The services and content it provides us are an intrinsic part of the fabric of daily life. But still, mostly, it is something we look at through glowing rectangular screens. That is now changing.

As I write, analysts are engaged in a PR race to forecast ever larger numbers of devices on the Internet, from Gartner’s 26 billion devices by 2020 to Ericsson’s 50 billion by the same year.^[3],^[4]

Technology pioneer Kevin Ashton coined the term “Internet of Things” in 1999, while proposing supply chain management ...