Maker Faire 2012 - Wearable Tech

Ah, Maker Faire. Each May for the past 6 years it's become a tradition to head out to San Mateo Fairgrounds and mix with all the other lovely, obsessive DIY-ers for a weekend of play, show and tell. This year, I got a new perspective as I got a chance to go as a Maker - and got a great view of the setup and the people behind the scenes. 

In the past I've been lucky to go as a Media person, interviewing Makers for my friend Alexa Smith's artfuture YouTube channel. Maker Faire is the perfect place to find people working in the intersection of art and technology and you should definitely check out some of the previous year playlists - so many cool projects to explore (MF 2008, MF 2009, MF 2010, MF 2010 eTextile, MF 2011). The emphasis has always been finding out more about why the Makers do what they do, as well as getting a tour of the project they've brought. So many fun stories and tips to help inspire you to try out your own projects.

This year, I was excited to MC the Wearable Technology Showcase where we tried something new - doing short interviews in front of the crowd to introduce the Makers and then sending them out so people could see their projects up close. In the past we've had a fun fashion show but we want to keep evolving so more people can get inspired by talking with the people who are already wonderfully obsessed. Intel was very kind to donate their sound system and booth up to the cause this year.

Wearable technology is an interesting sub-culture in the DIY and Maker space. It crosses through adaptive technologies that help the wearer to navigate the world in ways they wouldn't otherwise be able to (PointLocus, hugging vest, wearable cane), light up clothing using LED and el wire, and communicative/responsive wearables. It also includes traditional fashion-focused garments extended with sensing or expressive technology and all of the materials used to create the wearables - traditionally called eTextile.

One of the easiest places to start your journey into circuits and wearable technology is to learn how to create soft circuits - a simple setup of a battery, connective thread and an LED light.

You can find a whole treasure trove of information, videos and inspiration at Lynne Bruning's site. Recently she created an entire video "how to" series that takes you through the basics and beyond in wearable computing. We interviewed Lynne a couple of year's ago about the eTextile Fashion Show she's planned and run the past 3 years - definitely a wonderful person to know if you're intrigued by eTextiles and wearable technology.

You can also search sites such as Instructables and find books for soft circuit, wearable tech and eTextile projects. If you prefer hands-on and in-person style learning, see if you can find any hacker or Make spaces in your area as there are communities all over the world who co-create and teach each other about all the aspects of wearable technology including Arduino programming, sewing, powering your project and how to use connective mediums such as conductive thread, paint and meshes.

In case you need some inspiration, here are a few of the amazing wearable technology Makers from this year's SF Bay Area Maker Faire.

Ruffletr0n - Lara Grant and Cullen Miller
Not simply wearable but playable, Lara shows me how the Ruffletr0n is built and Cullen gives me a peek into the software working behind the scenes to produce the sound as it is played on the garment.

Annika (8-year old Maker) - YoungMaker Soft Circuit Group
If this doesn't inspire you to get out and try your own projects, then DIY isn't for you. 

Alex Glow - Hologram-enabled hat & bracelets
I love holograms and was excited to get a chance to talk with Alex about these "old-school" meets wearable tech projects. 

Kristin Koch - Haptic Biomorphic Jewelry
A recent graduate of CCA, Kristin gives us insight into her adaptive technology project that cues the wearer to anxiety episodes and helps to break the cycle with haptic feedback. 

Jeff Saltzman - (F)Light Suit
Definitely a crowd favorite, Jeff shares the details behind his fun full body wearable project. 

Threadwitch - Volcano Coat
I'm so inspired by the stunning quality of sewing on Threadwitch's very first wearable project. A really good example of taking one skill and maneuvering it into lifelong learning. 

Chung-Hay Luk - Vibrato Skirt

Talk - Designing Native Apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone

Last night I went to an IXDA SF event at Trulia to hear Chia Hwu (@chiah) and Evan Kirchhoff (@theevank) of Qubop do some sharing on what they're up to in the mobile native app development world. They spent a nice amount of time giving an overview and also some idea of where development is currently on 3 platforms - iOS, Android and Windows Phone. I thought it was a really great conversation starter for those of us who are in and out of the native mobile space all day - a remarkably lonely space given the massive market, particularly if you're not focused on web-based responsive design. I also find we rarely get to see other people's process and thinking in native mobile design - so this was a real treat for me. 

OVERVIEW
Smartphones and tablet usage growing by leaps - both in users and in app sales.

iOS hardware usage

• iPhone 54%
• iPod Touch 23%
• iPad: 23%

Android hardware usage

• Phone - 96%
• Tablet - ~4%

It's also interesting to note where each company's revenue comes from to understand the strategy behind each. Apple is going after more app installations and enormous sales of hardware. Google is looking for more hardware to leverage ads and search earnings.

And it's even more interesting to see how the entire market has shifted since 2007. Nokia was the dominant force in the market while Apple and Samsung control 99% of the market currently.

So, why did they include Windows Phone in their exploration? They know that it's a very small market share but they hold out hope with the convergence of a great development environment, a hardware partner in Nokia, Verizon starting to push Windows phones and the new Windows 8 UI unified across all platforms, that the market share will come. Also, as a replacement for Blackberry app development as the 3rd platform.

They also pointed out an interesting new development about how Android OS is starting to split out (i.e. Kindle Android holds 54% of the market share for Android currently) that is shifts the market over the next few years.

iOS Design

• Designing for the most recent OS version. iOS 5 has over an 80% adoption rate across all devices.
• Nice because you only have 2 screen factors to design for across iPhone, iPod touch and iPad
• The iPhone dominates the iOS landscape in terms of units sold although the iPad dominates the overall tablet market and also is growing its marketshare rapidly
• Even with screen resolutions (Retina displays) you're at a 2x+ resolution. Easy scaling options if planned for in design.
• Cannot change home screen display other than to show a badge indication of "new" data
• Standard UI is called out and then customized conventions are created and adopted as "standard" (i.e. pull to refresh, 5 button bar with primary action in the middle)
• Over time redesigns show the shift in priorities for the company as well as adoption of newer conventions (i.e. Foursquare - upper-right check-in, middle action item check-in and now return to upper-right)
• Sliding navigation has become a new navigation concept that some apps are using to replace the tab bar analogy to allow it to remain hidden until needed (i.e. Facebook)
• There's also a drive to reveal and use multitasking gestures (i.e. 4/5 fingers, movement in front of the device)

Android Design

• Challenging because of the sheer number of devices, the different form factors, hardware specs, and now non-Google Android OS implementations
• Hardware questions: Does it have an accelerometer? How accurate? Processor speed? Does it have hardware buttons, touchscreen only or a combo of both?
• No agreement on number, order and functionality of hardware buttons
• Newer versions of Android attempt to change this to software functionality, however the largest user base is for the Kindle Android OS (54%) which does not conform to the Google Android direction
• Some features such as the Android "back" button confuse users because of their engineering-centric implementation. This button takes you back through every app and action across the entire device. An engineer sees that as simply navigating the "view stack." Users however are used to a app-centric navigation scheme leading designers in many apps to create iOS style back buttons to traverse through your interior app structures.
• Cannot design for most recent UI - version 2.3 has the largest installed user base across both phone and tablets. The most recent OS (4.0) has only 7% install base and it's deprecated as of next week

• Companies pay a certain cost to gain customers, so when designing there needs to be some consideration for brand and interaction identity from platform to platform. Creating a completely different experience that requires them to relearn how to use your product doesn't make sense.1) Square is a good example of an app for which it's business critical to make sure there is NO learning curve involved. They created pixel accurate across many configurations and wrote special code to make sure page tear the same across all Android devices. 2) Foursquare splits the difference so it retains brand visual but uses platform specific conventions.
• To address some of the issues of such wide diffraction there are new compatibility libraries called "fragments" - which are more adaptive across the different screensizes, particularly in their use on tablets where the do clumping and column behaviors rather than simple widening. The most recent OS is not viable to build for if trying to hit a wide audience and Kindle Android may or may not ultimately include compatibility - and with 54% of the market this is an important issue. 

 

Windows Mobile Design

• An interesting combination of both iOS and Android platforms. Microsoft dictates the screen size, graphics requirements, GPS and many other hardware specific items so the developer can count on these being consistent. Manufacturers cannot make UI changes. It's a closed ecosystem as the Microsoft store is the only place to buy. They take 30% of the purchase.
• Expression Blend is one of the most appealing aspects of this platform. A powerful way for designers (pixel-perfect design) and coders to work together, it's addressing some of the issues that neither Apple or Google dev environments have. Windows 8 will have new tools, but they haven't revealed them yet.

• UI design embraces radical simplicity and a text heavy interface. All surfaces are flat, there is no visual callout of a "button" or touchable area on the screen. This is where the question lies in it surviving as a consumer UI: will word based navigation work - buttons, links, titles all in the same visual space?
• Live tiles are the access point to all apps. You can choose which are displayed. Their main concern with this is that companies might take this as license to push ad content rather than live updates. There is not currently a way to control what data is delivered - wide open.
• Challenging to change fonts in certain areas so it's easy to fall into "house style." Rapid developer tools are fast but challenging to impose brand.
• Panorama Control - 24x pixel peek at the deeper data. Solves which feature on top.
• Magazine Cover UI - a lot of type, background graphics
• Pivot Control - no peek, content fills the screen (80+ more pixels), segmented control (like iOS)
• Application Bar - Not for navigation (swiping and touching) This is to show the context.
• Sideways motion - has a nice don't leave the screen feel rather than having to navigate levels.
• Porting to Window Mobile is fairly easy using these design patterns, but it's challenging to impose custom UI

Multi-screen Mobile Design Strategy
Chia and Evan spent some time walking us through one potential strategy for designing for the most impact and best use of time and money given the current market factors. The did hasn't to point out that a lot of this depends on your particular audience and that it is possible to target "new only" Android and skip Windows. I thought it was a good conversation given the content of this fun talk.

Beyond Networking – Women 2 Founder Fridays

Over the past few months I've renewed my relationship with Women 2.0's Founder Friday on the first Friday of each month. In that time, I've had a lot of different experiences but one thing remains the same for me - they are a place where I can refill the tank and be inspired by the diversity of humans and also the tenacity and creativity of how they go at what they are trying to do - exactly as I am in my life. And the fact that they support women in getting out there to create amazing things.

Let’s visit with just a few of the people that I met last month so you can begin to understand what makes this event such a unique experience.

My evening in May started with a wonderful conversation with one of the Bluxome Winery staff – the home of SF Founder Friday for the past few months. As we chatted he explained that he was part of the team that runs the winery, which sells a variety of wine by the glass and has the casks artfully displayed creating an inviting ambiance but also proving that they are a working business. He told me how they work with the casks and make sure that acidity and pH are constantly controlled for the best fermentation, pointing out the open laboratory in the back of the room. For me, that just adds a little spice to an already interesting situation.

 

Then I fell into conversation with Annika Dubrall who is fascinated by sustainable sourcing for clothing manufacturing. She had started in ecommerce and then the non-profit world before deciding that to pursue her passion she needed to be working in larger, corporate clothing enterprises. The biggest challenge was finding a story that showed the relevance of her non-profit work in a corporate environment. She found a good fit with Gap Inc and is enjoying the process of understanding the broad complexities of worldwide sourcing. I was inspired by her experimentation and returned to my own storytelling with some new ideas.

One conversation I've been having fairly frequently at Founder Friday gatherings is about how to get comfortable with having an online presence in social media. It's fascinating to hear which platforms make sense to each person and which don't. As someone who has become enamored with Twitter and Instagram, has a strong working relationship with Flickr and YouTube and doesn't use Facebook except to watch others feeds, I'm always listening for how people come up with their own strategies for moving through these worlds. Annika finds Twitter to be a time sink and have to do in her week so we agreed to meet in person to see if we couldn't find the fun.

In the midst of the conversation with Annika I discovered that her husband, Jigar Mehta is also an entrepreneur who is in early stage development on an integrated social media platform called GroupStream. It creates an intriguing storytelling experience by pulling existing updates from FB, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to tell cohesive stories on a certain topic over a specified period of time. With his background in journalism and digital storyteller in many forms, it'll be fun to see where the company goes.

I find the intermix of husbands/wives, dating couples and business partners of different skills in this world to be fascinating. It's a returning theme throughout the night.

Then I saw a woman who I first met at the January Founder Friday, Kisha M. Richardson. Kisha has quickly become one of my favorite people as I so admire her programming and business building ability. We've met many times over the past few months to cowork and keep our sense of humor well charged in our constantly changing lives. She was excited to announce the alpha launch of her newest endeavor - The Seed Project. This is a stunning project that allows bootstrapping entrepreneurs to earn seed money to fund the early stages of projects without equity or debt obligations, so they can build teams and traction faster, and also build a track record that allows them to potentially find angel or venture funding down the road. Wow!

This is exactly the type of person you meet at Women 2.0 Founder Friday.

At 7 pm each Founder Friday there is a presentation done by women founders from the area. They tell stories of the adventures of starting up, as a woman, mother, wife, partner and soloist. These are always inspiring to me, and one of the big draws to this event. There's a real feeling of, "if I can do it, so can you."

Over the past few months we've heard from:

• Julia Hu - CEO/ Founder of Lark
• Tracy Lee - Founder/CEO of Dishcrawl
• Leah Busque, Founder & Chief Product Officer- TaskRabbit
• Willo O'Brien, Co-Founder & VP of Marketing -Stitchlabs 
  My good friend Willo has happily found a home at Stitchlabs where they make the world easier for all of the independent craft and small product folks with a set of great services.
• Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder & Head of User Experience - CloudFlare The biggest company you've never heard of and an interesting story of finding and growing an amazing technical niche.
• Julia Hartz, Co-Founder & President of Eventbrite
  Julia told a funny set of stories about growing a baby and a startup all at the same time.
• Susan Gregg Kroger, Co-Founder of ModCloth
  It's always fun to hear a "I started it in a dorm room" and kept it going for a long time in my house story. Very inspiring to see a great idea come to life.
• Jessica Scorpio, Founder and Director of Marketing - Getaround
  This was an intriguing talk because she pointed out how they got their start and how they eventually hit a wall until they got a great insurance provider and actually went out and started getting new laws in place making their business possible.

The rest of the night was a pleasant string of intriguing folk:

Across the crowd I spied Kathie Green, an old friend of many an event and cafe hangout and delightful product person working in go-to-market and social media storytelling. Kathie has an amazing way of connecting with people, remembering them and introducing them to others.

This night was no exception as she introduced me a young Russian entrepreneur she was talking to Zhanna Sharipova. Along with her wonderful description of the company she co-founded - Dish.fm. I was very impressed by her how willing she was to jump in to talking to people, this being the 3rd day in the US. I was even more impressed as I explored her experience on her LinkedIn profile. I feel so lucky to get to meet such smart, engaged women!

Then I had a stimulating round of back and forth with a product developer named Sonia Rodriguez. We had a lot of fun talking about her newly developed physical prototype, how to market test and develop strategies for getting to market and financing.

This is what it's all about for me at these events. People actually creating and trying things out. I look forward to seeing and hearing more about the product if she brings it to Founder Friday to do a little testing on her idea. I'd definitely love to see more people showing me what they're working on at Founders Fridays. To me it's the perfect place to try out your ideas - in story or physical form.

Then Kathie pulled me back in to have another intriguing conversation with Sian Morson, the owner of Kollective Mobile. We had a spirited discussion about "selling" native apps and discovering what tough clients "really" want by letting go of what we're trying to get them to do. Since this is the space I work in, this got my brain firing and a whole new direction with one of my clients was implemented the next day as a result of this conversation.

As someone who is thoroughly uncomfortable with “cold” networking, I find the friendliness and quirkiness of the other people in the room at Founder Friday SF to be the perfect antidote to my uncertainty in crowds. I find focusing on one person at a time to be a wonderful way to keep myself grounded.

I also make sure I take in a conscious practice – listening more than I talk, telling a simple, clean story, talking to anyone who looks more lost than I do or meeting the tallest people in the room.

It's important to find people to talk things over with - to find a passionate community of practice. I certainly know the isolation of doing cutting-edge and stealth projects. Finding "your" people is a real challenge until you start to find that everyone has things to offer. Realistically, the more different they are from you the more valuable the conversation. Not connecting? Try a new and different story. This is a great place to practice.

For a person who is in a deeply quiet and creative phase - practice and focus are both critical. I'm so grateful to have a warm and welcoming place like Founder Friday to do just that - check and see if they have one near you. Come experiment with us – we love iteration and you never know what you’ll discover next.

WORKSHOP: creative blogging at teahouse studio

I thought it would be fun to catch you up with what I've been up to so far in 2012. I've been deep at work upgrading technology here in my studio and working with several startups doing product development but I've also been getting myself moving on building some new neurons by finding some cool spaces and communities to work in.

In January, I finally made it over to Teahouse Studios, located nearby in Berkeley. I had been seeing some great workshops coming up for the past year but couldn't make things work with last year's busy travel schedule. So, when I saw that Britt Bravo was doing an afternoon Tea, Cupcakes and Creative Blogging workshop I jumped at the chance to go see what kind of community these women (founders: stephanie, mati and tiffany) were creating while getting some ideas for my own writing.

Teahouse Studio is a wonderful, open and airy space. In the front is an open room that the bigger meetings and crafting work happen in. The large back room houses painting, computer and other crafting stations. In between is a kitchen space for the tea and the promised cupcakes for Britt's workshop.

Britt's workshop was set up to be a quick afternoon run at her wonderful juicy blogging material. It was really amazing to be in the same room with 20 other women - all with the purpose of supporting their creative blogging. 

The afternoon progressed with a great get-to-know you icebreaker and then moved swiftly into talking specifics of how to keep things moving with your blog. My favorite exercise was a small-group brainstorm on topics for your blog. That was incredibly helpful as the women in my group were diverse and very intriguing

I came away with quite a lot to think about as it has become clear that my diverse interests are making things confusing for the people who read my blog. I'm even going to do a little coaching with Britt in the next couple of weeks to see if we can't shake out even more fun things to try - it's always good to have smart people to talk it out with, who can see the parts of the 360º you miss.

Be sure to catch Britt's Have Fun, Do Good blog, amazing podcasts, veggie cookbook blog and her lovely Instagram photos of the vegan meals she cooks! She frequently has online and in-person classes so if you'd like to keep up with her schedule, definitely sign up for her updates.

After the workshop, I really enjoyed staying and chatting with Tiffany, one of the co-founders of Teahouse Studios. She was telling me about some of the amazing classes they have coming up - including some last minute painting classes that fill up so quickly. Definitely sign up for their updates as well - these folks are doing some amazing work - and the community is really fun. I'll definitely be going back as soon as they have an open painting class.

Teahouse Studios (http://www.teahouseartstudio.com/)
1250 Addison St, Ste 208, Berkeley, CA 94702 (map)
Facebook Twitter: @teahousestudio 

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the amazing cupcakes from our workshop were created by Suzy Brannon of batter & dough.