From Istanbul To Sand Hill Road

It's About Time We Saw...

...exactly how the food we eat gets made.

Yes, as a human being and consumer, I demand that anybody who sells me food, provide me with a video as to how it is made.  I would like a law to be passed that ensures this.  I would like this done now.

Here is what I suggest: anybody who sells food in a supermarket or restaurant has to maintain a web page that shows a video as to how that food was processed and prepared.  Period. 

I want to know how a breast of chicken gets made, I want to know how a Powerbar gets made, and I sure as heck want to know how Hormel makes that awful stuff that I don't eat (but a lot of people do).

If you could go to a web site, click on the product you bought and saw a two minute video showing how it was made, I claim it would do wonders to educate people about what they eat.  It would be far far better than a nutrition information chart, and could perhaps solve the obesity problem in this country.

Why now?  Two words:  The Internet.

15 years ago, if you demanded to know how food is processed, you could call and ask and, at best, somebody would invite you down to god knows where to see it.  It would be a short phone call. There was neither a cheap way for the food company to make the video nor an even cheaper way to distribute it.

The Internet has made it easy to create, publish, find and view such content.  If a guy with a camera can instantly become a TV channel and a newspaper, well, it is about time video brought transparency to how our food gets made.

One $1000 camera would give all the quality you need in creating the content.  Thanks to all the tools we have, it is trivial to upload, format, and publish the video.  It is even easier to search and find it.  It can be done cheaply, in can be done easily, and it would be a gigantic value add to the people. 

Think of the effect of this kind of transparency.  People could discuss the videos, comment on them.  Experts can help people understand what's going on. 

We live in the digital media era where consumers are empowered to express their point of view.  We comment on news articles, we review restaurants, we publish newspapers, and we carry on conversations with thousands of people.  How can we accept not to know how our food is prepared?

It is about time we find a way to discuss the very system that provides us with the most important service of them all; nutrition.

I want the content out there, I want to see exactly what I am feeding my children and where it is coming from.

I don't want to watch an old Sesame Street video as to how a bottle is filled.  I want to see exactly how the chicken I eat is packaged, I want people to see how their string cheese is made, I want mothers to see how the Lunchables they stuff in their children's lunch boxes are made.

The point of this post is that there is no longer any excuse for us NOT to ask for this. The infrastructure is there to provide it and do it cost effectively.

If you want to be able to view how and where your food comes from, then put a comment on this post.  Let's get so many comments on this post that eventually, the lawmakers have to listen.  We have the power.

The Design Era Of Technology

A few months ago, during TED, Yves Behar, the designer of the OLPC and the Jawbone headset, was talking about "design driven engineering".  The talk made me think how much more important the role of design has become relative to engineering in consumer electronics.  He gave an example from the design of the jawbone, where designers controlled the size of the product and as they changed the size, engineering had to go back and re-layout the PCB (Printed Circuit Board, a.k.a the green thing on which chips are).  Designers were telling engineers where to put their circuits.  That is very very different from how things used to be done.

In my old days at U.S. Robotics, products sold in the same stores that sell the Jawbone were designed very differently.  No designer had the power to touch the printed circuit board layout.  Engineers defined the product (we had bad marketing guys, but the modems were flying off the shelves anyway so who cared) and they decided on what features a modem should have.  Once features are determined hardware engineers figured out what chips and components to use, drew a schematic and gave it to the PCB guy, which was almost always a fat white guy who worked alone.   A few weeks later, out came the PCB layout, which was the biggest determinant as to what the product looked like.  The size of the board, thickness were all features that determined the cost, so people who were accountable for the cost of the product made decision on the board. 

What was forgotten is that the size of the PCB determines the size and shape of the end product that some industrial designer would have to design around.  That person had no say whatsoever as to what size the product should be.  Even marketing people were scared, because the answer could be "can't be changed, too expensive, too hard or even impossible".  So design was done AFTER engineers were done with the product.

Yves Behar (whose father is Turkish), says they do the design BEFORE engineers get to put their circuits in.  That is a big change.  Finally the designers can ask critical questions like "who will use this?" and "what is their context?" at a point in time in product development that can actually have an impact on the end result.  That is design driven engineering.

So far this may not be all that new, but I wonder, why now?  Could it be that all of a sudden society has got more "taste" and care for design.  Surely not.  What has happened that caused this shift and what more could be coming our way. I see three key factors that gave power to design and took it from engineering.

1) Moore's Law:  There is enough processing power in small enough components that "getting it to work" is no longer the biggest problem.  Chips have gotten smaller and better, and people have learned over the last 10-15 years how to do it.  Just look at how small and powerful handsets have become.  If the iPhone can run the same big OS that runs in desktops, we are "there" in terms of technology being able to deliver the features we want.  Therefore, differentiation is less on making it work, and more on making it useful.  Enter design.

2) Wireless connectivity:  This is mainly WiFi and Bluetooth and Edge/3G.  A lot of devices we want, now come in portable forms.  Moore's Law has helped in that immensely, but so has connectivity.  Take the Jawbone.  If it had to have a cable instead of using Bluetooth, the options you have in the design of it is limited.  Wires are clumsy, so are power supplies, they shadow what design can do.  With connectivity, you don't need those things, and it opens up chance for good design to kick in.

3) Successful examples of winning designs.  This is the most important reason why the "Design Era of Technology" is starting and the "Functionality Era of Technology" is over.  The two examples I've written about over and over and over again in this blog is the Nintendo Wii and the Apple iPhone.  They are proof that good design sells in a big way and is "impactful".  Sony paid $1B to IBM to design the new processor for the Playstation 3.  The rules of the game until the Wii was that better graphics, faster games was the path to success.  Then comes Nintendo with a simpler machine, simpler technology but smarter and well designed technology and now you have a device that four generations of people can play and use.  The iPhone is no different.  Think of the billions invested by handset companies to build better more functional phones, think of the billions invested by VC's to reformat the Internet content to the phone.  Apple comes and better designs the device and UI an boom the rules are changed.  There are other good examples from the Internet as well, where a good designed UI has made the difference between one site winning over another (that's a whole other blog post).

In the end, I think we are squarely in the "Design Era of Technology"  D-schools will become more prominent over the years, and the designer will be one of the first hires in any company (true in the Internet). The next question becomes, "where else can design take over?" and that's left to the reader to ponder.  For a hint, look at Yves Behar's "seven axioms".

Thank you, Steve Venuto, for giving me the idea to write about this.