Bits Blog: Tech Moves to the Background as Design Becomes Foremost

Stephen Lam/Reuters Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering, discussing the redesign of its mobile software system.

In the last few decades, the computing industry has passed through several different eras. In the ’90s, the big tech companies were in a race for faster and more powerful computers. Then in the 2000s, the industry moved to mobile in a quest for slimmer phones with brighter screens.

Now, the industry is entering the era of design.

As I noted in my column this week, Disruptions: Mobile Competition Shifts to Software Design, tech companies are looking for ways to make sure the user interfaces of their products are unique.

Design experts I spoke with noted that many of the devices we use today look almost exactly the same, which explains the emphasis on the software that goes into that interface. Battery life and processing speed are only marginally different within product categories such as smartphones. But the look and feel of the software is what allows a competitor to leap ahead of the competition.

Cesar Torres, a former Apple designer who now works for Sidecar, a ride-sharing start-up, said on Twitter: “While I don’t agree with the stylistic choices in iOS 7, it excites me that ‘design’ is a term that shows up in major news site headlines.”

Design, it seems, is becoming a mainstream topic. And for those who have lived and breathed design for decades, it’s a refreshing change.

“In the ’90s when I would meet with investors, there was no return on investment for design. Yet today, 20 years later, every project I do is because design is seen as absolutely central,” said Yves Béhar, the founder of Fuseproject, a San Francisco design agency.

Mr. Béhar said that, now, directors, chief executives and investors often sit in meetings and ask about user interface, overall experience, and the look and feel of a product. Twenty years ago, most investors wouldn’t even know what those terms meant.

What the mainstream and the financiers are now starting to realize is that design is a doorway to something much more important.

“Design, even if you’re talking about Apple and their sexy devices, is a promise of quality,” explained James Victore, an award-winning art director, designer, and author. “It’s a promise that the public is not going to be let down.”

App Smart: Home Design Apps Let You Experiment With Colors and Décor

Home Design 3D ($7 on iOS) is one of the better ones. It turns a two-dimensional view of your home into a three-dimensional graphic that you can view from any angle and even walk around as if inside. It is so sophisticated you could use it as a starting point for designing a house, rather than just tweaking your interior design.

You start in two-dimensional construction mode, adding rooms and adjusting their size and shape to match your place. You can add measurements and drop in items from a database, like a water fountain or a grand piano. There’s a host of options for doorways, windows and other openings, and you can choose to color walls or floors with textures that look like wallpaper, carpet or wood or simply a uniform color.

When your design is done, you click on the 3-D button to turn it into a 3-D version. While the app tries to be as intuitive as possible, with clear icons for control and some attractively designed screens, it has a steep learning curve. The fact that you have to pay for access to some textures and pieces of furniture might also frustrate you.

Build App Pro is a similar Android app that costs $6. The app also has a plan-view design mode that lets you set out the layout of rooms and furniture items, plus a 3-D graphical view. Like Home Design 3D, the app tries to make design simple — it uses icon-driven menus and easy-to-learn gestures.

But it has a small number of 3-D furniture models and a tendency to crash.

A far simpler app is Houzz Interior Design Ideas, free on Android and iOS, which will probably be more useful in the early stages of any redesign plans. The app’s main feature is an extensive catalog of photos, listed by categories like Family Room, Wine Cellar and Exterior. Tap on a category, select a subcategory like Modern or Tropical and scroll through the photos. You can bookmark designs you like in your own idea book, or export them to Twitter or through e-mail. The app also has lists of products for sale and professionals who can help you realize your design.

If you’re just thinking about changing the color of your furniture or walls, there are many apps to help. The best-known color matching system is Pantone, and it has an official MyPantone app for iOS.

The app’s main feature is a representation of the famous Pantone color swatches. Scroll through the rainbow of options by dragging and then tapping on a color you like. This brings up a new page of data on that color, including its official Pantone code number and a tab for “harmonies.” This tab takes you to a graphical display of colors that complement your initial choice. If you are inspired by a color you see in real life, you can snap a photo of it and have the app recommend the closest Pantone color. You can save your favorite colors for a visit to a store to find matching paint. The downside is that the app costs a steep $10.

Quick Call

Swype has been a popular alternative text-entry system for Android. It speeds typing on an on-screen keyboard because you simply glide your finger to the next letter in the word you want to type. Now the app has come out of its beta test mode, and has hit Google’s Play store for the first time, priced at $1.

Bits Blog: I.B.M. Research Points to Circuits That Mimic the Brain’s Design

A nanofluidic circuit would operate by passing ionic fluid, shown in green, through conduits fabricated on top of a planar oxide surface, shown in orange.

I.B.M. scientists said Thursday that they had developed a fluidic electronic system that mimics the circuits in the human brain and potentially offers a new direction for ultra-low-power microelectronics and artificial intelligence.

A group of researchers at the company’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., reported in the journal Science that they had pioneered a novel mechanism for transforming an insulating material into a metallic conductor by placing it in contact with a charged fluid. In contrast to conventional semiconductors, which use electric currents to switch materials between insulating and conducting states, the new method uses what the researchers describe as “ionic currents” — mobile charged atoms rather than electrons — as a switching mechanism.

“I’m particularly excited by our findings,” said Stuart Parkin, a physicist and I.B.M. Fellow, “because a lot of how the brain operates is by the flow of ions and ion channels. In some sense what we want to do is mimic those components of the brain.”

While the individual components of the brain work far more slowly than modern microelectronic transistors, the brain’s circuits are arranged in three dimensions and operate in parallel. That allows the brain to do complex computing using only a fraction of the energy of today’s computers.

The I.B.M. researchers hope that their approach could be used to build more brain-like computers.

The advantage of the new method is that it is both nonvolatile — it requires only a small amount of electricity to change the materials from one state to another, and they then remain in that state — and is potentially reversible, meaning that it could be used to build a device like a transistor.

The researchers noted that while the switching speed of the new materials might never match the raw speed of today’s transistors, their biological-like qualities might make them appropriate for building a new generation of sensors or memories.

Although the initial I.B.M. results are based on simply exposing oxidized materials to fluids, the researchers said that if systems were built upon the new mechanism, they could exploit fields that are known as nano- or microfluidics. These technologies use tiny channels and pipes to control and mix fluids for a variety of industrial and scientific applications.

The next step for the I.B.M. research team would be to make “fluidic” circuits in which it would be possible to move the charged fluids over surfaces to change their properties, much as a conventional microelectronic semiconductor is switched “on” and “off.”

“We could form or disrupt connections just in the same way a synaptic connection in the brain could be remade, or the strength of that connection could be adjusted,” Dr. Parkin said.

Analysts said I.B.M.’s announcement was likely to touch off broader interest in the field within the scientific community.

“This could have applications from fluidics to nonvolatile electronics to chips that are immune from radiation,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at the Envisioneering Group, a technology research firm.

Dr. Parkin said the I.B.M. scientists were still considering which direction to pursue with their new materials. “Probably initially we’ll build a small memory array or something like that,” he said.

The I.B.M. research is in a field known as correlated electron systems, which explores a wide range of materials that exhibit unusual electronic or magnetic behavior.