Tomorrow Lab, an intelligent hardware design firm located on 32nd Street in Manhattan, is part of a wave of smart hardware designers in the New York City area.
“Whenever we get a product to design, we basically tear out everything that’s been done to it so far,” Ted Ullrich, founder and partner of Tomorrow Lab told Jonathan Blum of Crain’s New York Business. “We strip back the ideas to help uncover the ‘strong why’ behind the product.”
New cheap prototyping tools, like the Atmel-powered 3D desktop printer from Brooklyn’s MakerBot and open-source electronics development tools such as Arduino are helping to facilitate the current wave of smart hardware design. In fact, the new methods of design have even prompted some observers to suggest that New York’s deep design talent pool now gives it a major leg up in terms of innovation.
“What a new generation of low-cost hardware development technologies has done is force the product industry to reconsider its clichés,” said Pepin Gelardi, a Tomorrow Lab partner. “Smart thermostats, intelligent dishes, jackets that think, it’s all back on the table.”
Similarly, many local investors are bullish about the prospects of smart hardware firms taking off in New York.
“For applying technology to the things of everyday life, this is the place to be,” added David S. Rose, managing partner at Rose Tech Ventures, a New York City angel investor.
The full text of “Why designers are the engineers of tomorrow” can be read on Crain’s New York Business here.
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