Good morning everybody. My name's Greg Petroff.

I manage user experience for GE, which is

a very large company, been around for a long time and design

hasn't been part of the DNA of the culture of the company

at all and we are sort of been challenged to find ways

to bring design into a incredibly well-run engineering

organization that doesn't really understand design too well.

I'm going to highlight a project that we've been working on

for the last two years.

It's really about the people who make the planet run,

that keep things running.

The guys and gals who keep the jet engines

operating on the plane that you flew to come out to

the conference.

The people that keep the power on.

The folks who keep the medical machines at hospitals

operating so that clinicians can help you

if you need to or find yourself in that kind of situation.

What is it about this space?

It's an interesting place.

We call these people field engineers and they

have to work in some of the most difficult situations

you can imagine.

This is a guy who is sitting about 350 feet in the air

in the tallest wind turbine in the world, in the Nacelle.

He has to bring everything up a ladder, right?

There's no elevator that takes you up that space.

You have to climb your way up to the top.

He has to operate in an environment that is challenging

to say the least.

These guys, the folks that work in these environments, we

haven't really developed software or tools for them.

They're late to the technology revolution.

They're not really software people. They're craftsmen.

They treasure their tools. They treasure the experience

of having an intimate relationship with the machines that

they service and they become sort of connected to them.

In a way, they're sort of the machine whisperers of our

industrial world.

They work in really interesting environments.

Sometimes it's dangerous environments.

It's tight spaces.

It's places that are difficult for people to get into.

You can see this person

is in a water processing space.

They have to disassemble these things, put them back

together again and it's a big challenge for them

in terms of how to do it.

So we spent a lot of time watching these people at work

and it's one of the nice things about GE. It has so

many different businesses that we can sort of study

field engineers in locationss on an oil platform, in a

manufacturing facility, at a hospital, and we can study

them in different cultures too around the world

and in different weather conditions.

As I said earlier, there are ... They have to operate

in environments which might be 125 degrees outside

or in an environment where it's minus 40 degrees so it's

a challenging space for people to be productive and

get work and an interesting problem to solve for.

So just some more cool pictures of kind of the space that

they get to operate.

One of the things we've discovered in sort of watching these

people at work are a couple of really simple truths.

One, nobody respects the context of what they're doing.

They don't have actually access to the tools that they

need to be successful when they're out on the job.

This environment that they work in, in infrastructure,

they know why they're there. They're being called because

there's a failure or there's a repair that needs to be made.

We actually know why they're there because we sent

them there.

The systems that are operating on these machines have

sensors in them now that generate tons of data, so we

know what's going on in the situation at that moment

but we don't really respect the moment, the environment

that they find themselves in and offer them the information

that they need to be successful.

So we spent some time sort of looking at this and

the biggest part, for them, is sort of Understand

what I'm doing and I need to accomplish.

Make that easy for me.

So we spent a lot of time.

This is, looking at it, this is a picture of a turbo.

It's a part of a locomotive.

It weighs about two tons

and they get removed pretty often because it's the part

on a locomotive that breaks the most often.

It's not just fixing what's broken, it's actually

they have a lot of decisions to make.

Because we know the behavior of how this particular

locomotive or this particular turbo has been operated

in a context of a larger fleet of systems and they may

make a decision to repair something that's not even

broken yet because they already have it out

of the machine.

So they have a lot of strong decisions that they have to

make along the way.

In that process, repairing what's not necessarily

broken is an important part of their decision process.

So we also know that there are a lot of remote

locationss, right?

These people have to wear safety gloves and goggles and

equipment that gets in the way of them being able to have

access to computing.

They're not normally software people, right?

They're people that hold tools.

We've historically given them some degree of software and

if you look in the space, it's really late to modernize.

If they have something it's a DOS screen with

you know, the green screen of death.

We in an inflection point and the irony is that

we actually can change their lives pretty

radically right now with where we are from a computer

science standpoint, with cloud and data and analytics,

and being able to take information off of the machines

that we have out in the world.

So what happens when we have a platform that knows that

you're there?

What happens when if I walk up to a machine, the machine

knows I've already arrived at the situation?

What happens when all of the infrastructure and databases

and systems that can support you being effective,

also are aware of that context and moment?

That's the space that we've been really interested in from

a design standpoint.

So we did a bunch of things.

We started looking at how could we build a simple design

system for GE as a whole.

We built a bunch of prototypes 3 years ago

when we started the adventure.

We didn't really know what we were making.

We made a bunch of different types of applications.

We then built that in a way where we could actually

build very fast, so we built a design system for

engineers to build software with, so we built it

and code enabled it. That allowed us to sort of make

it the speed that we could think so we didn't have to

think to make. We could make to think and that

enabled us to get smarter along the way.

Then, because we live in the world, we spent some time

on geospacial tools, making mapping more interesting,

more valuable for people.

Along the way we also sort of discovered how to provide

guidance to people who are building applications.

The design team that we have is not large enough to build

all of the software that's going to get built in GE

so we had to make it in a way that people could create

and aggregate and make their software as quickly as

possible.

We were challenged with some other things.

We were able to actually make really simple, delightful

applications that allowed us to prove our point around

how design could matter for the folks in the field.

We also had to explore new typography so I love the fact

that we're talking about typography today.

GE has a really strong typographic branding style to it

except there was never design for digital devices so we had

to go and redesign the type experience in GE back to the

skeletal side of the typeface and then rebuild it from

scratch.

So we did that and that got embedded into the software

that we built.

Click.

So then, basically, we came to a new idea, an idea

around what we call context-based computing.

This is, in the background what you're seeing here is

something we call PredixCo. It's a very simple

application that allows a field engineer to have everything

that he needs. So we build these micro-applications.

They're very small. Byte sized.

If I walk up to a piece of equipment

the system will assemble those micro-applications

automatically into a playlist.

It's sort of like you know, if you go to the gym

and you have your iTunes list of music that you're going

to listen to, we can create a list of software, software

as media, and put that together to make the perfect

experience for an engineer or a field engineer could

create their own collections, their own toolkits.

The thing that's cool about it is that you only need

to know four motions to be able to use it.

Sort of left, right, and up and down. We can support

that whether you're wearing gloves or even with motion

controllers so that if you're in a situation where

you have a wrench and tools, it's very easy for people to

use it.

What we found when we put this out into the field is that

people really liked using it.

In fact, there was a lot of speculation that if we gave

ipadss to field engineers that they would break them

or that they would forget them or that they would fall

apart. What we found out is that they became these

treasured items for them. They cared for them so

carefully because it was the first time that someone had

actually provided them the context that allowed them to

do their job and be successful in the moment and have

access to all the information that they needed.

In doing that, we created a whole sort of ecosystem of

building these kinds of applications very quickly.

Now what we can do is we can sit down with a specific

field engineer and build an application in a matter of

hours and build that and make them more productive.

In that story, actually, we're democratizing the design

process and we hope in that process, we'll be able to

improve the quality of the infrastructure that we count

on in the world, moving forward.

Thank you.

(applause)