Volvo's Electric EX60 SUV Has a 400-Mile Range--and Rethinks the Humble Seat Belt The Swedish brand's latest computer-packed EV hopes to take on and beat the BMW iX3. Alongside the chosen few in WIRED's breakdown of the most anticipated EVs coming this year, the arrival of the Volvo EX60 has also been eagerly awaited. This is mainly because of the impressive stats surrounding the car; the headline claim is a range of more than 400 miles. Sitting between the EX40 and EX90, the new EV looks more like a sibling of the entry-level EX30, which is a good car but too fast for its own good . Plus, the reveal images here from Volvo initially seem to show that the design team has figured out a way to remove the unsightly lidar roofline bulges that in some eyes ruined the finished aesthetic of the EX90.

Meta wants to make its AI hardware slicker and more fashion-forward. It also needs to make its software more usable. The way to do all that appears to be hiring design maestros away from Apple. Meta has made a big move to hire two prominent designers away from rival tech giant Apple, likely putting them to work on designing Meta's next generation of AI hardware and the software that runs on it. Alan Dye, formerly Apple's vice president of Human Interface Design, will join Meta to head up a new design studio within Meta's Reality Labs.

Mauro Porcini is, amazingly, Samsung's first ever chief design officer. He's got a hell of a job ahead of him. Samsung has one of the biggest product line ups of any tech brand, yet when it comes to design, it's consistently seen as an "also-ran." While other companies have forged distinctive and instantly recognizable design languages, such as Nothing, Samsung has found itself behind in the style stakes. When you've got Apple as one of your biggest competitors, that's not a great position to be in.

A self-driving electric car uses artificial intelligence imaging and scanning to drive around highways and cities. The Japanese electric car developer Turing has unveiled its driverless EV whose car concept lets AI makes driving decisions while it cruises on the road. The camera on board, alongside sensors and dynamic maps, of the car design gathers the views it receives while driving. Based on the information detected, the car operates the steering wheel on its own and drives itself on public roads without the passengers' help. Turning to AI has always been the car's concept, and in 2022, the technology team was able to pool a driving data base amounting to 500 hours for its AI-driven system.

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have become more integrated into the fabric of business success than many would have imagined even a few years ago. In the last year alone, AI innovation witnessed many big waves, from the advancements in edge AI and computer vision to data center modernization and specialized AI chips, to AI designing those very chips. These milestones of progress are unlocking exciting opportunities for the industry. This AI revolution is also driving the need for an entirely new generation of AI systems-on-chip (SoCs). By 2026, the global market value for AI chipsets is expected to grow to more than $70 billion from $8 billion in 2019, as the surge in IoT devices with machine-learning capabilities and the development of smart cities propels the market.

Novel methods of searching the nation's gallery, library and museum collections could soon be revolutionized by a visual search platform designed in collaboration with Northumbria University. As the sector worldwide moves towards presenting collections online, the Deep Discoveries project was launched to explore ways of creating a computer vision search platform that can identify and match images across digitized collections on a national scale. The expertise of Dr. Jo Briggs and Associate Professor Jamie Steane, from Northumbria School of Design, were enlisted to help deliver the collaboration between The National Archives, the University of Surrey and the V&A Museum. Rather than typing a keyword into an empty search box, visual search uses a query image and computer vision artificial intelligence (AI), to match similar images from across digitized collections based on properties such as color, pattern and shape. The Northumbria design team--made up of Jo, Jamie and talented graduate Andy Cain--joined the project at a later stage to help with information sharing and developing the user experience.

User Centered Design (UCD) - diverse and inclusive teams are key to AI solutioning success. This blog is a continuation of the Building AI Leadership Brain Trust Blog Series which targets board directors and CEO's to accelerate their duty of care to develop stronger skills and competencies in AI in order to ensure their AI programs achieve sustaining results. In this blog series, I have identified forty skill domains in an AI Leadership Brain Trust Framework to guide board directors and CEO's to ensure they can develop and accelerate their investments in successful AI initiatives. You can see the full roster of the forty leadership Brain Trust skills in my first blog. Each of the blogs in this series explores either a group of skills or does a deep dive into one of the skill areas.

This Friday the 11th of December, Nikolas Martelaro (Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute) will give an online seminar on ways robot design teams can do remote user research now (in these COVID-19 times) and in the future. Nikolas Martelaro is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Martelaro's lab focuses on augmenting designer's capabilities through the use of new technology and design methods. Martelaro's interest in developing new ways to support designers stems from my interest in creating interactive and intelligent products. Martelaro blends a background in product design methods, interaction design, human-robot interaction, and mechatronic engineering to build tools and methods that allow designers to understand people better and to create more human-centered products.

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Michael Lewrick, author of The Design Thinking Playbook. The book has been released recently in English and has become the preferred book for many Universities which aim to teach students about Design Thinking in Europe, Asia and the US. Many organizations use the playbook as reference to kick-start the digital transformation or to build new capabilities needed to create for example new business ecosystems. We had the chance to interview Michael and we had some very specific questions about Design Thinking, he was happy to answer. What are some of the keys to creating valuable personas? Personas are a key concept for building empathy with the user.

Earlier this year, our design team spent a few weeks analyzing and improving the performance of the Postmark product website. Our app is known for lightning-fast email delivery, and we wanted to provide a similar experience to the visitors of the website. Conveniently, what's good for people is also good for robots -- search engines increasingly use performance and user experience metrics as a ranking factor in search results. Once completed, this project made the Postmark site significantly faster and increased our Lighthouse Performance score from 68 to a perfect 100. We do our best to keep regressions in check, but the nature of releasing something new often works against us.