Top Design Trends Behind the Industrial Internet 

Although tech companies have been slow to deliver us to the interconnected future that the Internet of Things has promised, where everything from our washer and dryer to industrial drills are networked, the push is ongoing, and General Electric (GE) has recently taken one more step toward that goal in the area of software.

Although we’ve gotten more used to hearing about GE’s software efforts in recent years, the company itself was surprised to learn only two years ago that it had assumed the role of fourteenth largest software producer in the world.

Since the discovery was made in June 2011, the company’s Software Center in San Ramon, Calif., has grown from four people to over 700. There, designer Greg Petroff and his team are hard at work on Predix, the Internet of Things software platform designed to unify the disparate systems that field engineers must otherwise deal with on a day-to-day basis.

But beyond creating a cohesive set of app-based interfaces, which it does, Predix’s real purpose is to connect each of these devices to the cloud, where their performance can be measured and downtime minimized. Rather than maintenance crews being alerted to an equipment problem after a component has failed, the software is designed to alert them weeks before the failure occurs.

With tools such as these at GE’s disposal, Petroff’s goal to deliver a one-percent performance increase per industry may seem humble. But one percent in aviation alone could save roughly $15 billion in jet fuel in only a few years.

And engineers aren’t the only ones pouring hard work into Predix—anyone with a tablet or smartphone should be able to recognize the design team’s nod to current consumer electronic trends. Beyond offering repairmen a touchscreen interface, the software will actually interface with the broken machine in question to guide the engineer through the specific process to fix it up, which means situational awareness is at the core of the product’s design.

But as Petroff explained in an interview with Wired, Predix isn’t just giant warehouse of machine knowledge. When an engineer begins work, he says, “all the right information, and only the right information, he needs to be successful is available to him.” Assuming the role of that engineer, Petroff continued: “I just show up, and the things I need to do just kind of miraculously and magically appear.”

But as Wired writer Kyle Vanhemert points out, there is one aspect of design where GE isn’t just keeping up with consumer trends, but actually setting them. With Predix, Petroff expects to see engineers using a seamless interface that transfers from screen to screen, allowing them to use the right device for the moment while keeping all of the same apps and information on screen.