Creative Connectivity

The Burnham Boost for British Manufacturing

It was good to wake up to another upbeat policy announcement from Andy Burnham, in this second week of his premiership, proposing that secondary schools let their students study subjects like manufacturing and AI in addition to core academic learning. Messages of support for manufacturing have been few and far between for most of the last fifty years. The mantra has been that Maggie killed UK manufacturing, although more recently the mantle of industrial destroyer has shifted to Ed Miliband.

Within manufacturing circles it has become a constant complaint that the cost of UK energy is crippling industry, with Ed Miliband’s NetZero policies placing an almost impossible burden on companies trying to compete internationally. Whether he will supplant Maggie as the chief architect of UK manufacturing decline is something only time will tell, but there was a collective sigh of relief when he was exiled to the Foreign Office. So, what do these new announcements mean for UK manufacturing and technology?

Anyone for Stereo Tennis?

With Wimbledon upon us again, I was reminded that one of the use cases we considered when we were designing Bluetooth LE Audio was based on a tennis audience at Centre Court. Despite all of the money and technology that goes into international tournaments like Wimbledon, the sound reinforcement design provided for spectators still hasn’t evolved to the level of the original TV tennis games of the 1960s.

Looking at the spectators sitting in the main courts, it looks as if they’re aging, possibly because you need a hefty Civil Service defined-benefits pension to afford the tickets. Which mean that a fair number will have hearing loss. According to Wimbledon’s Access Guides, there are Hearing Loops located at key points around the grounds, but it doesn’t mention if they’re in the courts. Even if they are. reinforcing sound for a tennis audience poses some interesting questions.

Plug-in Solar and the PV Detector Van

Let’s start with the good news. It looks as if the UK is about to make it legal to buy and install plug-in solar panels. That’s basically a solar panel packaged with electronics, that lets you plug it directly into an ordinary 13A socket in your home to generate some of your own electricity. The bad news is that DESNZ ( the Department for Energy and Net Zero) want to regulate plug-in solar units in much the same way as TVs used to be regulated. These are DIY products which you can install yourself, but when you buy one, DESNZ wants to be notified, presumably so they can check that you’ve plugged it in properly and not broken anything. Their proposal reads like the old TV Licensing regime, which then sent detector vans around to make sure you had a licence. Except in this case, they’d be PV vans to check your Photo Voltaics.

There’s a consultation on whether that’s a good idea at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/plug-in-solar, but in typical DESNZ fashion, it opened last week and closes next week. So if you’ve got an opinion, you have until 30^th June to respond.

Arturo Ui, Electric Guitars and Hearing Aids

The Royal Shakespeare Company are currently running an excellent production of Brecht’s play “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, which I can thoroughly recommend. What I didn’t expect when I went to see it last week, is that I’d also learn quite a few useful things about user experience design for hearing aids and assisted listening.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a parable of Hitler’s rise to power, conceived as a parallel story based on Chicago gangsters fighting for control of the vegetable trade. It’s an important piece, not least because of the warning of its final line “The beast that bore him is in heat again”. But enough of UI for the moment. Here’s what I learnt about User Interfaces for hearing aids.

Apple’s AirPod dilemma

What do you do if you’ve just designed a great product, but then realised that it’s missing a key feature that everyone is about to start asking for? That’s the dilemma Apple had with its latest AirPods Max 2 headset, which is missing a new Bluetooth capability called Auracast. Auracast is rapidly approaching critical mass – appearing in other consumer products a lot faster than Apple had anticipated.

TVs take the lead in Audio Innovation

It’s almost ten years since the last major innovation in consumer audio, which was Apple’s launch of its AirPods back in 2016. Those arrived on the market ten years after the underlying Bluetooth specification which made wireless audio streaming possible, which demonstrates the fact that it can take quite a long time to bring new technologies to market. This year looks as if it will be the tipping point for the next big audio innovation to go mainstream. It’s something called Auracast and this time, the innovation is being spearheaded by the TV industry.