The Contradictions of Design

This essay will be launched with a stub of the main ideas. It will then be revised periodically (iteratively) using the principles of time available and gestation learning.

When we design, we are designing in a social and environmental context. Always.  Each realized design depends on product life cycles from extraction to end of life and they are usually embedded  in global supply chains, also with major social and environmental impacts (SEIs). The major alternatives to this are product life cycles within local supply chains, and hybrid varieties.  Local supply chains usually have smaller and better SEIs.

There are two curves that are very salient to this discussion. First the extreme and worsening degree of economic and social inequality. This is discussed in this blog under Design for Whom.  We have evolved into a society with a small class of people who own product life cycles and the rest of the people who use the products and services but find them increasingly hard to afford. Designers for the most part serve the PLC owners by constantly innovating using IP-driven design to promote profits under the 20 years protection window of patents.  This has been very productive, but growing inequality is now hollowing out the middle class and the benefits of design are likely drift out of reach of more and more people.

The second “cliff curve” – both curves are becoming almost vertical when set against time –  is that of the total flow of goods and services in the last 2,000 years (Economist).  PLCs have total flows of energy and materials embedded in them and the total flows for all goods and services  have become completely unsustainable. Yet the problem is that both PLCs/capita and the number of people using them are still growing

So these two curves spell social and environment crises in the near future unless there are major adaptations in society or breakthroughs in science and technology (eg the solar energy doubling “law” Kurzweil).

Control of knowledge represents a battleground with the internet fueling an explosion of knowledge and access to knowledge, while governments in particular seem intent on hiding everything they do while studying in great detail everything we do. There is, too, a commodification of life where everything costs money and everything, even life forms, is owned. Some predict plausibly enough that humans are being changed by bionics and that we will become a blend of biology and machines. This could hasten the prospect of being owned. A new form of slavery?

Another contradiction is the breakdown of infrastructure in the US. This is fixable but very expensive and the paralysis in Washington DC means it will not be addressed. It is hard to underestimate the trouble that this will cause.

 

 

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The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, and Open Source Thinking

Open source technology has a strong record of contributions that have had near universal impacts from Linux to 3D printing. This short essay shows how mainstream it is in terms of the history of ideas by finding its roots in the Age of Enlightenment and the rise of modern science. For a modern Open Source reference see http://opensourceecology.org/

“The Renaissance … was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. Though availability of paper and the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe. WIKIP

“The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals beginning in late 17th-century Western Europe emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition.[1] It spread across Europe and to the United States, continuing to the end of the 18th century. Its purpose was to reform society using reason, to challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and to advance knowledge through the scientific method. It promoted scientific thought, skepticism, and intellectual interchange.[2]   WIKIP

The Renaissance may be thought of as a period when authority in politics and thought was challenged.  Old knowledge from Greece and Rome was rediscovered and became an alternative to knowledge controlled by monarchs and priests.  Vernacular languages became respectable, and this and the printing press led to a rapid dissemination of these new sources of knowledge and new approaches to knowledge, especially science.  This led to the Enlightenment when the role of the individual and reason flourished.  These things also led to the rise of representative democracy, at first in thought and then in practice.  Individuals wanted freedom from abuses under monarchs and the church, they wanted to control the governments that ruled them, they wanted freedom to learn and to advance and share knowledge.  There were many thinkers who epitomized these ideas in different ways.

John Locke’s writings did not have a wide impact in his time, but he had a huge influence on minds that matter.   “…one passage from the Second Treatise is reproduced verbatim in the Declaration of Independence, the reference to a “long train of abuses.” Such was Locke’s influence that Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Bacon, Locke and Newton… I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences”.[16][17][18] Today, most contemporary libertarians claim Locke as an influence[citation needed].”  WIKIP  And it is here that this story of Open Source thinking begins.

Locke believed that all men were born free and had the natural rights of life, liberty, and property.   Others cast different nuances. The Philosophes in France, who greatly admired Locke and the 1689 Bill of Rights in England, believed in reason as the way to pursue truth, that nature was good, that happiness should be attained in this life, in the possibility of individual and social progress, and in liberty. They included happiness but not property.  Happiness made its way into the Declaration of independence and property found a home in the Constitution of the United States.  There were some then, and others now, who think that property and happiness are equivalent, but this is only one meaning of happiness.  And by the time it applies to only 1% of the population who own almost half of the wealth in the world, then perhaps it is time to look at the other meanings of happiness.

These values are important. They are the end states, the goals, of the means we use to reach them. So innovating for personal and economic growth through privatizing technology and the market economy is one way of  achieving what we want.  Innovating and sharing (gifting) for personal satisfaction and the public good is another such way.   There are clearly people who choose one or the other, as ways of life they prefer, and as reasoned preferable definitions of what it means to be human.   The identification of happiness with property has led to an explosion of goods and services, but this, in turn. has created an environmentally unsustainable society in which inequality is now out of control.  Design for Whom  Technology and Inequality

Another important beginning was Diderot’s encyclopedia published in 1751. A sharing of knowledge developed by leading scholars in Europe.  Condemned by the state as “undermining royal authority (in France)” and of being “irreligious.”  Both were true as church and state watched the control of knowledge slip away from them. Parallel to this was the birth of modern science based on empiricism and skepticism. That also triggered reactions and Galileo was condemned in 1632 for adhering to Copernican theory by the Catholic Church who did not retract the charge until 1992.  Robert Merton described the norms of science in a classic 1935 article as follows

  • Communalism All scientists should have equal access to scientific goods (intellectual property) and there should be a sense of common ownership in order to promote collective collaboration, secrecy is the opposite of this norm. [4]
  • Universalism All scientists can contribute to science regardless of race, nationality, culture, or gender. [5]
  • Disinterestedness according to which scientists are supposed to act for the benefit of a common scientific enterprise, rather than for personal gain. [6]
  • Originality requires that scientific claims contribute something new, whether a new problem, a new approach, new data, a new theory or a new explanation.[7]

In science, then, we can also see the rise of Open Source thinking as it praises sharing and eschews personal gain. And this happens in a lateral communal manner not a hierarchical manner where knowledge exists in structures of control. This difference is captured well in The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond when writing about how well Open Source contributed to the development of Linux. Both science and Open Source celebrate the idea of a knowledge bazaar where knowledge transactions take place in a transparent environment among intrinsically motivated people.  The science bazaar now suffers from pressure applied by many cathedrals seeking to control it for their benefit.

Besides the rise of  freedom to for individuals, the Enlightenment also meant freedom from the abuses of the past.  Resistance to absolutist rule grew and the movement towards representative democracies also took hold.   In extreme, it led to the development of the philosophy of anarchism, of societies without governments consisting of freely associating individuals. Or at least anarchism embraces the idea that that government is best that governs least. The word anarchism got politically perverted as advocating violence against the state, and replaced by libertarianism in the United States. That said, it has always been a powerful thread in American political thought.  The Open Source movement often epitomizes the idea of individuals freely associating to create technology for the common good.  But whereas historically resistance to authority has focused on governments and churches, corporations and other large organizations are now limiting the freedoms of individuals.

So Open Source with intrinsic rewards and social recognition clearly has antecedents in the Enlightenment as strong as those of Intellectual Property and materialist (capitalist) incentives.   They create different cultures and both have played a major role in the development of technology.  In any design process you may choose either path with patents only having a 20 year protection window everything ends up as open source anyway (cf generic drugs). But individual probably choose one or the other path on the basis of a choice of culture: the lifestyle they prefer.

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The Affordable Unlocked Moto G Smartphone

I thought of posting this under the rubric “The de-mesmerized smartphone.”  Rather than being blinded by the latest brilliant pocket computer, you can get a very decent device at a fraction of the cost. The Android Moto G by Motorola is sold unlocked and off-contract for $179 (8GB) or $199 (16GB).   Expect to get the 16GB and use the 50 GB Google cloud storage that is free for 2 years.   J. R. Raphael on Computer world recently posted a very good review of this smartphone. Moto G is only 3G, but it has very good performance and display, and excellent battery life. You can save at least $400 by buying this unlocked phone rather than almost any other new 4G unlocked phone.   With expensive contracts that charge the full price over two years, your initial outlay for the Moto G might be $100 extra. But your monthly fees will be $20-30 less leading to a break even point of 3 months, or so, and savings of several hundred dollars a year thereafter. It is compatible with almost all GSM carriers.  There is a CDMA version coming soon, and its operating system will be upgraded from Android 4.3 Jelly-Bean to 4.4 Kit-Kat in January.

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Design for Whom

Adam Mordecai recently posted this remarkable info graphic that shows not only how unequal life is in the United states, but that it has been growing worse for for 30-40 years. This graphic brilliantly communicates data such as those found on sites like the Russell Sage Foundation Program on Social Inequality.  And, in this harsh light, that we would even be debating the worthiness of universal health care (universal access to medical technology) is very hard to understand, let alone tax cuts for the rich. But key to the stability of this very unequal picture is that American people do not know about it.  Mordecai shows that based on survey data, 9/10 Americans think that it would be OK if the top 20% had 30% of the wealth, whereas they think the top 20% actually has almost 60% of the wealth and that that is unfair. In fact, the top 20% has almost 85% of the wealth and it is growing.  We await American opinion about that. But the problem is apparently global with Oxfam, the NGO, claiming that the top 1% globally owns 46% of the wealth, and the richest 85 people own as much as the poorest 50% of the world’s population.  Oxfam Report  They, too, argue that there has been a sharp increase over the last 30 years. They note “In the US, the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population grabbed 95 per cent of post-financial crisis growth between 2009 and 2012, while the bottom 90 per cent became poorer.” link

Another metric of inequality is the ratio of the highest paid worker to the lowest paid worker in a corporation. Remarkably, the Swiss voted on a referendum on November 24, 2013, that would have capped the ratio at 1:12.  It is currently 148:1.  The ratio for the US was reported in this story as currently 354:1 (an AFL-CIO figure that is probably too high). According to the Economic Policy Institute the ratio in the US was 20 in 1970 and was 200  in 2012, an order of magnitude increase.  If that referendum had passed, it failed by 2:1, the world would have changed overnight. That it was even voted on suggests that a dialectic process is underway historically that must produce a reaction sooner or later. There must be some level of inequality that a democratic country will categorically reject, and it cannot be far away.  Many wealthy people probably see this coming and the new billionaires club, the Giving Pledge, requires all members to donate half their wealth to charity. Well done, but it will not be enough to change the historical trend and whatever other outcomes that it produces.

A confirmation. The Gini Coeficient/ Inequality Index  has been around since 1912 and it is used by economists to assess the degree of income inequality in a society. The coefficient is zero when everyone gets the same, and it is one when one person has everything. The graph below shows that the US [and the UK] has indeed been rising steadily on this scale since ~1980 and it is now one of the highest in the world – matched incredibly enough by China, chased by India, and dwarfed by Brazil but no longer by Mexico.  The BRIC countries would all be in the top flight with the US, had Russia been included.  But why are we in that group? See below. The good guys include Canada, Italy, Norway and Belgium, but, surprisingly, not so much Sweden.

Design for Whom? Mordecai, in a moment of madness, suggests that everyone owning the same amount would be socialism. That has never been true, even theoretically, and China, the world’s largest communist society, is trending past the United States to become even more unequal than we are.  State capitalism is apparently no better than private capitalism.  What Marx said was “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” The top 1%, who get to do this, apparently have an insatiable need to own most product life cycles (PLCs).  And the growth of revenues in the design of products and services is what fuels the wealth creation that is so poorly shared. The Economist published a chart in 2011 that showed that the 23% of the products and service in the last 2,000 years were created in the last 10 years.  The curve is almost vertical, remarkably like the Mordecai graphic on the distribution of wealth.

Beyond the consumer market, wealth is about ownership and power, and owning PLCs is just a means to that end.  Greenspan observed, post recession, that deregulation, pushed by him, failed because irrational greed overwhelmed rational self interest. That is, greed is an addiction and capitalism needs regulation to work.  However, in a democracy, this house of cards depends on the poorest ~60%, even 90% perhaps, being happy about the extreme inequality.  Remarkably, there is considerable pressure from people who will not benefit, to maintain tax breaks for the super rich, and to declare a War on the Poor.

So it rests on a false consciousness, and this rests on controlling public discourse through large media empires.  Social media are trending democratic and blowing at this house of cards.  Hence, Mordecai’s blog.  Already it is on the political agenda for Fall 2014 elections. Until then, should we launch a design agenda for greater technological equity? More low cost open source designs? More employee owned companies? What else?

You might think that a traditional avenue of upward mobility like engineering is a moderating factor. Think again. David Rotman writes about Silicon Valley: “The homeless are the most visible signs of poverty in the region. But the numbers back up first impressions. Median income in Silicon Valley reached $94,000 in 2013, far above the national median of around $53,000. Yet an estimated 31 percent of jobs pay $16 per hour or less, below what is needed to support a family in an area with notoriously expensive housing. The poverty rate in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, is around 19 percent, according to calculations that factor in the high cost of living.” Technology Review, 2014

The change in Gini indices has differed across countries. Some countries have change little over time, such as Belgium, Canada, Germany, Japan, and Sweden. Brazil has oscillated around a steady value. France, Italy, Mexico, and Norway have shown marked declines. China and the US have increased steadily. Australia grew to moderate levels before dropping. India sank before rising again. The UK and Poland stayed at very low levels before rising. Bulgaria had an increase of fits-and-starts. .svg alt text

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The Pocket Computer Revolution and the Design of Collaborative Spaces

Calling your pocket computer a smartphone is like calling the Maserati in your driveway an enhanced bicycle.  It is a computer that can perform in at least six different functional categories, only one of which is people to people communications and, even there, a phone is not the most used option. It is a pocket computer because it fits in a pocket and phablets and tablets do not. And, in personal computing sales, pocket computers dwarf sales of all other computers combined. Gartner

These computer functions include: Communications (text, email, phone, social media, collaborative tools on the Cloud, telemedicine); Knowledge Retrieval (from local scout and maps to internet searches for anything); Entertainment  (videos, games); Sensing the environment (photos, videos, detecting danger in gases or pathogens, blood alcohol content, blood pressure and other medical data); and Control of the environment with NFC and Bluetooth (paying charges electronically, controlling the TV or home HVAC and security systems, kiss and tell with another pocket computer).  In addition, it is a technology that allows others to know a lot about you.  That is, your smartphone also “belongs” to a lot of other people who use your smartphone for Surveillance of you and personal data collection that impugn your privacy in ways you suspect but probably do not know much about, link link2.  So five functional categories bring power to the people and one takes it away.

In design we are always concerned with creating the best spaces for design behavior. This can be a complex design task, but it should start with an understanding of what the designers have in their pockets, or hands, since these computers spend a great deal of time out of their pockets.  We then need to think through scenarios of what a pocket computer will be 1 year and 5 years from now. It will still be a computer, but “pocket” may not be an apt descriptor for wearable devices.  But the main point here is that the computing functionality of any space is enormously enhanced when the designers enter the room. We need to design for extending, enhancing, and complementing what they bring and beware of redundancy.  And, sometimes, we may wish to have more privacy and less dependency and leave them at the door.

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The ethics of care vs the ethics of competition

Carol Gilligan, the originator of the Ethics of Care thesis, says that “The ethics of care starts from the premise that as humans we are inherently relational, responsive beings and the human condition is one of connectedness or interdependence.” Link  She repudiates the ideas of moral developmentalists like Lawrence Kohlberg who consider universal ethical principles such as just laws that all live by as a higher order of development.  So stealing drugs from a pharmacy to save your daughter’s life when you are too poor to buy them is ethical for Gilligan but unethical for some versions of Kohlberg’s thesis.  And in focusing on those closest to you, you are also making ethical judgments where you are best informed.  A mathematician might argue that the quality of an ethical judgment is the product of p*c, where p is the importance of the principle applied and c is the degree of cognizance. If the knowledge of the situation is inadequate, you cannot get good decision.

In our classrooms, the ethics of care frequently develops spontaneously. This might be a good thing.  The cooperative learning movement inspired by Johnson and Johnson Link argues that learning together is a better environment than that of competition. [Learning alone being the third option]  Competition is great for the winners, but it necessarily creates failures in some and anxiety and stress in almost everybody that inhibit learning, such as test anxiety.  In higher education, we have failure rates that would be intolerable in industry.  It is intolerable even in the ubiquitous education programs run in industry. Industry wants to enhance productivity by enhancing all their human capital. In education, we sometimes lose sight of this by concentrating on ranking students according to what we have defined as merit. Many think that this is what the post education world needs.  It is not. Teach and test (T&T) anticipates little or nothing in the world of work where productivity is everything.  It helps us sort, select, and channel students into various futures, but there are other ways to do that.

It is the bottom of the T&T curve, not the top, that is most important, because incompetence means failing technology and no one wants that.  And the ethics of care can remove incompetence from more students than the ethics of competition, which tends to create it.   Teams can be judged, in part, on their ability to remove incompetence from their team members.  I am sure this is already being done somewhere.  The people at the top of the T&T curve should also get every chance to excel. There is nothing caring about systems that help only those at the top or those at the bottom.  But advancing the social good means maximizing everyone’s productivity so that everyone gains, and working to minimize the costs of carrying miseducated workers in an economy that demands the opposite.

Unfortunately, the ethics of competition has harsh sanctions in academia. If you cheat you can get thrown out of the university with negative implications for the rest of your life. If you cheat on Wall Street, you will probably be promoted – or at least get very rich.  If cheating is wrong, and I think it is, that is what we should teach. And we should explain why, or, better, get the students to explain why.  But I should note that misuse of the internet for personal gain (anonymous cut and paste) is not protected by the ethics of care, and it is very easy to catch.

But I do not think we should promote the idea that cheating is wrong because you can get caught and punished.  This is just the flip side of if you do not get caught, you will be rewarded. And this is what happens, as those who are caught are typically incompetent cheaters.  We should educate the students to believe that it is wrong. We may sometimes fail to redirect students on this issue.  The same can be said of the justice system, but we should at least try our way first.

Unfortunately, if you share and help you run the risk of incurring the same sanctions that are applied to cheating.   We say we teach team work and collaboration, but as soon as one student’s work looks like another student’s work, or actually is the same, the red flag goes up.  In a team, this outcome could have been deliberate, known by all and accepted by all.  It could be that they have loyalty to their team members and want to help them.  This maybe because they care and maybe because it raises the productivity of the team as a whole.   And one student checking another student’s work in order to improve it is essential in engineering design to avoid later failures of the product designed.  This is rarely taught in T&T systems, and perhaps too rare in teaching teamwork but the ethics of care is the right home for it.  Such checking is ethically required in the design process if engineers are to “Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public,” [universal principal in the NSPE code of ethics] not to mention sleep well at night [the ethics of care].

The ethics of competition breaks down peer relationships in favor of hierarchical relationships.  And when we speak of accountability, we usually refer to supervisory accounting not a peer group accounting.  Conversely, the ethics of care weakens hierarchy in favor of lateral social bonds – long thought to be the way to modernize organizations. This contrast between ethical systems is, in fact, a contest, and it is clearly political.  IT and Social media have strengthened the role of the ethics of care, in my view, and authoritarian politics either fights it or coopts it.  Authoritarian politicians tilting at social media windmills illustrate this well.  Currently, in early 2014, it is Erdogan in Turkey taking on Twitter.  Erdogan won the election, but he also energized and enabled his opposition as huge numbers of Twitter users learned to cloak their identity. Link

The ethics of care probably describes more ethical behavior globally than any other ethical system. It is rooted in emotion and the strongest and closest relationships.  At Penn State, we are seeing some engineering classes where the majority may be foreign born, and where 5-10 nationalities are present in a class of 32 students.  The ethics of care is important in the United States and in some sub-cultures more than others, and among women more than among men.  It is more important in the countries that some of these foreign students come from.  We are now getting mixed culture teams without using virtual teaming. There are a lot of reasons why we can, and should, teach cultural leaning and adaptation in our classes. One is to enhance team performance. An old research finding is that diverse teams can either have higher or lower team performance [the bath tub curve] depending on how well that diversity is managed.  Another reason is the opportunity to revisit some of our core beliefs.  This might lead us to have half the grade based on measures of individual ability, but the other half based on team grades which include an acceptance of the ethics of care as the best way to enhance team performance and individual learning.  In this way, we can enhance the strength of both ethical systems, and if they keep each other in check, so much the better.  And in mixed cultural teams it will provide a home that most will recognize.

 

 

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Innovation and Culture in China

We hear a lot about quantity from China: recently achieving number one in manufacturing, exports, the production of engineers, and solar panels.  But this story shows an emerging innovation side to China’s economy that also reflects their culture in a way not so different from that of the USA, but all their own even without YouTube.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21589434-chinas-online-video-market-largest-and-most-innovative-world-it-also-most?fsrc=nlw|hig|11-7-2013|6949251|37077759|

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Remarkable design related videos

Samsung’s flexible AMOLED screen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k6r2HQY9Ws

Samsung’s OLED transparent screen   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOKky70dPSc

Daniel Pink on motivation http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html   Not a great TED talk, but the studies showing that extrinsic rewards do not work is an interesting analysis.  And the pitch for the importance of autonomy, mastery, and purpose in innovation [and life?] is on target.

Raffaello D’Andrea’s quadcopters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2itwFJCgFQ  This is like a scene from Harry Potter

Ramesh Raskar: A trillion frames a second watching a light pulse travel  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_9vd4HWlVA

Tao Chen and 3Sweep’s remarkable alternative to scanning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM

Leap Motion for $80. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYgsAMKLu7s  Using hand controls with CAD images. Imagine the next level where we can shape CAD surfaces with our hands like throwing a clay pot

Elon Musk on the future of design http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY  Imagine, digitize and analyze, realize.  [conceptualize, digitize, analyze, realize, – CDAR]

 

 

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Google Reader Gone; Feedly Lives On

Google is canning its RSS aggregator: Reader.  I think this is partly because of competition from social media. But the user had control of Reader to select highly informative sources rather than BFFs.  So it will be missed, and the Intenet has a buzz of discontent about the loss.

Feedly is suggested by many as an alternative and it has a far better interface. It is like an app version of a primitive site.  http://www.feedly.com/     Other alternatives are listed here by Lifehacker.

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The Smartphone Era

In a blog by Evan Niu, CFA  in the Motley Fool, he argues that the PC is dead and “proves” it with this chart that was sourced at IDC.  links are useless  Update 11/13

You can have fun with this chart.   The PC still outsells the tablet, although the trend is with the tablet. However, whereas the PC is not much of a growth market it is a very big and stable market that seems to edge upwards.  And dual technologies that merge PC and tablet capabilities, like the Surface Pro and touch screen ultrabooks, will make this graph obsolete through new technology at the boundary between the two

But the unmistakable message of this chart is that the computer in your pocket is the elephant in the drawing room.  The smartphone now rules at the leading edge.  IDC on their site also note that the percentage of people, globally, using their smartphones to access the Internet daily rose from about a quarter in 2010 to about a half in 2012 and in some countries rose to 60-70%.  This includes most email use, but not all the texting, phoning, gaming, photography, and other uses via thousands of popular apps.

However, the graph may also be rendered obsolete by the tablet-smartphone hybrids appearing at their boundary in the 5-8″ size range.  And what do you call a mini 7″ tablet with a built-in phone and a separate mini-keyboard? Is this the next normal?

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