In this episode of The Digital Life we discuss recent news in emerging technology.

Big fashion houses and experimental designers alike are flocking to smart clothing as the latest expression of wearable technology. Sensors combined with online connectivity, are enabling information flow directly from our clothing — whether it’s measuring heart rate for sport, flexibility for rehabilitation, or Tweets for fun.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has proposed new regulations for commercial drone flights.

And Apple might be taking on Tesla and General Motors by venturing into one of the most complex product areas: the electric car.

Join us as we dig into these topics from a UX and design perspective.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES),  after a few years flirting with irrelevance, is on the rise again, as the wild technology and gadgets from the 2015 conference captured the imagination of consumers and media pundits alike. A big and important theme of CES 2015 was the Internet of Things, with major companies like Samsung taking IoT strategy for a new connected world. In this episode of the Digital Life we discuss some of the cool tech from CES, like Intel’s Curie chip, and how it relates to the IoT, wearables and the future of UX.

In this week’s edition of The Digital Life we examine three news stories important to user experience and our online lives: the Uber snafu over targeting critical journalists, the rising popularity of the e-book versus the tenacity of print, and the ongoing battle over net neutrality.

In 1980, Bill Gates famously wanted a computer on every desk and in every home. Now perhaps Microsoft would like a fitness band on every wrist and all your health data in the cloud.

With the release of its Health platform and fitness band into the already crowded fray, Microsoft is(again)staking a claim to your quantified self data, along with competitors Apple and Google. The battle for your body’s health data has just begun.

On another front, the war for your living room is heating up, with Google Play now on Roku and the Amazon Fire TV stick premiering for a mere $19. Perhaps most significantly, even Walmart is getting in the game, with their Vudu spark streaming service.

In this episode of the Digital Life, we discuss the future of design for ecosystems — be it your body, your living room, your car or even your bathroom — as designers begin to consider how digital and physical products come together with the Internet of Things.

China is on the rise, not just in the manufacturing and production of physical goods, but also in the digital realm. If Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Q&A session with students at Tsinghua University in Beijing in Mandarin wasn’t a sign of the times, then certainly the largest tech IPO in history, with Chinese tech giant Alibaba raking in billions of dollars to further fuel the growth of the company, is indicative of the fact that that the digital is China’s fastest developing frontier. In this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss the rise of China, and the unexpected opportunities it may represent for product designers in the West.