Rob Stott: All right, we are back on the Connected Design podcast. And I’m just going to mention this right up front. I am setting myself up for failure if we’re just talking about accents, because I’m going to make myself look like, you know, just some average Joe Schmoe American here on a podcast with my Philly accent and my wooder and all that sort of stuff. But no, Mr. Michael Short and Mr. Giles Sutton of Crestron. Giles, the director of business development. And Michael is global VP of marketing. Gentlemen, I appreciate you taking the time and you know deciding to do a podcast and put my voice to shame personally. So…
Michael Short: It’s all right. I mean, to be fair, when we look at how Giles and I have both ended up working pretty much in America for an American company, through journeys from the U.K., it’s pretty wild.
Rob Stott: How much do you attribute to your accent? Accents, I should say. All of it, Giles? Yeah. I know, it’s amazing. So no, I appreciate obviously I jest, but I really could just turn it over and let you guys talk and I’ll be enthralled. But we do have questions to ask and a lot of fun, a cool topic to dive into today, but…
Michael Short: All of it. All of it.
Giles Sutton: Who was that? Makes it sound intelligent, you know, Rob. That’s how it works.
Rob Stott: Before that, you know, I know first podcast with you guys, and I know we have a bunch planned to do with you guys with Crestron through our podcast. So, with this being the first, I want to give you a chance. I know plenty of people probably recognize those voices, but I want to give you guys the chance to introduce yourselves and give a little bit of background on each of you and you know, just kind of set the stage for what we’re going to be talking about today. So flip a coin, Giles, I’ll just throw it to you first. You know, introduce yourself and give a little bit of that background.
Giles Sutton: Sure, well thanks, Rob and also I have to say it’s great to see Connected Design back as well. So very excited about this. It’s awesome to be involved and yeah, we’ve known each other a long time. I’ve been in the industry for most of my working career now, I would say. Over 20 years, but I was an integrator for 14 years in the U.K.
Rob Stott: Thank you.
Giles Sutton: Moved to the States, was working for CEDIA as VP of Industry Engagement, also was interim co-CEO for a little while, on the association side. So a lot of work with the design and build community, working with other partner associations as well and running some of our regional events. Did a master’s in legal studies, got kind of interested in cybersecurity and privacy law and things like that. So took some time out to figure out what I wanted to do. And then yeah, about a year ago, joined Crestron to head up North American business development. So love being here. Very much what I’ve been doing for most of my career, which is working with specifiers, designers, architects, and developers. So yeah, that’s pretty much where I am right now, and very excited to be meeting with you today as well, Rob. So yeah, thank you.
Rob Stott: Yeah. No, I appreciate it. And you know, I obviously you mentioned the connections that it’s been fun to follow your career too. Kind of what you’ve done and having that rounded background of the integration side but also the association side that you know, supporting the channel as a whole, kind of get to experience everything from all sides of the industry and then obviously bringing those talents over to Crestron and joining creating a one-two punch. I’m going to, this is the last reference to the accents, but the one-two punch of the accents is just it’s perfect. So you guys teaming up, this was like meant to be. So Michael, now your turn, right?
Michael Short: Awesome. And you know, it was great when we first had the opportunity or knew that Giles was potentially going to be available to join Crestron. Many of us were excited because of his history, his experience on the integrator side, in the design-build market with CEDIA. So it’s a great mix. My background, based in the U.K., but my teams are based both in the U.S. and in Belgium, where we have two of our European and obviously U.S. headquarters. I accidentally stumbled into the world of AV when I first started my career. I’ve specialized in marketing for most of my career in different sectors and the opportunity came to join Crestron Europe. This is maybe 12 years ago now. I’ve been at Crestron for 10 years and had a break in between, but about 10 years since. And I started looking after EMEA marketing. I had the opportunity to take on, as we were growing our residential business. Everyone in the industry probably knows John Clancy reasonably well. When he joined Crestron, we were looking at growing the residential side and from there really I’ve had the opportunity to grow within my role and now have a wider remit covering both residential and commercial looking after PR, social, creative, marketing operations, product marketing and have the experience, the great experience of working with lots of groups within Crestron, working with lots of the channel teams like Giles and the other sort of business development areas of the company. So really exciting for me, like I said, 10 years at Crestron and this industry in itself just continues to grow and change. We continue to battle away with economic problems. Problems across borders, situations just continue to be throwing punches at us, but it’s a wild ride and I think that it’s still one of the most exciting industries around. We get to work with incredible people on incredible projects and it’s really fun to see and be involved in physical technology change in ways on both hardware and software. And today’s topic around the touch panel, or touchscreens. We call it touchscreens here at Crestron, but it’s touch panel and touchscreen, same thing, is a really interesting one because it’s kind of at the heart of what people touch. Lots of what we do, lots of the magic is behind the scenes. Very few things do customers touch and the touchscreen is one of them. And this is a really, really interesting topic today.
Rob Stott: Yeah. No, I appreciate you both sharing that. It obviously sets the table for today, but also future conversations that you know, I know we hope to have. And you know, that topic, you know, you mentioned it’s all I feel like it’s always been one of those things I can even relate it to as a parent, right? Screen-time, right? And thinking about how it’s just a constant battle between whether it’s parents and kids or media and parents, like how the discussions are happening between this channel or, you know, what in any sort of facet of life, right? But it’s always been sort of the thing, you know, especially from a design standpoint, when you get into homes or commercial spaces around, you know, directions that a space will go. So, for those that aren’t sure or I haven’t been aware, don’t necessarily follow the news, I want to give just a little bit of an overview on sort of more recently some of the discussion points that have been happening. And you know, I don’t mind calling out the publications necessarily. You can go find them if you want, but there was one in Architectural Digest that really had more to do with I feel like the design around a space, right? So there was an article that you know, addressed sort of the re-emergence we can call it, I guess. I don’t know that they never really went away, but you know, switches and buttons and things like that, the tactile functions of a space and those coming back to replace, you know, screens that people were tired of looking at and using these touch panels, touchscreens. And then another coming from Residential Tech Today actually had to do with the rise of voice sort of impacting, you know, the use of touchscreens in the home. And it felt like everyone from all sides was coming at the touchscreen within like a couple weeks of each other. It’s like, what did the touchscreen do? Like what the heck? Why is this happening? So, you know, those are kind of the conversations that are going on. I guess just right off the bat, the instant reaction from both of you around the just hostility toward the touchscreen of late. Like what comes to mind when you see those types of conversations and editorial pieces sort of thrown out there?
Giles Sutton: I mean, I read the article as well and it was interesting because some of the use cases, I guess they gave the touchscreen, I think were a little unusual. I think any integrator in this channel would not suggest that, you know, to turn lights on and off by your bed, if you want to get up in the middle of the night, you have to go to a touch panel, go into an app, go open an app, touch, you know, turn on lighting scene. That is not a practical use of technology. And I think it kind of presented it in an interesting way. It sort of presented it as an either-or as opposed to having an and. And I think some of it definitely comes from, there are touchscreens everywhere, right? There’s touchscreens and we’ve seen in the automotive industry where there’s been a huge, leaning into touchscreens to the point where actually some automotive industries are pulling back because there is so much you can do when you’re driving and you’re having to navigate, but I think that kind of illustrates the point in a way. There’s ways that you can use touchscreens and where they add tremendous value, but also there is this rise of more sort of tactile controls, more, I guess, more traditional in some ways, there’s sort of confidence that you use. But I think some of it, some of this may come from, you know, app, maybe app and touch, touchscreen exhaustion, you know, that we, that we all kind of endure in that we all have like multiple apps and multiple things. And I think if anything, that really hammers home the value of having a centralized control system, of having one, like one app to alleviate that, but a mixture of different interfaces in the home, whether that is voice, whether that is traditional, quote unquote, keypads and tactile controls, and then also touchscreens for things that you can only do on touchscreens. You can only view a CCTV camera on a touchscreen. You can only edit a lighting scene on a touchscreen. And I’m using a touchscreen, and I know we should call them touch panels at Crestron. But there are certain types of things where they are absolutely necessary to make the use of a home streamlined and simple. It’s sort of almost a weird kind of crossover where it actually can become more complicated if you don’t have one.
Rob Stott: Yeah. No. I mean it makes sense. Michael, before getting kind of your hot take reaction to the conversation there, to a point that you made there, Giles. Does it almost feel like a correction or is it like people reacting in a way where like to your point, touchscreens the car is a great example. I’m glad you brought that up ’cause I ironically timing wise just upgraded from like a two thousand six to like a twenty twenty six, and it is a world of difference. Not even just talking about safety features, but about the like the touch panel being in there and it’s like now I have a TV in my car. You know, it’s a correction back, like is it a correction back to like we went too far one direction in coming back? Like, there is a balance that we’re trying to find. Or is it sort of that?
Giles Sutton: I think so. I think absolutely. Like people, I go back to the perfectly designed remote control, right? And there we all know those remote controls that we’ve used over the years in the U.K., you know, it was the Sky remote control, you know, over here, you know, maybe it’s the Roku remote control or there are remotes where people just instinctively know where the buttons are, when you navigate them, you just know where to find them. And that kind of gets lost with the touchscreen, and I won’t mention automotive names for various obvious reasons but you know when you’re driving along at 70 miles an hour and you need to adjust you know the temperature within the car you know they now have to build in safety systems into cars to prevent you from looking away when you have to do that and you’re navigating through to find it, you just can’t find it while keeping your eyes on the road. It’s impossible. So I think there is now, we’re coming to a sort of convergence, a sort of a central point where automotive is definitely moving back in some ways, where you do need controls, maybe not going quite as far as some cars that are more known for maybe off-road, let’s say. I can’t mention the names, but more off-road cars that are used quite a lot, where there’s just switches everywhere.
Rob Stott: Certainly. Yeah.
Giles Sutton: But, you know, there is definitely a happy medium, I would say, and that’s probably the same within the residential environment.
Rob Stott: That’s fair. Michael, kind of going back to that hot take reaction, what when you see these articles and these types of commentaries out there around you know, touchscreens or touch panels, like what is your reaction?
Michael Short: Initially it’s like, here we go again. What I mean by that is six years ago.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Michael Short: Keypads, touchscreens, were all going to disappear because of voice control. Everything was going to be voice. There’d be no need for a light switch in a single home. It’s all going to be voice and voice, voice, voice, voice, voice. Obviously that didn’t happen because the requirement to touch something is very important in a home. There’s always going to be a need to switch a light switch to press a button. It’s going away. And then the other side of this is, and I totally agree with Giles and what you’re saying with regards to this is all about mix for the right environment because we have this wonderful technology that is voice coming along. So let’s use it in the right way. You look at keypads and again, the architectural digest story, they’re actually just referring to bringing back switches that are still smart. So they’re not removing the keypad or replacing a touchscreen. They’re taking what was a dumb light switch that might have now been a really smart keypad with three buttons and actually now making it a smart keypad with an aesthetic switch. It’s the same thing. It’s still a smart keypad so it’s not replacing anything. Touchscreens don’t replace light switches or keypads on the wall, touchscreens are used in very specific environments. In fact, in many of the most high-end homes will do, you will see that, let’s say in a door entry area, or maybe in the kitchen as you first walk in, there will be a touchscreen with a keypad above it or next to it because of the tactile motion of feeling it. Now, we’re all saying the same thing here. We all totally agree that, you know, the point is that such things are not going away. And actually, you know, both the articles really were just playing sort of clickbait with regards to what this is. But there is also a little nuance, maybe within the one that wasn’t the Architectural Digest one, was on Residential Tech Today. There could also be a little bit of survivorship bias maybe in some of the sourcing materials there because both the quoted experts represented voice-based tech adjacent businesses whether it was a consultant pushing voice systems in their property and I think the other one was a platform marketer for voice. Now their interests lie in voice technology. Our interests actually, outside of all this, yeah, we want to sell touchscreens, but we also have a really great voice control platform. And we also partner with Alexa and Google. So we also work with the best voice control platforms out there. We’re open to it. And the reason why we partner with those voice control platforms and we don’t make our own voice control hub and package it up and sell it is we know that the touch has a really important place in the home. It is required for so many experiences and I think that in reality finding the right mix of what, where and how is really important and I think that’s where we all sort of agree on there. The point is that it has its place, it’s required, as does voice, as does a keypad, as does…
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Michael Short: Keypad that looks like a beautifully designed light switch.
Rob Stott: Yeah. I and I think it’s important too that everything you’re mentioning is that I you know, it almost lends itself to there’s certainly misconceptions, I think. When people read a headline like that or or see an article like that, talking about, you know, these displays being too prevalent in a home, they probably think like, every You mean every switch in my house is now a touchpad, like ones, you know, maybe the size of an iPhone versus the size of an iPad. Like I have them everywhere and there’s no button. Like they think it’s in every room of the house. Whereas in reality, you know, I don’t think that was ever the case or the intent, right? Was to just replace all these switches with, you know, screens that you have to touch and things like that. It’s more in moderation, as opposed to, you know, just proliferation, just to make it fun and catchy. But like putting these screens in every room was never the intent as as far as, you know, implementing this technology in a in a system, whatever it might be.
Giles Sutton: Yeah, I mean, think there’s no doubt that there is a design movement towards more, sort of more tactile, more traditional looking controls. We have partners, there’s multiple brands that we partner with that allow that kind of control. I think there is even, but yeah, and it’s interesting, Michael said that about voice, because I even remember when, and you’ll remember when the iPad came out. And everyone thought that was also going to be the death of the in-wall touch panel. But actually, it’s not been that. Again, it’s just another way, plus voice, plus these tactile controls. I think it may be more that it’s being associated with the complexity of all the apps on our phones. It’s maybe being associated more with complexity than simplicity, which there is something to be said for a lighting cue or a lighting control, or a tactile control, and you just instinctively know how to use it, it’s labeled properly, you just go up to it, you know how to switch the room on and off, which is what everyone wants, whereas with a panel, there is still an element where you have to learn it, you have to learn how to navigate it. So I think there’s also that, that plays into this.
Rob Stott: Right. Right.
Michael Short: Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that kind of struck me with this, and again, I don’t want to rip into sort of the article too much, but the closing around the future being multimodal, I would challenge this and say, well… I don’t know if that is the future. That’s what we do now. It’s what we’ve been doing for years. My home, your home, the biggest homes that we do, the spaces that Crestron are in. We use keypads, we use voice, we use automation, we use sensing, we touch, we feel. That is… That is everything that’s currently happening. And it feels like potentially the next phase of this story is more like, okay, we know that this multimodal is actually what’s available right now, but what is next? And we’re all having conversations about AI, which again, I don’t think we should talk about on here because God, everyone is, but.
Rob Stott: Yeah.
Michael Short: That potentially is what’s actually next is how do all these come together and seamlessly work for the customer and for the end user and how does the AI layer add onto that because right now all our homes are using touch, voice, sensing, automation, environmental control in one way or another.
Rob Stott: Yeah, I and to your point that probably a future conversation. Certainly that’s I think that’s a topic worthy of its own discussion for sure. But I know I mentioned this sort of at the top of the conversation. And I want to give you the chance to like d do you think there’s any correlation? I again kind of biased as a parent and thinking about trying to limit screen-time. I know that is such a big talking point in the parental community of wanting to reduce like this access to screens and looking at a screen. Do you think that has any impact or like reason why this is or am I just making a leap as a sensitive parent here?
Michael Short: I think, and I probably shouldn’t say this, our screens are not that much fun. I mean that in the nicest way in terms of, you know, my touchscreen in this house, I love it because I’m a geek and I control my home, my wife goes there and presses the button.
Rob Stott: Fair. No. I get what you’re saying.
Michael Short: Two or three times a day maybe to pick some music or to put the shades up. They’re not that entertaining. And maybe I’m wrong, Giles. I don’t know what you think, but I just, I don’t know whether that is a correlation. I could see it with the phone, you know, because if we’re controlling and using the Crestron Home app on your phone, then, you know, I sit down on the sofa sometimes and open my phone to control the light in the room because the remote’s somewhere else and you pick up your phone and your kids see you on the phone. Yeah, that’s, that’s not, that’s not good. But the actual touchscreen. I think it’s maybe a stretch. But Giles, I don’t know. What did your gut say with that?
Giles Sutton: No. Yeah, I agree. I’m not sure it is a screen-time thing. I think it’s more a simplicity thing. I think in some ways it’s more being associated with the multiple apps to navigate and a steep learning curve. I’m not sure it’s a screen-time issue. I agree with Michael. Yeah, I think they’re not that much fun, but that illustrates the functional nature of them. And at the end of the day, I do hear a lot from people: We just want simplicity. We don’t need a system. We don’t need a light control system. Just want simple switches. But there’s a point where simplicity, in the pursuit of simplicity, it suddenly becomes complicated. There’s a tipping point. And like, say, an open plan living area where you have a dining room, a dining area, maybe you have a living space, you have a kitchen, then you have outdoor lighting. Think how many lighting zones you have in that one space, how many places you will need to have rocker switches and dimmers. If that’s simplicity I don’t think that’s what people would view as very easy to use at all so that I think that’s where it’s really where people are sort of associating it where that’s a tactile switch, that’s a rocker switch, they understand how those work, but in general day-to-day life, that is a nightmare to use, when you have multiple switches everywhere.
Rob Stott: No, makes sense. And hey, at the very least, comforting to me as the parent that it’s not it’s not that at the very least. So no, I appreciate you both. And maybe another parent gets comforted in hearing that as well. It’s like just one less conversation because it happens at school, like it’s everywhere, man. So you know, let’s remove it from this conversation and move on. But one thing I know too is that it’s all of these discussions, it’s great. People write words, they have these discussions like this. And talk about, you know, the death of the touchscreen or however you want to phrase it and clickbaity type you know approach to get people to read your opinion. There’s data out there, I’m sure. And, you know, you guys, so where does it actually lie as far as, you know, there’s all this discussion around, you know, touch panels going away. Are they?
Michael Short: Totally, totally. So I actually was looking at some of our data this morning, not particularly for this call, just as part of internal conversations. And they are certainly not going away. for Crestron. When we look at the number of touchscreens per project, when we look at the number of touchscreen sales that we’re making, it is a category that is extremely strong for us and is growing. So we’re not seeing that in the homes that we’re working on. I actually feel like from a dealer’s standpoint, for them, it is a product that they can suggest and utilise in multiple areas. It’s a great opportunity to put a solution in multiple places. So from our data, I know that we’re not seeing it decline. I know that we’ve just moved to our new 80 series. And again, we’re seeing amazing trajectory in that product line as well. So I know our data isn’t saying that. From the design-build standpoint, Giles, are you getting, do you get much pushback from designers and architects on, can’t put an ugly touchscreen, I think our touchscreens are beautiful, by the way, but do you ever get that sense that they don’t want that or is it a bit like well we know that we’re going to have to put a TV on a wall and in many cases I know they might hide it but touchscreens I believe are quite aesthetically pleasing in many styles of homes but what do you hear?
Giles Sutton: I mean, it’s not so much on the touchscreens. I think the touchscreens, there’s an acceptance that you need to have them in certain areas of the home. Again, that’s why it’s surprising to see this article, I think, from our standpoint. There’s an acceptance that you need to have them in certain areas of the home. We don’t get a lot of pushback on that. I think that the area that the specifiers, the designers really look at is the keypad, the lighting keypad. One where they’re really concerned about the number, the finish of that, the look and feel, and I think that’s where we have great options, both from our own keypad offering, plus working with partners as well. So I’d also just say in terms of what you quoted in terms of touchscreen sales, we’ve seen not just from within more other channel manufacturers, that may have started in voice that have then evolved, but we’ve also seen from sort of those IoT, more sort of consumer-based products that have started with voice, like Google and Amazon, have now sort of evolved, then have touchscreen offerings. So it shows that there is demand for those, I would say, across the board. But yeah, I think our touchscreens are beautiful. I think when it comes to touchscreens, I think there is opportunity also for innovation. I think that’s also something we need to think about. There are things that we can borrow from the iPhone in terms of facial recognition, maybe near-field technology. There are things where I think the touchscreen still has room to evolve to actually then add more, there’s more use cases around it in the home. Personalization to different users as they can walk up to it and different family members, different access levels, you know, from a guest through to a homeowner. So I think there’s more that we can do with a touchscreen to make it more useful as well as maybe there’s things to, you know, evolving it into other areas. You know, as we said earlier, AI could be a whole separate conversation if we wanted it to be. But there’s ways that there are certainly things that from the more consumer IoT world that I just mentioned, there are some very useful things to those touchscreens that we use in terms of bringing in recipes and how long it’s going to take you on your commute to the office and things like that maybe can start to come into the pro channel.
Rob Stott: Yeah. And I’m glad you mentioned all that because I think that gets to, you know, for anyone that sees these types of commentaries or maybe just natur inherently has these opinions of themselves out there around touchscreens in the home. You know, that it get what everything you just mentioned kind of gets to how, whether it’s you know, someone from your team or an integrator out there, how to approach those professionals or the homeowner. To you know, almost alleviate those concerns or just help them make sense of why this type of technology, you know, is necessary might be the word you want to use, right? But like you know, it is something that makes sense to have in this home, you know, or in the project that you’re working on because of all of the ways that, you know, a couple of tactile switches aren’t going to be able to do that. Today, you know, God knows who knows with AI and technology advancements, right? But like that Those types of things are only possible right now with the technology that you guys have and you know, putting these touch panels within a home.
Michael Short: Hopefully. Totally, I think Giles mentioned one thing earlier on with regards to security cameras and being able to view cameras on a screen. So when you’re having that conversation with customers, especially when you think of you walk into a lobby or your front porch or whatever it might be on the scale of homes. Now in many homes, there’s a light switch, there’s a security camera screen, there’s a number pad to set your alarms. There’s all these devices on the wall. This can be replaced by the touchscreen that can do cameras, it can do your security pins, it can do your lights, it can do your goodbye, your welcome scenes, it can be set just for your home screen. At night it can light up for you when you come in through the front door so you can see it. It can be all these great things at the front door. So when Giles mentions cameras at the start of this is cool. That is a huge advantage of a touchscreen in that space. Then in other areas of the home, for me, it’s all about it being felt like this is like the heartbeat of the room. At any point, it doesn’t replace the keypads and the light switches as you first walk into the room to activate a lighting scene, to activate on/off or make a change. That’s fine. That can be on a five-button keypad and can control lots of things. But when you’re in your big open plan kitchen, and you’re entertaining guests and people want to select music or you want to click a scene or you want to search for something or you want to page to the kids who are upstairs in a different room. You can only do that from a panel on the wall that has access to these things and that is why you pay for a professional smart home to get all that stuff centered on that beautiful singular screen. So it is a conversation that hopefully everyone’s having because it’s important for me. And it’s one of the most exciting things that I think exists within a pro smart home. Your friends don’t have that. Your neighbor doesn’t have that. When they walk into the room, and I know it’s not all about showing off, it’s about lifestyle. When people walk in and they see a touchscreen on the wall, it’s like, whoa, what’s that? That’s cool. That’s great. I believe that’s part of the sale as well.
Rob Stott: Yeah, for sure. It’s that experience that it provides and it’s something that, you know, you hope someday we get to a point where you walk in and that is normal to see. Right. But right now it is that differentiator or just the thing that you know, it’s the cool to have. It is awesome. And something that makes you think, you know, something’s different about this space or this home and what you can do within it. But to kind of button it up. Like I feel like all of what we’ve talked about, you know, clearly there’s like a happy medium with all of this, but at the very least the headline should be that the death of the touchscreen is overstated, right? Right. This is not like a, you know, the touchscreen is dead, long live the touchscreen. Like, no, it’s here to stay and has a purpose and you know, something that we’ll certainly continue to see and you know, understand more about and I know too the use cases are going to evolve for this as well. Like for this technology as well. So to see all you talked about so many, Giles, so many use cases and things that make it different. I can’t even imagine, you know, three, five, ten years from now what these screens are going to be able to do within a home and you know, how we’ll be using them then ’cause I’m sure it’s just like AI and other technologies out there, it’s evolving every day. So it’ll be something to experience. But no, this was a cool conversation guys. I appreciate you diving into it. You know, allowing me to speak. I said no more, you know, talking about that, but I can’t not end a podcast with you two talking about accents. But no, I appreciate you know, sharing it all and you know, diving into it ’cause it’s one, you know, hey, we can have this conversation, but it’s certainly going to continue and you know, to have you guys as a voice out there, no pun intended there, talking about touchscreens. It is important. So thank you for that.
Michael Short: Thank you.
