Lost in time and space
I came across the paper while researching something else entirely. It was a peer-reviewed study on smoking cessation, and I expected it to have nothing to say to me professionally. I was wrong. When researchers asked habitual smokers what they feared most about quitting, the answers bypassed nicotine entirely. They were not about cravings, withdrawal, or the physical pull of the habit. They were about disorientation. Participants described a fear of not knowing what to do with themselves, of losing the mechanism that punctuated their day, gave them a reason to step away from a difficult situation, and marked the passage of time from morning to evening. They were afraid of being lost, both in time and in space.
I sat with the idea for a while. What the paper described was a navigation system, calibrated to time and social space rather than geography. The moment I saw it in those terms, I could not stop seeing it everywhere.
The image that came to mind was immediate, drawn from years of thinking about aircraft and navigation. I studied aeronautical engineering, and waypointing is a fundamental navigational discipline to me. Allow me to explain...
Before the arrival of radar, pilots flying long distances relied on waypoints: fixed visual reference points along a route that confirmed position, maintained bearing, and gave the journey coherence. Without them, even a skilled pilot risked drift. Waypoints were not the destination. It was the assurance that progress was real and the next leg was knowable.
Consumer products function in a structurally similar way. People do not buy products solely for their specifications or stated capabilities. They integrate them into a personal navigation system, using them to orient themselves through the hours of the day, marking transitions, structuring focus, and managing the rhythm between engagement and recovery. This is an observable pattern in consumer behaviour, with direct consequences for how products should be conceived, specified, and built.
The question for innovators is not “what does this product do?” but rather “where does it take the user in their day, and how reliably does it get them there?”
Beyond the use case
Traditional product development places considerable effort into finding use cases and use scenarios. That work is necessary and valuable. Where it reaches a ceiling is in its capacity to explain the underlying human drive. A use case describes behaviour; it rarely explains the orientation that produces it.
The deeper frame is agency. When people depend on a product throughout the day, from the first moment of the morning through to the close of the evening, what they are seeking is a dependable sense of control over how time unfolds and how space is navigated. Predictability matters not as a technical specification but as a psychological condition.
This is the Control dimension of our ICP framework, a proprietary product innovation framework built from more than 20 years of keen observation and direct interaction with over 16,000 consumers across categories. The framework is organised around the three core drivers of product choice and ownership experience: Identity, Control, and Pleasure. Its purpose is to ground innovation in the whys: why people love certain products, why some products sustain that attachment over the years while others do not, and why consumers consistently gravitate to some offerings and pass over others. Waypointing is the operational expression of Control in that framework. Use case investigation tells you what people do with a product. Waypointing tells you what they depend on it for.
That shift in framing has a significant impact on product innovation.
Product innovation
Battery life is a useful illustration. From a use-case perspective, for a product used throughout the day, maybe eight to twelve hours of charge. That covers the day. From a waypointing perspective, however, the frame expands. A user who forgets to charge overnight, or whose device depletes slightly faster than expected, wakes to a product that cannot fulfil its orientation role that day. The waypointing answer is that it’s closer to 1.5 to 2 days of charge capacity, precisely because that buffer absorbs the imperfections of real daily life. The product remains dependable even when the owner is not at their most attentive.
Camera innovation illustrates the same principle from a different angle. The growing practice of embedding flash memory directly into cameras is often described as a way to protect against memory card failure or accidental erasure. Seen through a waypointing lens, the brief is more considered.
Built-in storage should be sufficient to bridge between sessions, to allow an owner to leave the house without a memory card and photograph with confidence, or to sustain a full day of intensive shooting at the volume typical for the target audience. Dependability and predictability targets will directly dictate how much memory should be built in.
The thinking goes beyond capturing images to offloading them to a computer for post-processing. Control expands the innovation horizon by drawing, capturing, transferring, and charging — while the camera sits idle — into a single underlying understanding of what the owner needs. From that vantage point, built-in memory, wireless transfer, and wireless charging present a coherent response to a single navigational need. Ideas of that kind, and much more, surface readily when the right question is being asked.
Reduced-risk products (nicotine products that heat, rather than burn tobacco in a device) introduce a further dimension. A heated tobacco session is shorter than a traditional cigarette, which creates moments of temporal asymmetry when users of both products socialise together. The synchronisation of shared ritual is a dimension of daily life that use case analysis may surface, but the profundity of the moment is easily lost. Approached through waypointing, it becomes a structural design consideration and a meaningful engineering challenge. Varying session duration to better match the social rhythm of those sharing the moment is precisely the kind of insight that waypointing surfaces and use case analysis alone may flag as not a priority, when in fact, it is very important.
Orientation lost
The relationship between intelligent automotive technology and the driver exemplifies waypointing tension in action. Owners consistently value systems that support their sense of agency at the wheel. The tension does not arise with the technology itself but with how it is presented: mainly through large, flat touchscreen interfaces that aggregate considerable volumes of information into a surface that is difficult to operate in a dynamic driving environment. The interface sits between the driver and the machine rather than serving as the link between them. Trust and operational fluency, both of which depend on a reliable sense of control, are diminished as a result.
The same structural issue runs through speculative personal technology more broadly. AR glasses, ambient computing devices, and AI-assisted hardware have largely been positioned around capability rather than orientation. They demonstrate what they can do before establishing where they belong in the owner’s day.
The Meta Ray-Ban glasses represent a considered response to the social identity tension around AR wearables, compressing the technology into a form that does not signal withdrawal from shared reality. Yet the product resolves one driver while leaving others unaddressed. The integrated camera brings an unresolved tension in control around surveillance, for the wearer and those within the field of view alike. A simple mechanism that allows the camera to be concealed when not in use would resolve that tension directly, giving both the wearer and bystanders a visible signal of intent. Even a capability-first product can secure its place in someone’s day once the control tension is addressed.
The pattern across these examples points to the same root cause: innovation that begins with capability rather than with the moments people need to navigate. Reversing that sequence is the work.
Innovate for time and space
The practical implication for innovation programmes is a shift in diagnostic priority. Rather than mapping use cases exhaustively, the more productive starting point is to ask what is missing from the user’s navigational system: which moments are underserved, poorly marked, or unnecessarily effortful. The answer defines the space for innovation more precisely than a feature comparison or a category benchmark.
Products are for people. A real understanding of how people move through their days brings the right features and customer benefits into focus. Waypointing changes the question being asked, and in doing so, changes what the answer makes possible.