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Webstock 2013: An Animating Spark

Tom Coates gives a talk at Webstock about how connected devices and data have the potential to transform our lives and spark new ideas. He argues that combining different technologies and data sources in new ways opens up a vast creative possibility space for new products. As an example, Coates discusses how connecting appliances in the home to the internet could imbue physical objects with new intelligence and functionality. However, he notes that futurists often oversell new technologies to impress, focusing on strange visions rather than practical applications that could improve people's lives today.

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AN ANIMATING SPARK BY Tom Coates @TOMCOATES Product Club Hello again! I’m unbelievably happy to be back at Webstock, and I hope you’re all happy to be here too! Are you enjoying yourselves?! I said, ARE YOU ENJOYING YOURSELVES?! Webstock is, without a doubt, my favourite event on the planet. And I think it’s important that you guys all realise how special a thing you’ve got going here. From the organisers, to my fellow speakers, to all of you guys, to New Zealand itself - everything here is exceptional: exceptionally brilliant, exceptionally welcoming and exceptionally fun. But those things aren’t really what makes me so happy to be back here in front of you for the FOURTH time. The reason that Webstock matters to me so much is the optimism, the positivity, the genuine feeling that the web and technology are thrilling, fantastic things that point to a better and ever more extraordinary world. That’s a feeling that for me exemplified the early web, and it was the reason that I got involved in this industry in the first place. But I sometimes think in the scrabbling for money and with the coming of the MBAs, quite a lot of the rest of the world has forgotten that joy. Well, this is where the optimists make our stand. This is where we push back, because everyone here has one thing in common - we want to make the world better, more fun, more creative, more inspiring. And every year I’m here I want to thank Mike, Tash, Deb and Ben for reminding us of that.
HELLO LONDON WEBSTOCK Hello Webstock!
TOM COATES WEB ENTHUSIAST PHOTO BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS So anyway, my name is Tom Coates, and I am a web enthusiast. I work primarily in New Product Development and Invention. Basically, what I do is look at the direction that technology is going, and then try to spot the product possibilities in that movement. When I work, I'm looking, on the whole, for things that can make people's lives more interesting, productive, or fun - and ideally help companies make some money in the process. This is a video from the Green Room of me sweating over this talk, with help, as ever, from the charming Clay Johnson.
I used to work for companies like Time Out, Yahoo and the BBC, but now I have my own little company with my business Partner Matt Biddulph. The company is called Product Club. We are young loners who champion the cause of the innocent, the hopeless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who exist above the law. Oh no, hang on, that’s [click] Knight Rider.
[Okay, enough of that...]
# besttalkever Oh and while I’m on the subject, I understand that it’s become very fashionable for people to suggest a hash tag so that while I’m talking, you guys can talk about my session on Twitter and elsewhere. So here’s the one I’ve come up with for you guys: If you could use that, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks. Right then, let’s get going...
149 .99 £ BPM 185lbs AAPL 3.5 149 .99 £ BPM So for the last few years I've been thinking and working and talking at conferences about the emerging web of data, and about how when we connect things together—when we recombine things—then extraordinary new possibilities emerge. I'm interested in the way that data on the web connects together, how sites and services spread outside the bounds of a web page and emerge in apps on iPads and iPhones, or connect to sites and services - even breaking free from the digital world and pushing into objects. I'm interested in how these individual connected components become more than the sum of their parts, with information flowing between them freely, layering the world in a a new network of cycling and recombinant data upon which we can all build, and which massively open up the realm of possibilities for creative work.
ROAD DYNAMIC TRANSPORT SEA RAIL AIR I believe this new network that is emerging has as much potential to transform the world of information as the transport and trading networks of the last few centuries have transformed the way we manufacture physical things - allowing us to specialise in what we produce, build upon the work of others and create more together than we could ever have done individually. In fact if there was one thing I wanted you to take away from this talk today, it would be that the possibility space for the new products we could make today is vast precisely because of the interconnections we’ve made. Take any two datasets or technologies and combine them and you have the potential seed of a new product or idea. Multiply the connected elements and your creative space explodes.
New Product Possibility Space n (All the technologies+All the data) I’ve had some trouble formulating this thought into one incredibly pithy statement, but this is I think a reasonable approximation... That the potential space of new product ideas at the moment is not simply about utilising any one particular new technology, or one particular new source of data. Its edges are defined by the sheer number of ways that they can be recombined.
Today though I want to talk about a specific interest of mine that I’ve been exploring for the last few years - the way that the network is starting to permeate the physical world, and how data, physical objects and even our environments are all starting to merge together. And in particular I’m going to be talking about a particular subset of that - connected appliances the home.
AN ANIMATING SPARK ELECTRICAL SPARKS STOCK FOOTAGE USED WITH PERMISSION I want you to think about the Network (by which I mean access to the internet, with all the streams of data and computation that could lie behind that simple connection) as an Animating Spark - a bit like Electricity, pervading objects and our environment, bringing new functionality to them, new intelligence, new life. I want you to consider what might be possible when all the computational and information possibilities of the internet are available to every device in the home, or on the street. Where the objects around you start manifesting a very limited amount of inteligence and agency and how you’ll feel about that.
ART BY BEN CRICK But most importantly, I want you to consider the idea for a moment that this vision of the future that I’m selling you isn’t a vision of the future at all. It’s a vision of /now/, just on the cusp of moving from theory and science fiction into the normal fabric of our lives, and that you guys are quite likely to be among the people who are going to be part of making it real. That’s why I’m here today, to get a room full of web people to think—not about what’s way out there—but about WHAT’S NEXT, what’s ALMOST HERE. How we make it REAL. And not in twenty years, but NOW. And yes, I very definitely WILL be talking about > CLICK <
..... Internet Fridges.
OUT OF THE LABS AND INTO THE SHOPS But first I want to contextualise things a bit - and talk about how we get things out of the labs and into the shops.
An uncharitable theory: The way we think about the future is betraying our present I have a theory. My theory is that Interaction Designers, academics and futurists (like — on occasion — myself) when exploring the more far-out possibilities of new technologies have one fundamental goal. And this goal is NOT to illustrate really practical things that you might want to bring into your home. We’re normally attempting to persuade. We’re attempting first and foremost to articulate why the technology that we’re exploring could be important in the future. We’re trying to show how world transformative it could be. And this comes with costs. You might get some people very enthusiastic about the promise of the technology, but you’re normally—in the short-term at least—over-selling its power. In your desire to impress, you build models of things that are extreme, fantastic, unusual, weird. Your desire fundamentally is to show how STRANGE the future will be. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that most of the time when you’re talking about the possibilities of technology in the future, the technology you talk about is EXPENSIVE and COMPLICATED. That means the concepts that we take on have to seem huge to seem like a reasonable use of the resources involved. The demonstrations made have to seem completely transformative. Science- fictional. Extraordinary. They're massive performance pieces. They're concept cars. [CLICK] But they are not, on the whole, practical things that you'd want to bring into your home.
Real-World Web Everyware Pervasive Computing Tangible Computing The Internet of Things Graspable Interfaces Embodied Interaction Ubiquitous Computing The Web of Things Physical Computing Ambient Intelligence Spimes Haptic Computing Things that think Of course this has not stopped those of us in the technology industry or our peers in academia thinking about what the world of the future might be like. Far from it. We've spent many years exploring some of the ways that the network might penetrate physical objects - with ideas like Pervasive Computing, Spimes, the Internet of Things, Ubiquitous Computing, Everyware, Embodied Interaction, Tangible Computing and many others. Two authors of extremely brilliant books in this area are here with us today, and I owe them a huge debt. Adam Greenfield’s Everyware is a seminal deconstruction of the possibilities of computing in everything. And our own Bruce Sterling’s book on Shaping Things has left its mark on pretty much everyone’s work since.
An uncharitable theory: The way we think about the future is betraying our present But I think we’ve actually hit a transition in the world of connected devices and appliances, and this is what I mean when I say the way we’re thinking about the future is betraying our present. It’s my belief that we’ve become so invested in the way out visions of what ubiquitous and networked computing COULD be, that we’ve not noticed that we’re actually on the cusp of making it real. I’m here to try and convince you that the network is already more and more penetrating everyday objects, that there are tangible and practical applications to ubiquitous computing - that it’s not just a weird joke or bit of future-think any more- and most importantly that the people who will take things forward, who will take on the torch passed from earlier thinkers and make them manifest are PEOPLE LIKE YOU.
PEAK OF INFLATED EXPECTATIONS PLATEAU OF PRODUCTIVITY SLOPE OF ENGLIGHTENMENT TECHNOLOGY TRIGGER TROUGH OF DISILLUSIONMENT So this is a very crudely drawn version of the Gartner Hype Cycle, which I’m sure many of you know. It illustrates their sense of how new technologies work. Essentially, they turn up, everyone gets terribly excited about it, then nothing happens with it and there’s a huge crash of interest, and then finally there’s a more sustainable and gradual incorporation of the ideas into the real world. Now, most of the grandiose thinking happens in this first area here. And I think many people still think that’s where this whole network enabled home stuff is. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s already here. Struggling it’s way up the Slope of Enlightenment.
$ And fundamentally this is because the price has dropped. When the cost of network functionality - that’s the hardware that helps you get online AND the cost of the network while you are online - halves and then halves again and then keeps on halving, we no longer need to keep thinking about the grand performance videos and the sci-fi future. Previously to sell ourselves on the promise of networked devices we needed videos full of perfect, shiny, rich families who use virtual reality and pervasive reactive glass to swim peacefully through an idyllic life of comfy tope sweaters, picnics and football matches, working calmly and effortlessly on nearby panes of reactive glass while laughing at sunsets and hugging each other. But now we can look to the everyday devices and appliances that surround real people every day. We can think instead about what extra value we can create — what problems we can solve — if all of the extra hardware we need to bring a dishwasher or an oven online costs five dollars. Or a dollar. Or fifty cents. And it doesn’t have to be grandiose. It doesn’t even have to be - initially at least - that useful. It just has to produce more than fifty cents of value through the lifetime of the device.
Now often, when I talk about the inevitable changes that happen with the cheapening of technologies I talk about the LCD clock and how it went from expensive to ubiquitous in a decade - from being a “sophisticated value adding extra” to costing more to REMOVE from pre-manufactured components than to simply accept that every device would have an LCD clock in it. More recently, I heard about another example of this kind of thing from Jack Schulze in London. Apparently, the need for tiny vibrating motors for mobile phones from companies like Nokia and Apple has led to the cost of that component dropping catastrophically. They, again, can be stamped out for pennies. This has, in turn, led to an explosion in Chinese toys with tiny motors in them. They’re using the same components that were in Nokia phones to bring life to things for kids.
ALIBABA.COM FOR ENDLESS COMPONENTS If you’re at all interested in this kind of thing and want to have your mind blown, I can very much recommend going to have a look at this site - Alibaba.com It’s a B2B marketplace that sells everything from components for clocks and tiny vibrating motors to “sexy leopard print dresses”. Essentially it’s a direct access to the manufacturing behemoths of Shenzhen and the far east. If you’re looking for a few thousand dirt cheap ANYTHINGS, this is the place to go. My point with all this is that network components and computing components are getting almost vanishingly cheap now. And when something gets that cheap, you can start adding it to devices and appliances without having to make a big deal about it. Again, if it costs you 50c to buy the components, they only have to provide your users with a tiny amount of added value to make incorporating it worthwhile.
PROCESSOR http://www.bigboardlist.com/ Another example... This is a picture of a Raspberry pi. It's a board that—as a technical enthusiast— you can buy for $25 that includes an ENTIRE linux computer. This whole thing by the way is about the size of an thin iPhone with a few blobs sticking out of it. The actual computer, by the way is the little dot in the middle. The rest of it is the power socket, USB port, video and audio leads, ethernet port, HDMI port etc. etc.. It's powerful enough to run a full 1080p HD screen, and it’s cheap enough now that it's prime hobbyist material. Remember this is $25 for an end consumer buying *one* instantiation. The price drops and drops if you buy in bulk... There are dozens of these out there at the moment. Joshua Schachter, the creator of delicious, maintains a list of them at bigboardlist.com - again, if you want your mind blown, go and check this stuff out.
And then there’s wireless connectivity. This is the Kindle Paperwhile, the classic example of a device that costs around a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars that comes with ALWAYS ON, PERPETUAL, WORLD-WIDE, FREE WIRELESS INTERNET. This isn’t a weird anomaly. This is Amazon’s biggest selling product. Now the internet is subsidized clearly, but it’s subsidized because it makes them more money elsewhere. And it’s a piece of hardware that you can buy for $100 and which includes LIFETIME, AND POTENTIALLY WORLDWIDE network access. This is ENORMOUS. This is a HUGE CHANGE. Given how much prices for components like these drop, it's now reasonable to look at any powered object at around the $100 mark and start asking yourself why it's NOT online. More specifically you can ask yourself about what is the minimum set of networked features that you could add to an appliance in the home to make it worth an additional couple of bucks. Because, if we're not right there now, then we will be in a couple of years...
MUNDANE COMPUTING & MUJICOMP Okay, so we’ve talked about how components are getting super cheap, and that means that we no longer need to think about such grandiose visions of what the future of connected devices might look like. So what’s a less grandiose vision? What’s a more likely, simpler, cheaper version of using the network in the home to make little incremental improvements to our lives? There are two concepts that I've come across in the wild which I think, most accurately describe what I'm getting at - and what I think constitutes a significant transition in our understanding of the kinds of networked devices we should be thinking about. They are Mundane Computing and MujiComp.
CHRIS HEATHCOTE TECHNOLOGIST PHOTO BY STML USED WITH THE HOPE THAT THEY’LL BOTH FORGIVE ME Mundane Computing—or at least the concept of Mundanecomp—is a phrase I found from the work of Chris Heathcote. This is Chris on a train. He threw out this concept in a blog post about a year ago as an off-the-cuff comment, but it’s stuck with me ever since.
Chris Heathcote Mundanecomp & the nu-DIY “ A lot of time and effort is spent on the extremes of life - going to new places, finding new things and people. But most of life isn't like that. Most of the time, people are in routines, doing the same thing day after day. It's not a bad thing. It's life. And I'm interested in how technology can make some of these daily moments better. ” Chris gave some context before he explained his specific problem - A lot of time and effort is spent on the extremes of life - going to new places, finding new things and people. But most of life isn't like that. Most of the time, people are in routines, doing the same thing day after day. It's not a bad thing. It's life. And I'm interested in how technology can make some of these daily moments better. Now I don’t think there’s anything here that anyone here would disagree with in our practice. In fact, in digital design and on the web, we’d might consider this a nice but fairly obvious sentiment. But somehow in the world of network enabled physical appliances, this actually feels pretty radical. Give up on your ubicomp, stop being so bloody HIGH CONCEPT, Chris is saying. Do something useful. I mean, why WOULDN’T you?
IMPOLITE DEVICES WASHING MACHINE ILLUSTRATION BY TOM COATES WHY DON’T CREATIVE COMMONS BUELPOVE M YO E ! E?! B E E P ! For Chris, the problem that he came across was a really simple one that I'm sure a number of you are familiar with. It's the device that BEEPS. He has a washing machine. When it finishes washing it beeps. And then it beeps again. And then it beeps again, and again. For an hour. I'm done, it cries out into the abyss. I'm finished! WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME? And Chris is in another part of his house, thinking to himself, "Well I don't really want to just get up right now and deal with this. I want to sit here and play Minecraft or read Don Quixote. I get the point. You're done. But that's all I really needed to know right now."
IMPOLITE DEVICES WASHING MACHINE ILLUSTRATION BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS I DRIED YOUR DAMN CLOTHES FOR YOU. BUT DON’T FOR ONE SECOND THINK I’M HAPPY ABOUT IT. Another example, my mother up in Norfolk has a clothes dryer. It does the same thing. I HAVE DRIED YOUR DAMN CLOTHES, it shouts across the house like a domestic dalek. DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. It doesn't actually shout these things of course. It beeps. Again and again. And it WILL. NOT. SHUT. UP.
IMPOLITE DEVICES SCOOBA TIMELAPSE VIDEO BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS In my own life, I went out and bought myself a scooba, which is like a Roomba except that it washes hardwood floors. I did it because scoobas are cool and brilliant and awesome. And 99% of the time, my scooba is brilliant and happy. And then every so often it gets caught on some wires while it's cleaning and it starts beeping. And this incredibly disappointed voice shouts across the house. "Scooba is stuck. Please move Scooba to a new location and press start to restart". And it needs me to do it at that precise moment. And if I don't, it will just keep beeping plaintively. Chris and I agree that our needy devices need to take a stress pill and calm the hell down. And we can't help but think that this functionality - of a device shouting into the abyss - is something that could be improved with simple, cheap network technology. Now again, at this point I want to reassure you. I am going to get to some slightly more inspiring examples shortly. I’m just saying - why don’t we, for a change, start with the mundane and work our way UP to the really good stuff...
CHRIS’ SOLUTION SIMPLE LAPTOP APP ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS HEATHCOTE CREATIVE COMMONS Chris’s proposed solution here is a little app that sits on his laptop or on his mobile phone that he can use to check the status of the device at a distance, and with which he can tell it to shut the hell up. And at one level, that's really all that Mundane Computing is about. It’s looking into the possibilities of making the devices in our homes work more effectively in VERY SIMPLE, CHEAP WAYS, through the use of the network. I'll talk more about how we could solve some of these little problems later in this talk.
MATT SOLUTION CHRIS’JONES LORD OF DESIGN FICTIONS SIMPLE LAPTOP APP ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS HEATHCOTE PHOTO TAKEN BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS COMMONS CREATIVE The other concept that I particularly like comes from Matt Jones and Jack Schulze of the London design company BERG, responsible for (among other things) Little Printer [CLICK]
Can I ask how many of you have heard of Little Printer? And how many of you have bought one? Well then, it’s just as well I’m here to tell you that Little Printer remains AVAILABLE AT BERGCLOUD.COM
株式会社良品計画 MUSIC PLAYER ONLINE ENVIRONMENTAL SENSORS ONLINE 5% DOOR CONTROLS ONLINE 10% PARTICULATE SENSORS ONLINE 15% IPAD CONNECTIVITY ONLINE 20% PUBLISHING TO DASHBOARD ONLINE 25% PERSONALISING SYSTEMS ONLINE 30% ACCESSING YOUR CLOUD FILES ONLINE 35% 40% MUJICOMP ONLINE 45% 無印良品 50% MUJICOMP VERSION ONE BY TOM COATES 無印良品 無印良品 sudo create useful object cd ../network/ 55% 無印良品 無印良品 connecting to internet 60% your object is online 65% animating spark active 70% ---------------------- 75% NETWORK SIGNAL ---------------------- 80% ---------------------- 85% ---------------------- 90% ---------------------- 95% ---------------------- ---------------------- ---------------------- Anyway, Matt’s concept is MUJI COMP. Now, I know that Muji don’t actually have any stores in New Zealand, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it. It's a Japanese company that sells, essentially, stripped down, simple, elegant bits of furniture and homewares. They're not particularly expensive. They’re particularly known for being pared down and brandless. And they are very nice... Matt's point when he was talking about Mujicomp was primarily about the aesthetics of the company and his desire to translate that to network-enabled computing. [CLICK] He described 'Mujicomp' as "SEXY AND DESIRABLE UBICOMP - ABLE TO BE APPRECIATED AS CULTURAL DESIGN OBJECTS RATHER THAN TECHNOLOGY - TASTEFUL, SIMPLE, CLEAR, CLEAN, CONTEMPORARY AND AFFORDABLE - ABLE TO BE INVITED INTO THE HOME." All of this is a noble goal, but for me that quote skips over some other aspects of things that are bought from shops like Muji. It’s not just that they’re beautiful and simple. It’s not just that they’re able to be invited into the home. It’s that they are, of course, *useful*, *normal*, *simple* /and/ stylish versions of things that already exist in the world. Housewares. Furniture. Technology. Beautiful and well-designed, sure, but also NORMAL. MUNDANE.
mundane adj. 1. Lacking interest or excitement; dull. 2. Of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one. Again, I think it’s in this mundane realm where the greatest short-term potential for networked appliances will happen. In fact, I think it’s borderline inevitable, because the cost is starting to approach trivial. And I think mundane computing is potentially a really interesting phrase to use in this context. I don’t think it’ll catch on because I don’t think it’s that sexy, but I still think it’s an important concept for us to think about right now. It’s about moving from PERFORMANCE towards Non-flashy, practical integrations between physical objects and the virtual. But it’s also about being a part of the web that’s also a part of the world. For the few of you who don’t know, the word mundane derives from the Latin Mundi meaning universe or world.
MAPPA MUNDI ‘OF THE WORLD’ CREATIVE COMMONS USED WITH PERMISSION For the few of you who don’t know, the word mundane derives from the Latin Mundi meaning universe or world. I’m sure I could find some way to make this relevant to the core of the talk, but mostly I just put this in because it makes me happy.
FIGHTING THE FUTURISTS... So I’ve set my goals - mundane, practical computing integrated into the home in ways that solve small and potentially large problems, are attractive and simple and add little to the cost. And in a moment I’ll give you some sense of how I think we shoudl approach building these things. But before I do that, I feel like I have to shut down a few of the more grandiose or ridiculous villains of the piece. So let’s just get right down to it. The NETWORK ENABLED FRIDGE...
DOES MY FRIDGE NEED TWITTER? FROM FUCK YEAR INTERNET FRIDGE FIND MORE AT FUCKYEAHINTERNETFRIDGE.TUMBLR.COM Okay. Right. Let’s start off with a recommendation. There is an amazing tumblr account out there called Fuck Yeah Internet Fridge, mostly assembled by Roo Reynolds. It is spectacular and you should all read it as soon as this talk is over. This is one of many appliances out there which *already exists* manufacturered and is being sold by companies like LG, Samsung, Panasonic and General Electric. If their interest doesn’t already point to a future of cheap utility networking then I don’t know what does. Unfortunately the vast majority of these internet improvements are useless. This fridge, for example, not only has skeuomorphic replicas of things that you could just do with pen and paper and post-its or magnets, but it also has it’s own Twitter client, AP News Interface and way of accessing Pandora. This is a new object that has come out into the world recently and makes no sense whatsoever. What person with an incredibly expensive futuristic fridge with a screen on it doesn’t have a laptop or an iPad or a smartphone? What person decides to read the news on their future fridge? Or post a Twitter message? This message seems to need to be stated and restated. Having something attached to the internet does not mean that it needs to have a browser on it. In fact it doesn’t even mean that it needs to have a screen attached to it, for a whole range of reasons, including simply cost. If there’s one thing that holds back network enabled devices in my opinion, it’s the decision to put bloody touch screens on them. This is what I mean about price and performance. If something costs a lot, then you have to advertise its benefits a lot. It has to perform ‘Internetness’. But as the price drops, you can just start thinking about how to use network access to make something $5 better. And it genuinely doesn’t matter if the benefit is minor, if the cost is even less.
>15 years Here’s another reason why that fridge makes no sense. Can any of you guess the approximate life-time use of a fridge in the home? How often people replace them? I don’t have super accurate figures on this at the moment, if I’m honest, but the best evidence I can get is that in the US, most fridges last in excess of FIFTEEN YEARS before they’re replaced.
This is a computer from fifteen years ago. On such a computer, if you were lucky to have access to the internet at all, you’d be reading about the death of Princess Diana and the Spice Girls would have just got to number one with their first ever single. If ubiquitous computing and pervasive networking were popular then in the way they’re conceived of at the moment, this is what you’d have stapled to the front of your dishwasher right now. I want you to think for a moment about the upgrade cycle in technology versus the upgrade cycle in other areas of our lives, and consider for a moment what it would mean to have a fridge with a block of computronium on the front that is out of date before you’ve got the device home. You’ve got that in your head? Excellent, then I can show you this...
A DAY MADE OF GLASS BY CORNING WHICH I WILL NOW PROCEED TO UNCHARITABLY MOCK Now I don’t know how many of you have seen this video before. Many people find it incredibly exciting and thrilling and progressive. I’m going to go in a slightly different direction. I’m just going to take the living piss out of it, which is maybe a bit unfair since Corning is in no way alone in this vision of the future. it’s a future in which pretty much every surface in the home is covered with display and touchscreen technology. From the bathroom mirror to the kitchen counter. But let’s be serious for a moment. How often do people refit their homes? How often do people gut their kitchens and install brand new services and counters and cabinets? How often do people build new bathrooms? NOT VERY OFTEN. Until such a point that the stuff here is VANISHINGLY cheap, and as easy to replace as popping out a panel and popping in a new one, who on earth is going to build this functionality into their home. My brother just bought a flat. His bathroom is mouldy! My bathroom mirror gets dirty enough already without me rubbing my fingers on it. And honestly, do you WANT people writing emails on the wall just after they’ve gone to the loo? I don’t want your lavatory fingers anywhere near me, frankly. Sorry! And honestly WHO HAS THE TIME to knock off a quick e-mail while they’re brushing their teeth in the morning that wouldn’t be better spent , you know, brushing your teeth? Honestly we’ll probably see this kind of built in massive touchscreen glass display in public places with massive footfall - say in public places, as street furniture, in high profile office spaces or whatever, but in the home for the foreseeable future, this is just NOT GOING TO HAPPEN...
A HOME’S SHEARING LAYERS BY STEWART BRAND FROM ‘HOW BUILDINGS LEARN’ REDRAWN BY TOM COATES, CREATIVE COMMONS 20 years Skin 30-300 years Structure 7-15 years Services 3-30 years Spaceplan 1 day-1 month Stuff Eternal Site This is a classic (or a terrible cliché) depending on who you ask - it’s Stewart Brand’s diagram of the layers of a home. There’s the site at the bottom, then the structure of the building, the skin of the facade and decoration, and then within it, in turn, the service layer, the spaceplan and then eventually the STUFF. I’m pretty sure in his mind that human beings constitute ‘stuff’. The most important thing from his perspective is that each of these layers moves at a different rate. The land underneath is unmoving, the core structure and services move slowly, large furniture and appliances move a bit more quickly - but we’re still talking years here. The fastest layer is the ‘stuff’ that moves in and out of the house pretty quickly. When we’re talking about appliances and structure though, there’s pretty clearly a disjunct between the speed that they get replaced and the speed of technological change... This is a fascinating design problem that I believe there are ways to route around, but let’s be clear, shiny interfaces like Corning Glasses embedded in counter tops and bathroom mirrors? It just doesn’t make any sense.
EVERYTHING THE NETWORK TOUCHES So that’s a few of the things that we can rightly throw away as being ridiculous or overblown or performance pieces? What approaches would get us towards some simple practical Mundane Computing today?
MATT ROLANDSON AMMUNITION GROUP PHOTO TAKEN BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS This is Matt Rolandson who heads up the UX and Strategy team at a product and service design company called Ammunition in San Francisco. He’s one of my favourite people because he works in this area AND he’s sensible. The Ammunition Group, if you’re interested, worked on the Nook e-reader for Barnes and Noble and the Beats by Dr Dre headphone line among loads of other work for HP, Microsoft, Nike and Panasonic. His fundamental principle is so simple it seems obvious, but you wouldn’t know that based on some of the products coming out of the design chambers of major appliance manufacturers and it’s such a simple principle that I’m determined to push it to a wider audience. I’ve also slightly bastardised it, so if you don’t agree with it, it’s my fault.
Core Principle “ You should use the network to amplify a tool’s core purpose, not to be another web browser or Twitter client. ” The Internet !=A web browser This is that fundamental principle, that I think really underlies everything else I’m going to talk about. That you should use the network to AMPLIFY a tool’s CORE PURPOSE. Let me give you a quick example - and apologies to those of you who have seen me talk before, because I use this one a lot...
TOM 185lbs I’ve talked about the Withings networked bathroom scale at Webstock before. It really is one of my favourite network-enabled devices in my home. I weigh myself regularly, ignore all the numbers on the screen and then go and eat a chocolate bar and drink a can of coke. Apart from the fact that it’s utterly incapable of fixing my total lack of self control, this to me is a perfect illustration of the kind of Mundane, useful, practical network-enabled device that I’m talking about. Since I was last here, they’ve announced they’re launching a new device that comes with heart-rate monitors and air-quality sensors to capture information and instrument your home.
#1 It’s unbelievably simple to get it onto the network in the first place. Now I refer to the Withings scale not just because in and of itself it’s a lovely object, although it totally is. I refer to it because to me it epitomises a whole range of intelligent networked product design decisions. I’m going to start by running through a few of the really simple ones... The first one is pretty simple. Still some products out there, the set-up process is beyond painful. The Withings scale is pretty good, but I actually still think there’s more scope here.
OBJECT CODE DONE WITH SIM There are, I think, a whole range of ways to get objects onto the internet, but my personal guess is that medium term, it may be mobile phone networks and sim cards that own the networked device space - at least if they pull their heads out of their ample buttocks. For example, I talked earlier about the out of the box experience of the Kindle - immediate, worldwide network access. And as prices drop, perhaps that can apply to more things. Imagine buying objects that are online as soon as you plug them in, where the only work you have to do is type in a code into a web site to claim it. As prices drop, this will be entirely practical... What might it be like to say that every object had a sim card in it?
#2 It still works when the device is not online. It’s just much better when it’s online. This second principle is pretty self explanatory. Networked objects are awesome, but do you really want to not be able to get into your house or open your oven or fridge because your wifi’s gone down? No. Mundane computing in the near future is a progressive enhancement to objects, and the more fundamental to your life, the more the core functions have to also be achievable without connectivity.
#3 The bulk of the intelligence is not in the device, but in the cloud. On the internet. This is, I think, a huge one. We talked a bit about the shearing layers of technology and the different rates of redundancy for different bits of technology and infrastructure in the home. The technology IN the device is hard to upgrade. It’s complicated and expensive and gets even more so if it’s in the built fabric of the home. But the intelligence on the network can be upgraded easily and effectively at pretty much any time. This also means that the data that you’re collecting and the intelligence of the service can easily be connected with other services around the web. Can trigger actions elsewhere. So what do you leave in the device? Clearly you have the bit that connects to the network. But in addition, you put in the sensors that tell you about the object and actuators that allow the network to control the object. This means that—essentially—the object is just an endpoint of the network. It’s a data source and something that can be triggered by activity online. And that’s all. Your question then is just what sensors to put into the device.
#4 The interface for the device isn’t embedded in its surface, but is wherever you need it. This follows on from the previous one. If the intelligence is online, and can be upgraded as and when necessary, then the interface that you use to interact with the data is everywhere. So what is the interface for a network-enabled fridge or dishwasher? Is it embedded in your kitchen counter top or on the front of your fridge? No, of course not.
iPAD TABLET COMPUTER AS SOLD BY APPLE, INC. I’m afraid it’s just these. Lots of these. The future is, in my opinion, not massive interfaces covering every surface, but a few multi-purpose screens detached from the objects they control. These are the screens you have in your home that give you access to all of the data and functions that the devices provide... I find this really interesting - a simple, cut-down interface on the object, and then a much larger, more powerful, simpler, clearer and more elegant interface for more complex functions available on the web, on your tablet, on your phone. This makes WAY more sense... Which is not to say that you don’t want to have any interfaces on anything - just that they’re less likely to be high powered touchscreens that run Pandora, and more things that enhance one of their core functions.
iPAD TABLET COMPUTER AS SOLD BY APPLE, INC. I knocked this up a couple of days ago to illustrate the point I was making - a UI that wouldn’t go out of date, where most of the logic and intelligence is in the cloud and which uses the wasted space on the front of a fridge to *ambiently* keep you up to date. It’s not a touch screen particularly. It’s just using the fridge surface for one of the uses it has a lot - ambient information. It’s not a LEAN-FORWARD fridge. It’s a background fridge. This version is probably a bit intrusive and I may be confusing you a little by going into this much detail on a sideline. I imagine you’d maybe have a glowing touch sensor next to the clock to turn the display on or off or to dim the lights or something. But I found it a useful design thought experiment, so I thought maybe you guys would too...
#5 The best way you can enhance an object is to make it easier to control or understand. And this, fundamentally, is where the function comes in. Where the ‘amplification’ comes in. The best way that you can enhance an object is to make it easier to control or understand. This is WHY we want network connectivity in our devices so we can pull information from them, and so we can control them from a distance.
MUNDANE COMPUTING A DEVICE SHOULD PROVIDE THESE SERVICES I should be able to ask: Where is the device? To whom does it belong? What is it currently doing? How has it been used historically? How much power has it used / is it using How well is it currently functioning? I should be able to: Control (only safe) basic functions Receive alerts when something goes wrong Receive alerts when a job is completed I’ve been thinking a bit recently about what mundane web services any physical object I buy or rent should be able to provide if I wanted them - both through a simple web interface - things that I myself should be able to directly ask of the device - but also things that I should be able to let other people or things ask it through an API. And this is the list that I came up with. It’s a pretty simple list and frankly not particularly complicated, but I want you to think for a moment about what could be possible if EVERY appliance over $100 could do all of this stuff - and later, every appliance over $20. They’re things that fall really into two clumps - sensors in the device recording information, and some form of actuators in the device that trigger behaviours. The first two are derived from Bruce Sterlings concept of a spime - an object that reports its location in place and spime, is uniquely identified in some way and knows to whom it belongs. The information about what the device does and how well it’s working provides both a car-like service schedule, giving you the capacity to understand how a device is working, what’s going wrong with it, what needs to be fixed, serviced or replaced, information on power consumption and more. The last few are to solve those aggravating aspects of having to be near a device to control it or deal with its alerts or problems. I’ll show you a few of the things you coudl build upon those in a minute.
Let’s look a little more deeply at some of these basics. Simple dashboarding for the home emerges out of the data thrown off objects like this. Data Ghosts as Josh said yesterday. A full record of how much power you’re using, where you’re using it, how you’re using it, what devices are doing what. How you could improve that consumption etc. Also how well something is working. I’m really keen on this stuff. I have no insight into my oven or my fridge or my dishwasher. I have no grasp of how efficient my tumble drier is, whether it needs fixing, whether it’s too hot or overloaded. These things are communicated currently to me by a light or a beep. Just from a personal perspective, think about reselling or buying a device that comes with a full history of its use.
MUNDANE SERVICES CONTROLLING DEVICES And then of course there’s the ability for us to have great control over our devices. Control from a distance, control from any number of different interfaces, and more granular and complicated control. This is the WeMo system, which I’m actually using at my home at the moment. It gives me granular control over my lights from my phone. It’s more useful than you’d expect, but still possibly not useful enough to be worth the money to buy it. Although I can say that it is pretty entertaining having someone stay in your house, like I do at the moment, and being able to randomly turn on and off the lights in the sitting room. I even have a motion sensor in there too, so I know when he’s home. Unfortunately at the moment, this doesn’t let me turn my lights on or off from the web, so that control from any interface thing I care a lot about isn’t working for me. I call these things SHIMS by the way - they’re things you can stick onto your existing infrastructure without having to do any significant work, which add network connectivity.
MUNDANE SERVICES LOCKITRON This is another shim that I’m very excited about - Lockitron. It basically just clips over your existing deadbolt and allows you to unlock your door from anywhere in the world. It might sound a bit frivolous until you realise you can let a friend in when you’re away to water the plants or pick up some stuff whether you’re at work or on the other side of the planet. And that you can change the permissions about who has access to your home without having to change the locks...
MUNDANE SERVICES MORE POWERFUL, GRANULAR CONTROLS As I mentioned a little while ago, another potential element is the pulling of the interface from the device—or at least the complicated parts of it—and putting it on a device that has more expressive and interactive potential. For me, one of the most complicated interfaces on the planet is that of a Microwave oven. Not the simple stuff for a certain number of seconds of a certain power but those complicated ones to do with knowing the right setting for defrosting a pound and a half of frozen fish which require you to punch in a million settings. The potential for pulling the interface off the device there and giving you an app for it are enormous...
MUNDANE SERVICES @houseofcoates If you’re interested, by the way, I’ve actually got some of these automation things, combined with my ever growing weight, posted up on the Twitter account House of Coates. I made this little avatar for my house. I’m not sure what it says about me. It’s pretty entertaining.
MUNDANE SERVICES @hauntedcoates Although perhaps it’s not quite as excited as the parody Twitter account someone has already made for it at the handle @hauntedcoates I honestly have no idea who did this, but it’s awesome. If it’s anyone here today in the audience, can I just say TOUCHÉ, sir. TOUCHÉ!
#6 It should communicate with its users in ways that are polite and pertinent. And of course, there’s no longer any need for impolite devices...
IMPOLITE DEVICES THE SCOOBA ILLUSTRATION BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS Earlier I talked about my Scooba and how it bleeps plaintively. But if it were on the network it wouldn’t need to do that - it could communicate with me in the ways that I’m used to or comfortable with.
POLITE DEVICES SCOOBA STATUS ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS I’D LIKE MORE EXERCISE I’ve travelled 1.2km this month I’VE GOT LOADS OF ENERGY My battery is 95% full at the moment. Thanks! SCOO BY IS I’M A LITTLE BIT THIRSTY I’d really like a drink of water if you’ve got some! H APPY! Well, the first one is just a status display. It’s not easy for your device to communicate with you directly, so why not let it communicate with you via the web. You could create a little avatar for it to make it more friendly, and talk to it as if it were an actual pet or assistant in you home.
POLITE DEVICES TWEETING SCOOBA ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS Sod off, Help!cleaning! I finished I’m I’m knackered... stuck! And once you’ve got it there on the web, acting like a tiny sentient creature, then why should it not talk to you directly. As I said, sometimes my little Scooby bleeps when he’s in trouble. Along with the annoying message he broadcasts a number of BEEPS that correspond with a list somewhere of the various error conditions that he could be suffering... But this is actually a bit of a pain. It would make more sense to have it communicate with me in the channels that I use every day. The ones that I actually check - say Twitter or Facebook. [click] I would be completely comfortable with getting the odd error message sent to me in a conversational way from Scooby as a Twitter direct message.
ANTHROPOMORPHS BOTANICALLS While we’re anthroporphising inanimate objects, here’s some work the guys at ITP did a few years ago with plants called Botanicalls... It measures stuff like the humidity, wetness and temperature and translates that into a personality that can talk to you or tweet to you. A friend of mine has a Rubber Plant called ... wait for it ... Robert Plant. It’s not strictly politeness, but it’s a hell of a lot better than something that beeps aggressively at you. It’s using the channels that you understand and already like...
COURTNEY LOVE’S MEDICINE CABINET NB: NOT REALLY COURTNEY LOVE’S MEDICINE CABINET Don’t listen to her, she’s high! This is a few years old now, and it’s not 100% strictly relevant since it’s far from ‘Mundane’ but I love it anyway so I’m going to talk about it... It’s a project from the ITP guys under Tom Igoe. It’s Courtney Love’s Medicine Cabinet. It is, though, not actually Courtney Love’s Medicine Cabinet, of course. But you know. The idea is that it tracks how many pills are taken at any given time, and sits in Fake Courntney’s favourite IRC channel. Every time our hypothetical Courtney comes in and says something particularly medicated, the Medicine Cabinet chirps in. “Don’t listen to her”, it says, “She’s high”. It’s definitely not polite, it’s bordering on judgmental, but it’s bloody funny.
LIVE SCOOBA RACING HOME MUJICOMP 2 1 3 100ft 200ft 300ft 400ft 500ft 600ft 700ft But it’s not all about failure. What about play? I’m definitely still going down a bit of a rathole here, but hey - why not, right? You’re here for the long haul... Here’s a thought: Why not make cleaning even more fun by racing your friends. My little cleaner must be racking up substantial distance in its running around my house, and it’s in my best interest to set it to clean regularly. Perhaps competing with my friends would be a good way to encourage me to do that! Little experiment time - I’d like you guys to choose a robot that you think has the best chance of winning and we’re going to have a little race. I’d like you guys to shout out encouragement as they run. If you want to place little side bets with people around you, then that’s okay too. The names of the robots are, for the record, Pink, Green and Blue. So “Come on blue” is a perfectly acceptable thing to shout. Let’s try that out quickly - choose your colour and then at the count of three we’ll shout out Come on Blue/Pink or Green... Excellent. Here we go...
BEST T ALK EVER! Okay, that was a bit of fun, but there is a bit of method in this particular branch of madness. There’s a question that’s been preying on me a bit recently about the degree to which we personalise our objects and our avatars. Matt Jones from Berg has been talking for a while about software agents that feel like little daemons in the Philip Pullman style because they’re actually responding to your environment or to stimuli they’re receiving. And what do we talk about when we engage with things that do things that aren’t entirely predictable? We start intuiting motives to them, we start arguing with them, or trying to rationalise with them. As a result there are a few people out there at the moment trying to think of physical objects as collaborative agents, working and representing themselves to you with what they think is important. My partner Matt and I have been thinking about this a bit recently and have been starting to think about what it might be like to have a chatroom for your devices in your home...
The idea would be that every object in the house could express itself in a backchannel, throwing out completely human readable text, with—behind the scenes—a glob of XML or JSON or something that would allow them to pass data to one another. You could go in at any time and read all the reasons your objects were doing the things they were doing.
Here, for example, is a motion detector in a light getting a TV to power down when you’re out.
Motion Sensor: You know, I think he’s gone out. It’s been quite a while Gatekeeper: I’ll just send him a note and see... Gatekeeper: Yup. He says he’s out for a while and we should clean Dishwasher: Okay cool. I’m going to start cleaning now. Scooba: I’d like to clean to. But Roomba normally goes first. Roomba: I’m okay, I cleaned earlier this morning. Scooba: Okay, cool. I’m going to start cleaning now too. Upstairs lights: Right, I’m going to turn off the lights up here until he’s back. Tom has entered the Abbey Street Chatroom Tom: Everything okay? Gatekeeper: No problems to report. Everyone’s happy... I sort of like all this stuff. It’s sort of awesome, it’s sort of cool. I quite like it. And yet, somehow in the back of my head I keep hearing this guy...
ADAM GREENFIELD TERRIFYING MODERNIST HIS FAVOURITE SONG IS FUNKYTOWN This is Adam Greenfield, my speaking colleague and the lovely, charming and relentlessly modernist author of the book Everyware, which you should all immediately read. I’m pretty sure for him, the world of the future should be clean and simple and elegant, and not futzed up with a home or a set of interfaces full of shiny happy expressive faces. My point is, I guess, that I don’t think Adam wants to live in a world like this...
OBJECTS WITH PERSONALITY DO WE REALLY WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD LIKE THIS? You know, sometimes I think it could be quite fun, but often I can’t imagine anything worse. Something to think about there maybe... Now I come to think of it... Yes. Yes I do. Yes. That would be awesome.
PUSHING BEYOND THE MUNDANE Anyway, where were we? At the beginning of this talk, I said that I thought the next stage of network enabled appliances in the home was not the performative stuff that we’ve seen so far, but simple, cheap, practical interventions that add a little more value to the stuff in our homes.
A quick summary so far: • Cheap and simple network connectivity • Focused on sensors and actuators • Designed to enhance the core function of a product by helping you instrument, understand and control the devices. This is probably the tightest summary I could come up with - cheap and simple network connectivity, fundamentally focused on sensors and actuators that help you instrument, understand and control the object. And at the centre of it all, the network itself, allowing every piece of information from any object to be a stimulus for activity somewhere else. The offboard brain, the offboard storage place, the connective tissue that makes it possible for motion sensor to communicate with a lightbulb, with Twitter, with /ANYTHING/ that’s also connected.
By the way this stuff is already happening in industry. General Electric in the US has been working on something they call ‘The Industrial Internet’ - and there’s a very long and established discipline focused on ‘telemetry’ - essentially information recording and presentation at a distance, which is also moving to become more web-native from the proprietary systems that preceeded it... But I honestly think this is just the beginning. It’s the second order systems that emerge on top of the very simple infrastructure that we’ve been talking about where things start to get ridiculously exciting and where many of our fundamental assumptions about what a physical object IS start to get challenged a bit. There’s a famous quote from Bill Gates, which I sort of don’t like using even though I agree with it a lot.
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” Bill Gates It’s this - we always over-estimate the change that will occur int he next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Partly this is because of what Ben was talking about yesterday - Moore’s law and the exponential in computing power. But it’s also partly because there are many technologies out there that could genuinely change the world should they gain sufficient traction, but are nowhere until they do so. Clay Shirky talked about something related when he was writing about social software a few years ago. He observed that originally online communities had been all about people talking to strangers about shared interests UNTIL such a point that a sufficient number of your real-life friends were also online. Then, with a certain level of ubiquity, the division between your real and the virtual communities collapsed. At a certain threshold of use everything changes. Another way of putting that - MORE IS DIFFERENT. REALLY REALLY DIFFERENT.
MUNDANE COMPUTING A DEVICE SHOULD PROVIDE THESE SERVICES I should be able to ask: Where is the device? To whom does it belong? What is it currently doing? How has it been used historically? How much power has it used / is it using How well is it currently functioning? I should be able to: Control (only safe) basic functions Receive alerts when something goes wrong Receive alerts when a job is completed So what happens when it’s possible and practical for every object to provide these services? Here are a few very sketchy ideas...
A LIFE STORY FOR EVERY OBJECT Imagine each object continually writing its own biography, every time it failed, every time it was used, and imagine what that could mean for buying second hand equipment. It would be like buying a car with a service log. And you can extend it further, by using the same identifiers you’re using keep track of its raw materials from cradle to grave, optimising for recycling. Again, our own Bruce Sterling talks about this at length in his book Shaping Things, which you should also read.
OWNERSHIP & THEFT RFID AND SELF-REPORTING OBJECTS He also talks about ownership in that book. He restricts himself to talking about RFID tags, but any object that communicates with the network can do exactly the same things. If you can determine from an online service who something belongs to and potentially where it is, then what does that mean for concepts of ownership? We’re already some of the way there with things like Find My iPad and long-distance erasing, but what if that’s extended to all goods. If your friends borrowed something from you but you always could tell where it was and who had it, would that change how you think about protecting your belongings, storing them? And what about theft? Would it even be really possible in a world like that?
OBJECTS AS A SERVICE WASHING MACHINES PHOTO BY ALEXANDER LINDQUIST FLICKR CREATIVE COMMONS But why not go further. Why buy any large appliances at all, when you can get given it for free and get charged only when you use it. This is the idea of an object AS a service. In this model, you get an appliance when you want it, and the installing company tracks your usage. There’s some lovely work in this area particularly around shared resources. We’ve already seen things like Zip Car or Street Car that a vehicle to be left on the street and booked and used when and as people choose. Why could that not be extended to other objects? Molly Steenson years ago did a project years ago called Fluid Time that allowed people to share Washing Machines in a more practical way, being notified when it the machines were free, when their stuff was done, charging automatically for usage. In the street London Amazon lockers that provide points for accessing and collecting your purchases, lockers whose ownership changes with a network ping. Along those lines, what might a shared community tool shed be like that anyone could access at any point?
ANALYTICS FOR PHYSICAL OBJECTS 3.5 And then think of all the stuff that happens if you’re prepared to share your data about your object with the manufacturer. Obviously there are some potential privacy implications about having your coffee machine reporting what you’re doing to the internet, but on the other hand, the manufacturer could contact you if something was going wrong with the device, or if it suddenly started to get more ineffecient. And from the side of the manufacturer, they can do A/B testing to see which programmes or approaches are most efficient, they can measure how their devices are used. All the stuff we use to work out if our sites are functioning, they can now do where previously they’ve been blind.
149 .99 £ BPM 185lbs AAPL 3.5 149 .99 £ BPM But in the end, for most of us, the most fascinating stuff comes in the weird combinations of data and technology that we’ve not yet thought of. Many models of the future talk about the home and technology as somehow ‘magically’ working together, predicting when you’ll need light or heat, stringing together systems effortlessly around the place. The problem with most of those has been that they’re like boiling the ocean. There are many disparate components to any given system, and no individual problem seems fascinating enough to upgrade your lights, heating, phone and the dozen other systems that you need to make them function. But if the infrastucture is already there - if the devices are just sitting there prepared to push out data, and waiting for instructions - if EVERY device out there is doing it... Well then, we’re already bootstrapped, and we’re only limited by our imaginations.
AN ANIMATING SPARK So here we are, rapidly approaching the end of my talk. I’m sure some of you are breathing a sigh of relief. My goal today was to try and convince you that there is traction and considerable future in the fusion of the digital and the physical—that it’s not all the the punchline to a joke about technological excess any more than it is about interaction design experiments and toys. I also wanted to try and encourage you guys to step up and start seriously thinking about how you could get involved - because as I mentioned earlier - if there are any people in the world that know how to take something and make it native to the web, it’s the people in this room. I’ve been talking today primarily about the devices that we already have in our homes and how we can push them forward in ways that seem prosaic but are actually practical and transformative. But the stuff I’ve talked about here is—at best–a tiny fraction of the stuff that’s out there to think about and build. I’ve not talked about the amazing stuff people are doing outside the home, in the civic arena. On the streets, everything from STreet Bike Programmes, Instrumented Pedestrian Traffic all the way to networked Parking Meters. And i’ve not even touched on the brand new categories of products that may emerge - mostly because they’re just so hard to predict. It’s much easier to look at the types of things we have in our houses now and think about how we might push them five or ten years further along. To think of these new products—even to have any hope of building the next generation of products that I’ve talked about today—we need to unite groups of people who haven’t always been completely in sync.
Mechanical Engineering Electrical Engineering Software Engineering ? ! The Internet ?! Because most appliance companies simply have no idea how to make Devices that are Native to the Web. Originally they just had to deal with mechanics, then electricity, and then for the last few decades, they’ve had to think about integrating software into their products. And I’m sure we all have our respective horror stories about that.
For me this all comes back to our responsibilities as designers and engineers. Quite apart from the stuff that Ben was talking to you about yesterday, much of which I agree with, I think we have a responsibility to push things forward. I think we have a responsibility to progress. For me this comes back to one of the core precepts of one of the High Priests of Industrial Design, a phrase that emerged in fact, from the man who called himself the father of Industrial Design. Raymond Loewy, who has now been dead for twenty-five years, was the first designer on the cover of Time Magazine, and also—I think—quite possibly Tony Stark’s dad...
M.A.Y.A Raymond Loewy 1893-1986 He came up with the acronym MAYA, which stood for [CLICK]
M.A.Y.A “ Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable ” Raymond Loewy 1893-1986 Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable. This was what he thought the goal of all Industrial Designers should be, a goal I think extends to all of us now involved in the creation of *new* things in the world. It falls in two parts - firstly he believed that it was our responsibility to be always pushing towards the extreme possibilities of what it was possible to conceive of and make. He believed that was true in both an economic and a moral sense. Merging the physical with the digital is that frontier at the moment. It’s fascinating and exciting and it *will* happen.
But he also believed that we had a second responsibility, to bring the General Public with us into the future. To make amazing things that weren’t alienating, weren’t terrifying, but were useful, fun, creative, non-threatening. I’m here today to tell you that the futurist part of our work in these areas - the bits where we get to talk about the possibilities of what all these technologies MIGHT afford - the ubicomps, the pervasive computing, the everyware, the spimes etc. It’s my belief all of these are over... We have our most advanced. So now we need to make them acceptable. The future isn’t network-enabled products, it’s just products. And it’s not even the future. It’s now. And we’re the people with the responsibility to push them into the world. In a way, that’s what we’re for. None of this we’ll be able to do alone. It will need us, as people with a particular understanding of the web, to collaborate with hardware manufacturers, futurists, digital designers, industrial designers and business. So here’s my call to action. Get out there and start having those conversations. Without you, these companies, these objects, will flounder on the web. I started off by calling the network in objects a new animating spark. And so it is. But there’s another one here in this room. It’s all of you, with your expertise and enthusiasm and passion. The world of tomorrow needs you. And that’s all I have. Thank you.
THANKS FOR LISTENING Product Club
FURTHER READING SHAPING THINGS, BRUCE STERLING EVERYWARE, ADAM GREENFIELD SMART THINGS, MIKE KUNIAVSKY Product Club

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Webstock 2013: An Animating Spark

  • 1.
    AN ANIMATING SPARK BY Tom Coates @TOMCOATES Product Club Hello again! I’m unbelievably happy to be back at Webstock, and I hope you’re all happy to be here too! Are you enjoying yourselves?! I said, ARE YOU ENJOYING YOURSELVES?! Webstock is, without a doubt, my favourite event on the planet. And I think it’s important that you guys all realise how special a thing you’ve got going here. From the organisers, to my fellow speakers, to all of you guys, to New Zealand itself - everything here is exceptional: exceptionally brilliant, exceptionally welcoming and exceptionally fun. But those things aren’t really what makes me so happy to be back here in front of you for the FOURTH time. The reason that Webstock matters to me so much is the optimism, the positivity, the genuine feeling that the web and technology are thrilling, fantastic things that point to a better and ever more extraordinary world. That’s a feeling that for me exemplified the early web, and it was the reason that I got involved in this industry in the first place. But I sometimes think in the scrabbling for money and with the coming of the MBAs, quite a lot of the rest of the world has forgotten that joy. Well, this is where the optimists make our stand. This is where we push back, because everyone here has one thing in common - we want to make the world better, more fun, more creative, more inspiring. And every year I’m here I want to thank Mike, Tash, Deb and Ben for reminding us of that.
  • 2.
    HELLO LONDON WEBSTOCK Hello Webstock!
  • 3.
    TOM COATES WEB ENTHUSIAST PHOTO BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS So anyway, my name is Tom Coates, and I am a web enthusiast. I work primarily in New Product Development and Invention. Basically, what I do is look at the direction that technology is going, and then try to spot the product possibilities in that movement. When I work, I'm looking, on the whole, for things that can make people's lives more interesting, productive, or fun - and ideally help companies make some money in the process. This is a video from the Green Room of me sweating over this talk, with help, as ever, from the charming Clay Johnson.
  • 4.
    I used towork for companies like Time Out, Yahoo and the BBC, but now I have my own little company with my business Partner Matt Biddulph. The company is called Product Club. We are young loners who champion the cause of the innocent, the hopeless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who exist above the law. Oh no, hang on, that’s [click] Knight Rider.
  • 5.
  • 6.
    # besttalkever Oh andwhile I’m on the subject, I understand that it’s become very fashionable for people to suggest a hash tag so that while I’m talking, you guys can talk about my session on Twitter and elsewhere. So here’s the one I’ve come up with for you guys: If you could use that, I’d really appreciate it. Thanks. Right then, let’s get going...
  • 7.
    149 .99 £ BPM 185lbs AAPL 3.5 149 .99 £ BPM So for the last few years I've been thinking and working and talking at conferences about the emerging web of data, and about how when we connect things together—when we recombine things—then extraordinary new possibilities emerge. I'm interested in the way that data on the web connects together, how sites and services spread outside the bounds of a web page and emerge in apps on iPads and iPhones, or connect to sites and services - even breaking free from the digital world and pushing into objects. I'm interested in how these individual connected components become more than the sum of their parts, with information flowing between them freely, layering the world in a a new network of cycling and recombinant data upon which we can all build, and which massively open up the realm of possibilities for creative work.
  • 8.
    ROAD DYNAMIC TRANSPORT SEA RAIL AIR I believe this new network that is emerging has as much potential to transform the world of information as the transport and trading networks of the last few centuries have transformed the way we manufacture physical things - allowing us to specialise in what we produce, build upon the work of others and create more together than we could ever have done individually. In fact if there was one thing I wanted you to take away from this talk today, it would be that the possibility space for the new products we could make today is vast precisely because of the interconnections we’ve made. Take any two datasets or technologies and combine them and you have the potential seed of a new product or idea. Multiply the connected elements and your creative space explodes.
  • 9.
    New Product PossibilitySpace n (All the technologies+All the data) I’ve had some trouble formulating this thought into one incredibly pithy statement, but this is I think a reasonable approximation... That the potential space of new product ideas at the moment is not simply about utilising any one particular new technology, or one particular new source of data. Its edges are defined by the sheer number of ways that they can be recombined.
  • 10.
    Today though Iwant to talk about a specific interest of mine that I’ve been exploring for the last few years - the way that the network is starting to permeate the physical world, and how data, physical objects and even our environments are all starting to merge together. And in particular I’m going to be talking about a particular subset of that - connected appliances the home.
  • 11.
    AN ANIMATING SPARK ELECTRICAL SPARKS STOCK FOOTAGE USED WITH PERMISSION I want you to think about the Network (by which I mean access to the internet, with all the streams of data and computation that could lie behind that simple connection) as an Animating Spark - a bit like Electricity, pervading objects and our environment, bringing new functionality to them, new intelligence, new life. I want you to consider what might be possible when all the computational and information possibilities of the internet are available to every device in the home, or on the street. Where the objects around you start manifesting a very limited amount of inteligence and agency and how you’ll feel about that.
  • 12.
    ART BY BENCRICK But most importantly, I want you to consider the idea for a moment that this vision of the future that I’m selling you isn’t a vision of the future at all. It’s a vision of /now/, just on the cusp of moving from theory and science fiction into the normal fabric of our lives, and that you guys are quite likely to be among the people who are going to be part of making it real. That’s why I’m here today, to get a room full of web people to think—not about what’s way out there—but about WHAT’S NEXT, what’s ALMOST HERE. How we make it REAL. And not in twenty years, but NOW. And yes, I very definitely WILL be talking about > CLICK <
  • 13.
  • 14.
    OUT OF THELABS AND INTO THE SHOPS But first I want to contextualise things a bit - and talk about how we get things out of the labs and into the shops.
  • 15.
    An uncharitable theory: The way we think about the future is betraying our present I have a theory. My theory is that Interaction Designers, academics and futurists (like — on occasion — myself) when exploring the more far-out possibilities of new technologies have one fundamental goal. And this goal is NOT to illustrate really practical things that you might want to bring into your home. We’re normally attempting to persuade. We’re attempting first and foremost to articulate why the technology that we’re exploring could be important in the future. We’re trying to show how world transformative it could be. And this comes with costs. You might get some people very enthusiastic about the promise of the technology, but you’re normally—in the short-term at least—over-selling its power. In your desire to impress, you build models of things that are extreme, fantastic, unusual, weird. Your desire fundamentally is to show how STRANGE the future will be. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that most of the time when you’re talking about the possibilities of technology in the future, the technology you talk about is EXPENSIVE and COMPLICATED. That means the concepts that we take on have to seem huge to seem like a reasonable use of the resources involved. The demonstrations made have to seem completely transformative. Science- fictional. Extraordinary. They're massive performance pieces. They're concept cars. [CLICK] But they are not, on the whole, practical things that you'd want to bring into your home.
  • 16.
    Real-World Web Everyware Pervasive Computing Tangible Computing The Internet of Things Graspable Interfaces Embodied Interaction Ubiquitous Computing The Web of Things Physical Computing Ambient Intelligence Spimes Haptic Computing Things that think Of course this has not stopped those of us in the technology industry or our peers in academia thinking about what the world of the future might be like. Far from it. We've spent many years exploring some of the ways that the network might penetrate physical objects - with ideas like Pervasive Computing, Spimes, the Internet of Things, Ubiquitous Computing, Everyware, Embodied Interaction, Tangible Computing and many others. Two authors of extremely brilliant books in this area are here with us today, and I owe them a huge debt. Adam Greenfield’s Everyware is a seminal deconstruction of the possibilities of computing in everything. And our own Bruce Sterling’s book on Shaping Things has left its mark on pretty much everyone’s work since.
  • 17.
    An uncharitable theory: The way we think about the future is betraying our present But I think we’ve actually hit a transition in the world of connected devices and appliances, and this is what I mean when I say the way we’re thinking about the future is betraying our present. It’s my belief that we’ve become so invested in the way out visions of what ubiquitous and networked computing COULD be, that we’ve not noticed that we’re actually on the cusp of making it real. I’m here to try and convince you that the network is already more and more penetrating everyday objects, that there are tangible and practical applications to ubiquitous computing - that it’s not just a weird joke or bit of future-think any more- and most importantly that the people who will take things forward, who will take on the torch passed from earlier thinkers and make them manifest are PEOPLE LIKE YOU.
  • 18.
    PEAK OF INFLATEDEXPECTATIONS PLATEAU OF PRODUCTIVITY SLOPE OF ENGLIGHTENMENT TECHNOLOGY TRIGGER TROUGH OF DISILLUSIONMENT So this is a very crudely drawn version of the Gartner Hype Cycle, which I’m sure many of you know. It illustrates their sense of how new technologies work. Essentially, they turn up, everyone gets terribly excited about it, then nothing happens with it and there’s a huge crash of interest, and then finally there’s a more sustainable and gradual incorporation of the ideas into the real world. Now, most of the grandiose thinking happens in this first area here. And I think many people still think that’s where this whole network enabled home stuff is. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s already here. Struggling it’s way up the Slope of Enlightenment.
  • 19.
    $ And fundamentally thisis because the price has dropped. When the cost of network functionality - that’s the hardware that helps you get online AND the cost of the network while you are online - halves and then halves again and then keeps on halving, we no longer need to keep thinking about the grand performance videos and the sci-fi future. Previously to sell ourselves on the promise of networked devices we needed videos full of perfect, shiny, rich families who use virtual reality and pervasive reactive glass to swim peacefully through an idyllic life of comfy tope sweaters, picnics and football matches, working calmly and effortlessly on nearby panes of reactive glass while laughing at sunsets and hugging each other. But now we can look to the everyday devices and appliances that surround real people every day. We can think instead about what extra value we can create — what problems we can solve — if all of the extra hardware we need to bring a dishwasher or an oven online costs five dollars. Or a dollar. Or fifty cents. And it doesn’t have to be grandiose. It doesn’t even have to be - initially at least - that useful. It just has to produce more than fifty cents of value through the lifetime of the device.
  • 20.
    Now often, whenI talk about the inevitable changes that happen with the cheapening of technologies I talk about the LCD clock and how it went from expensive to ubiquitous in a decade - from being a “sophisticated value adding extra” to costing more to REMOVE from pre-manufactured components than to simply accept that every device would have an LCD clock in it. More recently, I heard about another example of this kind of thing from Jack Schulze in London. Apparently, the need for tiny vibrating motors for mobile phones from companies like Nokia and Apple has led to the cost of that component dropping catastrophically. They, again, can be stamped out for pennies. This has, in turn, led to an explosion in Chinese toys with tiny motors in them. They’re using the same components that were in Nokia phones to bring life to things for kids.
  • 21.
    ALIBABA.COM FOR ENDLESS COMPONENTS If you’re at all interested in this kind of thing and want to have your mind blown, I can very much recommend going to have a look at this site - Alibaba.com It’s a B2B marketplace that sells everything from components for clocks and tiny vibrating motors to “sexy leopard print dresses”. Essentially it’s a direct access to the manufacturing behemoths of Shenzhen and the far east. If you’re looking for a few thousand dirt cheap ANYTHINGS, this is the place to go. My point with all this is that network components and computing components are getting almost vanishingly cheap now. And when something gets that cheap, you can start adding it to devices and appliances without having to make a big deal about it. Again, if it costs you 50c to buy the components, they only have to provide your users with a tiny amount of added value to make incorporating it worthwhile.
  • 22.
    PROCESSOR http://www.bigboardlist.com/ Another example... This is a picture of a Raspberry pi. It's a board that—as a technical enthusiast— you can buy for $25 that includes an ENTIRE linux computer. This whole thing by the way is about the size of an thin iPhone with a few blobs sticking out of it. The actual computer, by the way is the little dot in the middle. The rest of it is the power socket, USB port, video and audio leads, ethernet port, HDMI port etc. etc.. It's powerful enough to run a full 1080p HD screen, and it’s cheap enough now that it's prime hobbyist material. Remember this is $25 for an end consumer buying *one* instantiation. The price drops and drops if you buy in bulk... There are dozens of these out there at the moment. Joshua Schachter, the creator of delicious, maintains a list of them at bigboardlist.com - again, if you want your mind blown, go and check this stuff out.
  • 23.
    And then there’swireless connectivity. This is the Kindle Paperwhile, the classic example of a device that costs around a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars that comes with ALWAYS ON, PERPETUAL, WORLD-WIDE, FREE WIRELESS INTERNET. This isn’t a weird anomaly. This is Amazon’s biggest selling product. Now the internet is subsidized clearly, but it’s subsidized because it makes them more money elsewhere. And it’s a piece of hardware that you can buy for $100 and which includes LIFETIME, AND POTENTIALLY WORLDWIDE network access. This is ENORMOUS. This is a HUGE CHANGE. Given how much prices for components like these drop, it's now reasonable to look at any powered object at around the $100 mark and start asking yourself why it's NOT online. More specifically you can ask yourself about what is the minimum set of networked features that you could add to an appliance in the home to make it worth an additional couple of bucks. Because, if we're not right there now, then we will be in a couple of years...
  • 24.
    MUNDANE COMPUTING & MUJICOMP Okay, so we’ve talked about how components are getting super cheap, and that means that we no longer need to think about such grandiose visions of what the future of connected devices might look like. So what’s a less grandiose vision? What’s a more likely, simpler, cheaper version of using the network in the home to make little incremental improvements to our lives? There are two concepts that I've come across in the wild which I think, most accurately describe what I'm getting at - and what I think constitutes a significant transition in our understanding of the kinds of networked devices we should be thinking about. They are Mundane Computing and MujiComp.
  • 25.
    CHRIS HEATHCOTE TECHNOLOGIST PHOTO BY STML USED WITH THE HOPE THAT THEY’LL BOTH FORGIVE ME Mundane Computing—or at least the concept of Mundanecomp—is a phrase I found from the work of Chris Heathcote. This is Chris on a train. He threw out this concept in a blog post about a year ago as an off-the-cuff comment, but it’s stuck with me ever since.
  • 26.
    Chris Heathcote Mundanecomp & the nu-DIY “ A lot of time and effort is spent on the extremes of life - going to new places, finding new things and people. But most of life isn't like that. Most of the time, people are in routines, doing the same thing day after day. It's not a bad thing. It's life. And I'm interested in how technology can make some of these daily moments better. ” Chris gave some context before he explained his specific problem - A lot of time and effort is spent on the extremes of life - going to new places, finding new things and people. But most of life isn't like that. Most of the time, people are in routines, doing the same thing day after day. It's not a bad thing. It's life. And I'm interested in how technology can make some of these daily moments better. Now I don’t think there’s anything here that anyone here would disagree with in our practice. In fact, in digital design and on the web, we’d might consider this a nice but fairly obvious sentiment. But somehow in the world of network enabled physical appliances, this actually feels pretty radical. Give up on your ubicomp, stop being so bloody HIGH CONCEPT, Chris is saying. Do something useful. I mean, why WOULDN’T you?
  • 27.
    IMPOLITE DEVICES WASHING MACHINE ILLUSTRATION BY TOM COATES WHY DON’T CREATIVE COMMONS BUELPOVE M YO E ! E?! B E E P ! For Chris, the problem that he came across was a really simple one that I'm sure a number of you are familiar with. It's the device that BEEPS. He has a washing machine. When it finishes washing it beeps. And then it beeps again. And then it beeps again, and again. For an hour. I'm done, it cries out into the abyss. I'm finished! WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME? And Chris is in another part of his house, thinking to himself, "Well I don't really want to just get up right now and deal with this. I want to sit here and play Minecraft or read Don Quixote. I get the point. You're done. But that's all I really needed to know right now."
  • 28.
    IMPOLITE DEVICES WASHING MACHINE ILLUSTRATION BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS I DRIED YOUR DAMN CLOTHES FOR YOU. BUT DON’T FOR ONE SECOND THINK I’M HAPPY ABOUT IT. Another example, my mother up in Norfolk has a clothes dryer. It does the same thing. I HAVE DRIED YOUR DAMN CLOTHES, it shouts across the house like a domestic dalek. DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. It doesn't actually shout these things of course. It beeps. Again and again. And it WILL. NOT. SHUT. UP.
  • 29.
    IMPOLITE DEVICES SCOOBA TIMELAPSE VIDEO BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS In my own life, I went out and bought myself a scooba, which is like a Roomba except that it washes hardwood floors. I did it because scoobas are cool and brilliant and awesome. And 99% of the time, my scooba is brilliant and happy. And then every so often it gets caught on some wires while it's cleaning and it starts beeping. And this incredibly disappointed voice shouts across the house. "Scooba is stuck. Please move Scooba to a new location and press start to restart". And it needs me to do it at that precise moment. And if I don't, it will just keep beeping plaintively. Chris and I agree that our needy devices need to take a stress pill and calm the hell down. And we can't help but think that this functionality - of a device shouting into the abyss - is something that could be improved with simple, cheap network technology. Now again, at this point I want to reassure you. I am going to get to some slightly more inspiring examples shortly. I’m just saying - why don’t we, for a change, start with the mundane and work our way UP to the really good stuff...
  • 30.
    CHRIS’ SOLUTION SIMPLE LAPTOP APP ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS HEATHCOTE CREATIVE COMMONS Chris’s proposed solution here is a little app that sits on his laptop or on his mobile phone that he can use to check the status of the device at a distance, and with which he can tell it to shut the hell up. And at one level, that's really all that Mundane Computing is about. It’s looking into the possibilities of making the devices in our homes work more effectively in VERY SIMPLE, CHEAP WAYS, through the use of the network. I'll talk more about how we could solve some of these little problems later in this talk.
  • 31.
    MATT SOLUTION CHRIS’JONES LORD OF DESIGN FICTIONS SIMPLE LAPTOP APP ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS HEATHCOTE PHOTO TAKEN BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS COMMONS CREATIVE The other concept that I particularly like comes from Matt Jones and Jack Schulze of the London design company BERG, responsible for (among other things) Little Printer [CLICK]
  • 32.
    Can I askhow many of you have heard of Little Printer? And how many of you have bought one? Well then, it’s just as well I’m here to tell you that Little Printer remains AVAILABLE AT BERGCLOUD.COM
  • 33.
    株式会社良品計画 MUSIC PLAYER ONLINE ENVIRONMENTAL SENSORS ONLINE 5% DOOR CONTROLS ONLINE 10% PARTICULATE SENSORS ONLINE 15% IPAD CONNECTIVITY ONLINE 20% PUBLISHING TO DASHBOARD ONLINE 25% PERSONALISING SYSTEMS ONLINE 30% ACCESSING YOUR CLOUD FILES ONLINE 35% 40% MUJICOMP ONLINE 45% 無印良品 50% MUJICOMP VERSION ONE BY TOM COATES 無印良品 無印良品 sudo create useful object cd ../network/ 55% 無印良品 無印良品 connecting to internet 60% your object is online 65% animating spark active 70% ---------------------- 75% NETWORK SIGNAL ---------------------- 80% ---------------------- 85% ---------------------- 90% ---------------------- 95% ---------------------- ---------------------- ---------------------- Anyway, Matt’s concept is MUJI COMP. Now, I know that Muji don’t actually have any stores in New Zealand, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it. It's a Japanese company that sells, essentially, stripped down, simple, elegant bits of furniture and homewares. They're not particularly expensive. They’re particularly known for being pared down and brandless. And they are very nice... Matt's point when he was talking about Mujicomp was primarily about the aesthetics of the company and his desire to translate that to network-enabled computing. [CLICK] He described 'Mujicomp' as "SEXY AND DESIRABLE UBICOMP - ABLE TO BE APPRECIATED AS CULTURAL DESIGN OBJECTS RATHER THAN TECHNOLOGY - TASTEFUL, SIMPLE, CLEAR, CLEAN, CONTEMPORARY AND AFFORDABLE - ABLE TO BE INVITED INTO THE HOME." All of this is a noble goal, but for me that quote skips over some other aspects of things that are bought from shops like Muji. It’s not just that they’re beautiful and simple. It’s not just that they’re able to be invited into the home. It’s that they are, of course, *useful*, *normal*, *simple* /and/ stylish versions of things that already exist in the world. Housewares. Furniture. Technology. Beautiful and well-designed, sure, but also NORMAL. MUNDANE.
  • 34.
    mundane adj. 1. Lacking interest or excitement; dull. 2. Of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one. Again, I think it’s in this mundane realm where the greatest short-term potential for networked appliances will happen. In fact, I think it’s borderline inevitable, because the cost is starting to approach trivial. And I think mundane computing is potentially a really interesting phrase to use in this context. I don’t think it’ll catch on because I don’t think it’s that sexy, but I still think it’s an important concept for us to think about right now. It’s about moving from PERFORMANCE towards Non-flashy, practical integrations between physical objects and the virtual. But it’s also about being a part of the web that’s also a part of the world. For the few of you who don’t know, the word mundane derives from the Latin Mundi meaning universe or world.
  • 35.
    MAPPA MUNDI ‘OF THE WORLD’ CREATIVE COMMONS USED WITH PERMISSION For the few of you who don’t know, the word mundane derives from the Latin Mundi meaning universe or world. I’m sure I could find some way to make this relevant to the core of the talk, but mostly I just put this in because it makes me happy.
  • 36.
    FIGHTING THE FUTURISTS... So I’ve set my goals - mundane, practical computing integrated into the home in ways that solve small and potentially large problems, are attractive and simple and add little to the cost. And in a moment I’ll give you some sense of how I think we shoudl approach building these things. But before I do that, I feel like I have to shut down a few of the more grandiose or ridiculous villains of the piece. So let’s just get right down to it. The NETWORK ENABLED FRIDGE...
  • 37.
    DOES MY FRIDGENEED TWITTER? FROM FUCK YEAR INTERNET FRIDGE FIND MORE AT FUCKYEAHINTERNETFRIDGE.TUMBLR.COM Okay. Right. Let’s start off with a recommendation. There is an amazing tumblr account out there called Fuck Yeah Internet Fridge, mostly assembled by Roo Reynolds. It is spectacular and you should all read it as soon as this talk is over. This is one of many appliances out there which *already exists* manufacturered and is being sold by companies like LG, Samsung, Panasonic and General Electric. If their interest doesn’t already point to a future of cheap utility networking then I don’t know what does. Unfortunately the vast majority of these internet improvements are useless. This fridge, for example, not only has skeuomorphic replicas of things that you could just do with pen and paper and post-its or magnets, but it also has it’s own Twitter client, AP News Interface and way of accessing Pandora. This is a new object that has come out into the world recently and makes no sense whatsoever. What person with an incredibly expensive futuristic fridge with a screen on it doesn’t have a laptop or an iPad or a smartphone? What person decides to read the news on their future fridge? Or post a Twitter message? This message seems to need to be stated and restated. Having something attached to the internet does not mean that it needs to have a browser on it. In fact it doesn’t even mean that it needs to have a screen attached to it, for a whole range of reasons, including simply cost. If there’s one thing that holds back network enabled devices in my opinion, it’s the decision to put bloody touch screens on them. This is what I mean about price and performance. If something costs a lot, then you have to advertise its benefits a lot. It has to perform ‘Internetness’. But as the price drops, you can just start thinking about how to use network access to make something $5 better. And it genuinely doesn’t matter if the benefit is minor, if the cost is even less.
  • 38.
    >15 years Here’s anotherreason why that fridge makes no sense. Can any of you guess the approximate life-time use of a fridge in the home? How often people replace them? I don’t have super accurate figures on this at the moment, if I’m honest, but the best evidence I can get is that in the US, most fridges last in excess of FIFTEEN YEARS before they’re replaced.
  • 39.
    This is acomputer from fifteen years ago. On such a computer, if you were lucky to have access to the internet at all, you’d be reading about the death of Princess Diana and the Spice Girls would have just got to number one with their first ever single. If ubiquitous computing and pervasive networking were popular then in the way they’re conceived of at the moment, this is what you’d have stapled to the front of your dishwasher right now. I want you to think for a moment about the upgrade cycle in technology versus the upgrade cycle in other areas of our lives, and consider for a moment what it would mean to have a fridge with a block of computronium on the front that is out of date before you’ve got the device home. You’ve got that in your head? Excellent, then I can show you this...
  • 40.
    A DAY MADEOF GLASS BY CORNING WHICH I WILL NOW PROCEED TO UNCHARITABLY MOCK Now I don’t know how many of you have seen this video before. Many people find it incredibly exciting and thrilling and progressive. I’m going to go in a slightly different direction. I’m just going to take the living piss out of it, which is maybe a bit unfair since Corning is in no way alone in this vision of the future. it’s a future in which pretty much every surface in the home is covered with display and touchscreen technology. From the bathroom mirror to the kitchen counter. But let’s be serious for a moment. How often do people refit their homes? How often do people gut their kitchens and install brand new services and counters and cabinets? How often do people build new bathrooms? NOT VERY OFTEN. Until such a point that the stuff here is VANISHINGLY cheap, and as easy to replace as popping out a panel and popping in a new one, who on earth is going to build this functionality into their home. My brother just bought a flat. His bathroom is mouldy! My bathroom mirror gets dirty enough already without me rubbing my fingers on it. And honestly, do you WANT people writing emails on the wall just after they’ve gone to the loo? I don’t want your lavatory fingers anywhere near me, frankly. Sorry! And honestly WHO HAS THE TIME to knock off a quick e-mail while they’re brushing their teeth in the morning that wouldn’t be better spent , you know, brushing your teeth? Honestly we’ll probably see this kind of built in massive touchscreen glass display in public places with massive footfall - say in public places, as street furniture, in high profile office spaces or whatever, but in the home for the foreseeable future, this is just NOT GOING TO HAPPEN...
  • 41.
    A HOME’S SHEARINGLAYERS BY STEWART BRAND FROM ‘HOW BUILDINGS LEARN’ REDRAWN BY TOM COATES, CREATIVE COMMONS 20 years Skin 30-300 years Structure 7-15 years Services 3-30 years Spaceplan 1 day-1 month Stuff Eternal Site This is a classic (or a terrible cliché) depending on who you ask - it’s Stewart Brand’s diagram of the layers of a home. There’s the site at the bottom, then the structure of the building, the skin of the facade and decoration, and then within it, in turn, the service layer, the spaceplan and then eventually the STUFF. I’m pretty sure in his mind that human beings constitute ‘stuff’. The most important thing from his perspective is that each of these layers moves at a different rate. The land underneath is unmoving, the core structure and services move slowly, large furniture and appliances move a bit more quickly - but we’re still talking years here. The fastest layer is the ‘stuff’ that moves in and out of the house pretty quickly. When we’re talking about appliances and structure though, there’s pretty clearly a disjunct between the speed that they get replaced and the speed of technological change... This is a fascinating design problem that I believe there are ways to route around, but let’s be clear, shiny interfaces like Corning Glasses embedded in counter tops and bathroom mirrors? It just doesn’t make any sense.
  • 42.
    EVERYTHING THE NETWORK TOUCHES So that’s a few of the things that we can rightly throw away as being ridiculous or overblown or performance pieces? What approaches would get us towards some simple practical Mundane Computing today?
  • 43.
    MATT ROLANDSON AMMUNITION GROUP PHOTO TAKEN BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS This is Matt Rolandson who heads up the UX and Strategy team at a product and service design company called Ammunition in San Francisco. He’s one of my favourite people because he works in this area AND he’s sensible. The Ammunition Group, if you’re interested, worked on the Nook e-reader for Barnes and Noble and the Beats by Dr Dre headphone line among loads of other work for HP, Microsoft, Nike and Panasonic. His fundamental principle is so simple it seems obvious, but you wouldn’t know that based on some of the products coming out of the design chambers of major appliance manufacturers and it’s such a simple principle that I’m determined to push it to a wider audience. I’ve also slightly bastardised it, so if you don’t agree with it, it’s my fault.
  • 44.
    Core Principle “ You should use the network to amplify a tool’s core purpose, not to be another web browser or Twitter client. ” The Internet !=A web browser This is that fundamental principle, that I think really underlies everything else I’m going to talk about. That you should use the network to AMPLIFY a tool’s CORE PURPOSE. Let me give you a quick example - and apologies to those of you who have seen me talk before, because I use this one a lot...
  • 45.
    TOM 185lbs I’ve talked about the Withings networked bathroom scale at Webstock before. It really is one of my favourite network-enabled devices in my home. I weigh myself regularly, ignore all the numbers on the screen and then go and eat a chocolate bar and drink a can of coke. Apart from the fact that it’s utterly incapable of fixing my total lack of self control, this to me is a perfect illustration of the kind of Mundane, useful, practical network-enabled device that I’m talking about. Since I was last here, they’ve announced they’re launching a new device that comes with heart-rate monitors and air-quality sensors to capture information and instrument your home.
  • 46.
    #1 It’s unbelievably simple to get it onto the network in the first place. Now I refer to the Withings scale not just because in and of itself it’s a lovely object, although it totally is. I refer to it because to me it epitomises a whole range of intelligent networked product design decisions. I’m going to start by running through a few of the really simple ones... The first one is pretty simple. Still some products out there, the set-up process is beyond painful. The Withings scale is pretty good, but I actually still think there’s more scope here.
  • 47.
    OBJECT CODE DONE WITH SIM There are, I think, a whole range of ways to get objects onto the internet, but my personal guess is that medium term, it may be mobile phone networks and sim cards that own the networked device space - at least if they pull their heads out of their ample buttocks. For example, I talked earlier about the out of the box experience of the Kindle - immediate, worldwide network access. And as prices drop, perhaps that can apply to more things. Imagine buying objects that are online as soon as you plug them in, where the only work you have to do is type in a code into a web site to claim it. As prices drop, this will be entirely practical... What might it be like to say that every object had a sim card in it?
  • 48.
    #2 It still works when the device is not online. It’s just much better when it’s online. This second principle is pretty self explanatory. Networked objects are awesome, but do you really want to not be able to get into your house or open your oven or fridge because your wifi’s gone down? No. Mundane computing in the near future is a progressive enhancement to objects, and the more fundamental to your life, the more the core functions have to also be achievable without connectivity.
  • 49.
    #3 The bulk of the intelligence is not in the device, but in the cloud. On the internet. This is, I think, a huge one. We talked a bit about the shearing layers of technology and the different rates of redundancy for different bits of technology and infrastructure in the home. The technology IN the device is hard to upgrade. It’s complicated and expensive and gets even more so if it’s in the built fabric of the home. But the intelligence on the network can be upgraded easily and effectively at pretty much any time. This also means that the data that you’re collecting and the intelligence of the service can easily be connected with other services around the web. Can trigger actions elsewhere. So what do you leave in the device? Clearly you have the bit that connects to the network. But in addition, you put in the sensors that tell you about the object and actuators that allow the network to control the object. This means that—essentially—the object is just an endpoint of the network. It’s a data source and something that can be triggered by activity online. And that’s all. Your question then is just what sensors to put into the device.
  • 50.
    #4 The interface for the device isn’t embedded in its surface, but is wherever you need it. This follows on from the previous one. If the intelligence is online, and can be upgraded as and when necessary, then the interface that you use to interact with the data is everywhere. So what is the interface for a network-enabled fridge or dishwasher? Is it embedded in your kitchen counter top or on the front of your fridge? No, of course not.
  • 51.
    iPAD TABLET COMPUTER AS SOLD BY APPLE, INC. I’m afraid it’s just these. Lots of these. The future is, in my opinion, not massive interfaces covering every surface, but a few multi-purpose screens detached from the objects they control. These are the screens you have in your home that give you access to all of the data and functions that the devices provide... I find this really interesting - a simple, cut-down interface on the object, and then a much larger, more powerful, simpler, clearer and more elegant interface for more complex functions available on the web, on your tablet, on your phone. This makes WAY more sense... Which is not to say that you don’t want to have any interfaces on anything - just that they’re less likely to be high powered touchscreens that run Pandora, and more things that enhance one of their core functions.
  • 52.
    iPAD TABLET COMPUTER AS SOLD BY APPLE, INC. I knocked this up a couple of days ago to illustrate the point I was making - a UI that wouldn’t go out of date, where most of the logic and intelligence is in the cloud and which uses the wasted space on the front of a fridge to *ambiently* keep you up to date. It’s not a touch screen particularly. It’s just using the fridge surface for one of the uses it has a lot - ambient information. It’s not a LEAN-FORWARD fridge. It’s a background fridge. This version is probably a bit intrusive and I may be confusing you a little by going into this much detail on a sideline. I imagine you’d maybe have a glowing touch sensor next to the clock to turn the display on or off or to dim the lights or something. But I found it a useful design thought experiment, so I thought maybe you guys would too...
  • 53.
    #5 The best way you can enhance an object is to make it easier to control or understand. And this, fundamentally, is where the function comes in. Where the ‘amplification’ comes in. The best way that you can enhance an object is to make it easier to control or understand. This is WHY we want network connectivity in our devices so we can pull information from them, and so we can control them from a distance.
  • 54.
    MUNDANE COMPUTING A DEVICE SHOULD PROVIDE THESE SERVICES I should be able to ask: Where is the device? To whom does it belong? What is it currently doing? How has it been used historically? How much power has it used / is it using How well is it currently functioning? I should be able to: Control (only safe) basic functions Receive alerts when something goes wrong Receive alerts when a job is completed I’ve been thinking a bit recently about what mundane web services any physical object I buy or rent should be able to provide if I wanted them - both through a simple web interface - things that I myself should be able to directly ask of the device - but also things that I should be able to let other people or things ask it through an API. And this is the list that I came up with. It’s a pretty simple list and frankly not particularly complicated, but I want you to think for a moment about what could be possible if EVERY appliance over $100 could do all of this stuff - and later, every appliance over $20. They’re things that fall really into two clumps - sensors in the device recording information, and some form of actuators in the device that trigger behaviours. The first two are derived from Bruce Sterlings concept of a spime - an object that reports its location in place and spime, is uniquely identified in some way and knows to whom it belongs. The information about what the device does and how well it’s working provides both a car-like service schedule, giving you the capacity to understand how a device is working, what’s going wrong with it, what needs to be fixed, serviced or replaced, information on power consumption and more. The last few are to solve those aggravating aspects of having to be near a device to control it or deal with its alerts or problems. I’ll show you a few of the things you coudl build upon those in a minute.
  • 55.
    Let’s look alittle more deeply at some of these basics. Simple dashboarding for the home emerges out of the data thrown off objects like this. Data Ghosts as Josh said yesterday. A full record of how much power you’re using, where you’re using it, how you’re using it, what devices are doing what. How you could improve that consumption etc. Also how well something is working. I’m really keen on this stuff. I have no insight into my oven or my fridge or my dishwasher. I have no grasp of how efficient my tumble drier is, whether it needs fixing, whether it’s too hot or overloaded. These things are communicated currently to me by a light or a beep. Just from a personal perspective, think about reselling or buying a device that comes with a full history of its use.
  • 56.
    MUNDANE SERVICES CONTROLLING DEVICES And then of course there’s the ability for us to have great control over our devices. Control from a distance, control from any number of different interfaces, and more granular and complicated control. This is the WeMo system, which I’m actually using at my home at the moment. It gives me granular control over my lights from my phone. It’s more useful than you’d expect, but still possibly not useful enough to be worth the money to buy it. Although I can say that it is pretty entertaining having someone stay in your house, like I do at the moment, and being able to randomly turn on and off the lights in the sitting room. I even have a motion sensor in there too, so I know when he’s home. Unfortunately at the moment, this doesn’t let me turn my lights on or off from the web, so that control from any interface thing I care a lot about isn’t working for me. I call these things SHIMS by the way - they’re things you can stick onto your existing infrastructure without having to do any significant work, which add network connectivity.
  • 57.
    MUNDANE SERVICES LOCKITRON This is another shim that I’m very excited about - Lockitron. It basically just clips over your existing deadbolt and allows you to unlock your door from anywhere in the world. It might sound a bit frivolous until you realise you can let a friend in when you’re away to water the plants or pick up some stuff whether you’re at work or on the other side of the planet. And that you can change the permissions about who has access to your home without having to change the locks...
  • 58.
    MUNDANE SERVICES MORE POWERFUL, GRANULAR CONTROLS As I mentioned a little while ago, another potential element is the pulling of the interface from the device—or at least the complicated parts of it—and putting it on a device that has more expressive and interactive potential. For me, one of the most complicated interfaces on the planet is that of a Microwave oven. Not the simple stuff for a certain number of seconds of a certain power but those complicated ones to do with knowing the right setting for defrosting a pound and a half of frozen fish which require you to punch in a million settings. The potential for pulling the interface off the device there and giving you an app for it are enormous...
  • 59.
    MUNDANE SERVICES @houseofcoates If you’re interested, by the way, I’ve actually got some of these automation things, combined with my ever growing weight, posted up on the Twitter account House of Coates. I made this little avatar for my house. I’m not sure what it says about me. It’s pretty entertaining.
  • 60.
    MUNDANE SERVICES @hauntedcoates Although perhaps it’s not quite as excited as the parody Twitter account someone has already made for it at the handle @hauntedcoates I honestly have no idea who did this, but it’s awesome. If it’s anyone here today in the audience, can I just say TOUCHÉ, sir. TOUCHÉ!
  • 61.
    #6 It should communicate with its users in ways that are polite and pertinent. And of course, there’s no longer any need for impolite devices...
  • 62.
    IMPOLITE DEVICES THE SCOOBA ILLUSTRATION BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS Earlier I talked about my Scooba and how it bleeps plaintively. But if it were on the network it wouldn’t need to do that - it could communicate with me in the ways that I’m used to or comfortable with.
  • 63.
    POLITE DEVICES SCOOBA STATUS ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS I’D LIKE MORE EXERCISE I’ve travelled 1.2km this month I’VE GOT LOADS OF ENERGY My battery is 95% full at the moment. Thanks! SCOO BY IS I’M A LITTLE BIT THIRSTY I’d really like a drink of water if you’ve got some! H APPY! Well, the first one is just a status display. It’s not easy for your device to communicate with you directly, so why not let it communicate with you via the web. You could create a little avatar for it to make it more friendly, and talk to it as if it were an actual pet or assistant in you home.
  • 64.
    POLITE DEVICES TWEETING SCOOBA ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM COATES CREATIVE COMMONS Sod off, Help!cleaning! I finished I’m I’m knackered... stuck! And once you’ve got it there on the web, acting like a tiny sentient creature, then why should it not talk to you directly. As I said, sometimes my little Scooby bleeps when he’s in trouble. Along with the annoying message he broadcasts a number of BEEPS that correspond with a list somewhere of the various error conditions that he could be suffering... But this is actually a bit of a pain. It would make more sense to have it communicate with me in the channels that I use every day. The ones that I actually check - say Twitter or Facebook. [click] I would be completely comfortable with getting the odd error message sent to me in a conversational way from Scooby as a Twitter direct message.
  • 65.
    ANTHROPOMORPHS BOTANICALLS While we’re anthroporphising inanimate objects, here’s some work the guys at ITP did a few years ago with plants called Botanicalls... It measures stuff like the humidity, wetness and temperature and translates that into a personality that can talk to you or tweet to you. A friend of mine has a Rubber Plant called ... wait for it ... Robert Plant. It’s not strictly politeness, but it’s a hell of a lot better than something that beeps aggressively at you. It’s using the channels that you understand and already like...
  • 66.
    COURTNEY LOVE’S MEDICINECABINET NB: NOT REALLY COURTNEY LOVE’S MEDICINE CABINET Don’t listen to her, she’s high! This is a few years old now, and it’s not 100% strictly relevant since it’s far from ‘Mundane’ but I love it anyway so I’m going to talk about it... It’s a project from the ITP guys under Tom Igoe. It’s Courtney Love’s Medicine Cabinet. It is, though, not actually Courtney Love’s Medicine Cabinet, of course. But you know. The idea is that it tracks how many pills are taken at any given time, and sits in Fake Courntney’s favourite IRC channel. Every time our hypothetical Courtney comes in and says something particularly medicated, the Medicine Cabinet chirps in. “Don’t listen to her”, it says, “She’s high”. It’s definitely not polite, it’s bordering on judgmental, but it’s bloody funny.
  • 67.
    LIVE SCOOBA RACING HOME MUJICOMP 2 1 3 100ft 200ft 300ft 400ft 500ft 600ft 700ft But it’s not all about failure. What about play? I’m definitely still going down a bit of a rathole here, but hey - why not, right? You’re here for the long haul... Here’s a thought: Why not make cleaning even more fun by racing your friends. My little cleaner must be racking up substantial distance in its running around my house, and it’s in my best interest to set it to clean regularly. Perhaps competing with my friends would be a good way to encourage me to do that! Little experiment time - I’d like you guys to choose a robot that you think has the best chance of winning and we’re going to have a little race. I’d like you guys to shout out encouragement as they run. If you want to place little side bets with people around you, then that’s okay too. The names of the robots are, for the record, Pink, Green and Blue. So “Come on blue” is a perfectly acceptable thing to shout. Let’s try that out quickly - choose your colour and then at the count of three we’ll shout out Come on Blue/Pink or Green... Excellent. Here we go...
  • 68.
    BEST T ALKEVER! Okay, that was a bit of fun, but there is a bit of method in this particular branch of madness. There’s a question that’s been preying on me a bit recently about the degree to which we personalise our objects and our avatars. Matt Jones from Berg has been talking for a while about software agents that feel like little daemons in the Philip Pullman style because they’re actually responding to your environment or to stimuli they’re receiving. And what do we talk about when we engage with things that do things that aren’t entirely predictable? We start intuiting motives to them, we start arguing with them, or trying to rationalise with them. As a result there are a few people out there at the moment trying to think of physical objects as collaborative agents, working and representing themselves to you with what they think is important. My partner Matt and I have been thinking about this a bit recently and have been starting to think about what it might be like to have a chatroom for your devices in your home...
  • 69.
    The idea wouldbe that every object in the house could express itself in a backchannel, throwing out completely human readable text, with—behind the scenes—a glob of XML or JSON or something that would allow them to pass data to one another. You could go in at any time and read all the reasons your objects were doing the things they were doing.
  • 70.
    Here, for example,is a motion detector in a light getting a TV to power down when you’re out.
  • 71.
    Motion Sensor: Youknow, I think he’s gone out. It’s been quite a while Gatekeeper: I’ll just send him a note and see... Gatekeeper: Yup. He says he’s out for a while and we should clean Dishwasher: Okay cool. I’m going to start cleaning now. Scooba: I’d like to clean to. But Roomba normally goes first. Roomba: I’m okay, I cleaned earlier this morning. Scooba: Okay, cool. I’m going to start cleaning now too. Upstairs lights: Right, I’m going to turn off the lights up here until he’s back. Tom has entered the Abbey Street Chatroom Tom: Everything okay? Gatekeeper: No problems to report. Everyone’s happy... I sort of like all this stuff. It’s sort of awesome, it’s sort of cool. I quite like it. And yet, somehow in the back of my head I keep hearing this guy...
  • 72.
    ADAM GREENFIELD TERRIFYING MODERNIST HIS FAVOURITE SONG IS FUNKYTOWN This is Adam Greenfield, my speaking colleague and the lovely, charming and relentlessly modernist author of the book Everyware, which you should all immediately read. I’m pretty sure for him, the world of the future should be clean and simple and elegant, and not futzed up with a home or a set of interfaces full of shiny happy expressive faces. My point is, I guess, that I don’t think Adam wants to live in a world like this...
  • 73.
    OBJECTS WITH PERSONALITY DO WE REALLY WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD LIKE THIS? You know, sometimes I think it could be quite fun, but often I can’t imagine anything worse. Something to think about there maybe... Now I come to think of it... Yes. Yes I do. Yes. That would be awesome.
  • 74.
    PUSHING BEYOND THE MUNDANE Anyway, where were we? At the beginning of this talk, I said that I thought the next stage of network enabled appliances in the home was not the performative stuff that we’ve seen so far, but simple, cheap, practical interventions that add a little more value to the stuff in our homes.
  • 75.
    A quick summaryso far: • Cheap and simple network connectivity • Focused on sensors and actuators • Designed to enhance the core function of a product by helping you instrument, understand and control the devices. This is probably the tightest summary I could come up with - cheap and simple network connectivity, fundamentally focused on sensors and actuators that help you instrument, understand and control the object. And at the centre of it all, the network itself, allowing every piece of information from any object to be a stimulus for activity somewhere else. The offboard brain, the offboard storage place, the connective tissue that makes it possible for motion sensor to communicate with a lightbulb, with Twitter, with /ANYTHING/ that’s also connected.
  • 76.
    By the waythis stuff is already happening in industry. General Electric in the US has been working on something they call ‘The Industrial Internet’ - and there’s a very long and established discipline focused on ‘telemetry’ - essentially information recording and presentation at a distance, which is also moving to become more web-native from the proprietary systems that preceeded it... But I honestly think this is just the beginning. It’s the second order systems that emerge on top of the very simple infrastructure that we’ve been talking about where things start to get ridiculously exciting and where many of our fundamental assumptions about what a physical object IS start to get challenged a bit. There’s a famous quote from Bill Gates, which I sort of don’t like using even though I agree with it a lot.
  • 77.
    “We always overestimatethe change that will occur in the next two years, and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” Bill Gates It’s this - we always over-estimate the change that will occur int he next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Partly this is because of what Ben was talking about yesterday - Moore’s law and the exponential in computing power. But it’s also partly because there are many technologies out there that could genuinely change the world should they gain sufficient traction, but are nowhere until they do so. Clay Shirky talked about something related when he was writing about social software a few years ago. He observed that originally online communities had been all about people talking to strangers about shared interests UNTIL such a point that a sufficient number of your real-life friends were also online. Then, with a certain level of ubiquity, the division between your real and the virtual communities collapsed. At a certain threshold of use everything changes. Another way of putting that - MORE IS DIFFERENT. REALLY REALLY DIFFERENT.
  • 78.
    MUNDANE COMPUTING A DEVICE SHOULD PROVIDE THESE SERVICES I should be able to ask: Where is the device? To whom does it belong? What is it currently doing? How has it been used historically? How much power has it used / is it using How well is it currently functioning? I should be able to: Control (only safe) basic functions Receive alerts when something goes wrong Receive alerts when a job is completed So what happens when it’s possible and practical for every object to provide these services? Here are a few very sketchy ideas...
  • 79.
    A LIFE STORYFOR EVERY OBJECT Imagine each object continually writing its own biography, every time it failed, every time it was used, and imagine what that could mean for buying second hand equipment. It would be like buying a car with a service log. And you can extend it further, by using the same identifiers you’re using keep track of its raw materials from cradle to grave, optimising for recycling. Again, our own Bruce Sterling talks about this at length in his book Shaping Things, which you should also read.
  • 80.
    OWNERSHIP & THEFT RFID AND SELF-REPORTING OBJECTS He also talks about ownership in that book. He restricts himself to talking about RFID tags, but any object that communicates with the network can do exactly the same things. If you can determine from an online service who something belongs to and potentially where it is, then what does that mean for concepts of ownership? We’re already some of the way there with things like Find My iPad and long-distance erasing, but what if that’s extended to all goods. If your friends borrowed something from you but you always could tell where it was and who had it, would that change how you think about protecting your belongings, storing them? And what about theft? Would it even be really possible in a world like that?
  • 81.
    OBJECTS AS ASERVICE WASHING MACHINES PHOTO BY ALEXANDER LINDQUIST FLICKR CREATIVE COMMONS But why not go further. Why buy any large appliances at all, when you can get given it for free and get charged only when you use it. This is the idea of an object AS a service. In this model, you get an appliance when you want it, and the installing company tracks your usage. There’s some lovely work in this area particularly around shared resources. We’ve already seen things like Zip Car or Street Car that a vehicle to be left on the street and booked and used when and as people choose. Why could that not be extended to other objects? Molly Steenson years ago did a project years ago called Fluid Time that allowed people to share Washing Machines in a more practical way, being notified when it the machines were free, when their stuff was done, charging automatically for usage. In the street London Amazon lockers that provide points for accessing and collecting your purchases, lockers whose ownership changes with a network ping. Along those lines, what might a shared community tool shed be like that anyone could access at any point?
  • 82.
    ANALYTICS FOR PHYSICALOBJECTS 3.5 And then think of all the stuff that happens if you’re prepared to share your data about your object with the manufacturer. Obviously there are some potential privacy implications about having your coffee machine reporting what you’re doing to the internet, but on the other hand, the manufacturer could contact you if something was going wrong with the device, or if it suddenly started to get more ineffecient. And from the side of the manufacturer, they can do A/B testing to see which programmes or approaches are most efficient, they can measure how their devices are used. All the stuff we use to work out if our sites are functioning, they can now do where previously they’ve been blind.
  • 83.
    149 .99 £ BPM 185lbs AAPL 3.5 149 .99 £ BPM But in the end, for most of us, the most fascinating stuff comes in the weird combinations of data and technology that we’ve not yet thought of. Many models of the future talk about the home and technology as somehow ‘magically’ working together, predicting when you’ll need light or heat, stringing together systems effortlessly around the place. The problem with most of those has been that they’re like boiling the ocean. There are many disparate components to any given system, and no individual problem seems fascinating enough to upgrade your lights, heating, phone and the dozen other systems that you need to make them function. But if the infrastucture is already there - if the devices are just sitting there prepared to push out data, and waiting for instructions - if EVERY device out there is doing it... Well then, we’re already bootstrapped, and we’re only limited by our imaginations.
  • 84.
    AN ANIMATING SPARK So here we are, rapidly approaching the end of my talk. I’m sure some of you are breathing a sigh of relief. My goal today was to try and convince you that there is traction and considerable future in the fusion of the digital and the physical—that it’s not all the the punchline to a joke about technological excess any more than it is about interaction design experiments and toys. I also wanted to try and encourage you guys to step up and start seriously thinking about how you could get involved - because as I mentioned earlier - if there are any people in the world that know how to take something and make it native to the web, it’s the people in this room. I’ve been talking today primarily about the devices that we already have in our homes and how we can push them forward in ways that seem prosaic but are actually practical and transformative. But the stuff I’ve talked about here is—at best–a tiny fraction of the stuff that’s out there to think about and build. I’ve not talked about the amazing stuff people are doing outside the home, in the civic arena. On the streets, everything from STreet Bike Programmes, Instrumented Pedestrian Traffic all the way to networked Parking Meters. And i’ve not even touched on the brand new categories of products that may emerge - mostly because they’re just so hard to predict. It’s much easier to look at the types of things we have in our houses now and think about how we might push them five or ten years further along. To think of these new products—even to have any hope of building the next generation of products that I’ve talked about today—we need to unite groups of people who haven’t always been completely in sync.
  • 85.
    Mechanical Engineering Electrical Engineering Software Engineering ? ! The Internet ?! Because most appliance companies simply have no idea how to make Devices that are Native to the Web. Originally they just had to deal with mechanics, then electricity, and then for the last few decades, they’ve had to think about integrating software into their products. And I’m sure we all have our respective horror stories about that.
  • 86.
    For me thisall comes back to our responsibilities as designers and engineers. Quite apart from the stuff that Ben was talking to you about yesterday, much of which I agree with, I think we have a responsibility to push things forward. I think we have a responsibility to progress. For me this comes back to one of the core precepts of one of the High Priests of Industrial Design, a phrase that emerged in fact, from the man who called himself the father of Industrial Design. Raymond Loewy, who has now been dead for twenty-five years, was the first designer on the cover of Time Magazine, and also—I think—quite possibly Tony Stark’s dad...
  • 87.
    M.A.Y.A Raymond Loewy 1893-1986 He came up with the acronym MAYA, which stood for [CLICK]
  • 88.
    M.A.Y.A “ Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable ” Raymond Loewy 1893-1986 Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable. This was what he thought the goal of all Industrial Designers should be, a goal I think extends to all of us now involved in the creation of *new* things in the world. It falls in two parts - firstly he believed that it was our responsibility to be always pushing towards the extreme possibilities of what it was possible to conceive of and make. He believed that was true in both an economic and a moral sense. Merging the physical with the digital is that frontier at the moment. It’s fascinating and exciting and it *will* happen.
  • 89.
    But he alsobelieved that we had a second responsibility, to bring the General Public with us into the future. To make amazing things that weren’t alienating, weren’t terrifying, but were useful, fun, creative, non-threatening. I’m here today to tell you that the futurist part of our work in these areas - the bits where we get to talk about the possibilities of what all these technologies MIGHT afford - the ubicomps, the pervasive computing, the everyware, the spimes etc. It’s my belief all of these are over... We have our most advanced. So now we need to make them acceptable. The future isn’t network-enabled products, it’s just products. And it’s not even the future. It’s now. And we’re the people with the responsibility to push them into the world. In a way, that’s what we’re for. None of this we’ll be able to do alone. It will need us, as people with a particular understanding of the web, to collaborate with hardware manufacturers, futurists, digital designers, industrial designers and business. So here’s my call to action. Get out there and start having those conversations. Without you, these companies, these objects, will flounder on the web. I started off by calling the network in objects a new animating spark. And so it is. But there’s another one here in this room. It’s all of you, with your expertise and enthusiasm and passion. The world of tomorrow needs you. And that’s all I have. Thank you.
  • 90.
  • 91.
    FURTHER READING SHAPING THINGS, BRUCESTERLING EVERYWARE, ADAM GREENFIELD SMART THINGS, MIKE KUNIAVSKY Product Club