Slashdot posted a story about an embedded HTML renderer being used for creating GUIs for medical devices. The story they point to is written by the marketing director of a company that's trying to sell the technology and, frankly, not all that interesting from a technology standpoint. It made me think, however, that basic Web technology has gotten stable enough and knowledge about it has gotten distributed enough, that including an HTML renderer for GUIs is almost a commodity idea, that it's a no-brainer to make UIs HTML-based, rather than creating a proprietary system. Even just a couple of years ago, the phone industry was trying to introduce WAP, which was a "simplified" version of HTML. Now, there's no need to simplify. From a device creator's perspective, an HTML renderer is nearly as much of a commodity as a clock chip or a serial port.
The effect that this has on device design may not be profound from an innovation standpoint, but from a development standpoint, it could be very big. Once HTML-based GUI rendering becomes as easy as putting a block on a block diagram, it's much easier to include it in engineered objects. It becomes a part of the production process, rather than part of R&D. I can imagine many more things growing rendered UIs because it's cheaper than creating them "in hardware." It's like when plastic backlit signs almost completely replaced neon signs. It not because the technology was any better or prettier, but because they were much cheaper to install, change and maintain.
In following up to my Smart Furniture Manifesto I decided to do a little research as to what's been done. My criterion for inclusion was to look for pieces of furniture that used environmental information in a deliberately functional way (rather than, say, Dunne and Raby's Placebo Project objects, which intentionally use information in a way that's only marginally useful).
I've come up with (only!?!) two:
Are there any others out there?
[10/27: Found Purdue's Sensing Chair project. Here's a better description.]
The Tapwave Zodiac looks to be a nifty PDA-like device at just about the right price point to capture the market of 20-somethings who grew up with Gameboys, but have dayjobs. It makes more sense to me than the PDA-phone bricks that were around last year and, if it had a Danger-like mobile Net connection (not to be used as a phone, of course, but just to use the digital phone network) and a thumb keyboard, it would be a truly great device, an adult Cybiko. I'm sure they're working on it, but I hope they converge that functionality to it quickly.
An essay I wrote over the summer and have revised several times to include some of the thoughts I've posted on this blog is now on the Adaptive Path site. It's the most public airing of ideas I've mulled over in the last year or so and I'd appreciate others' thoughts on the subject. Feel free to post feedback about it here.
I just finished reading Virginia Postrel's “Substance of Style” which my (ever vigilant and savvy) Mom gave me as a gift. It's a great book. It's short, it's focused, it has some great ideas in it, and the ideas are presented with enough backing that it can be the start of a discussion, rather than handwaving.
One of the most valuable points it makes is that humans need decoration as much as utility, that “form follows function” denies a basic human desire to have things be esthetically pleasing, that esthetics is fundamental to how we judge the quality of experience.
This statement resonates with me on a bunch of levels, and with a number of ideas I've been exposed to lately:
let the products sell themselvesAnd all respect to D.Boon, but he was wrong. Admirably idealistic, but wrong. Which brings me to the next idea,
fuck advertising and commercial psychology
psychological methods to sell should be destroyed
because of their own blind involvement
in their own conditioned closed minds
the unit bonded together
morals
ideals
awareness
progress
let yourself be heard
Critics of ornament have aimed some of their sharpest attacks at bodily decoration—at all the ways in which individuals create “false” selves and at the temptation to judge people by their appearance.We are creatures of first impressions, surface judgments and sensual experience. In a world of teeming with information this becomes especially important, since we have less time to evaluate beyond the surface. Pretending that we can see the essence of things is one way to help us filter through the deluge in the short term, but it denies how we actually work. Moreover, since we relate to objects anthropomorphically, I believe that all of these ideas also apply to our relationship to objects. As Postrel puts it: I like that. I'm like that.
form follows fashionEven in the design of paperclips.
As I understand it, the Panopticon was originally a prison plan, designed under the idea that omniscient vigilance would prevent sin. People would get out of the habit of sinning and thus become rehabilitated if they thought they were being watched all the time, or at least surveillance would minimize the damage they could do.
As a metaphor for The Modern World, this has been discussed ad nauseum by Foucault and his followers. I don't want to go there. I want to wrap the thing back around and think of actual panoptic prisons and rehabilitation. Panopticism, and the anxiety created by it, is a pretty bad thing, but there may be worse things, especially as far as actual prisons are concerned. Modern prisons, as I understand it from reading the paper, suffer from the problem of being “colleges” for prisoners, spreading knowledge and—more importantly—creating social networks of cons and ex-cons. These are the original smart mobs. This is terrible for rehabilitation since, as theory has it, social networks reinforce themselves. I'm sure there are whole schools of criminologists studying methods for reducing the social network effects without denying basic rights to individual prisoners. My thought is: why not actually use modern panoptic technology to make house arrest more of an option? If every permitted object gets tagged with an RFID tag, nonpermitted objects and people aren't permitted, software is there to monitor movements, and [include every other technology that's has been shown to be privacy-invading], wouldn't it be possible for people to then either continue to live in their homes or live in communities that are not prisons, communicating and dealing with people who are not other prisoners? Yes, their home would be a prison, but with a key element missing: the social network.
[And note that I think that prison reform doesn't start with technological solutions, it starts with an acceptance of reality by lawmakers... an acceptance that I believe is currently severely lacking. But that's a different rant.]
My book was reviewed by Christine Wiegand for the SAP Design Guild. She liked it and said it was long. I'm glad about the former and can't argue with the latter. ;-) She liked the practical aspects of it and correctly identified that there should be a shorter description of some of the techniques. I agree and I've thought that there's a place in the market for "The Guerilla Guide to User Experience Research."
In the interim, please note that the book is written so that pieces of it can be read without needing to read the whole. It's designed to be used like a cookbook, rather than read like a novel.
Random idea of the week: a disco floor made of scanners. I was walking down the street on Monday night and saw a scanner sitting on the street. Technology is tossed to the curb all the time in San Francisco, and lately I've been seeing more scanners (for a while it was managed switches) showing up the trash. This led me to think "Hmm, what could you do with a bunch of scanners?" and the idea of the scanner disco floor emerged.
Picture a floor with constantly moving back-and-forth lights, making long streaky scans of people's feet and ankles. The images could then be used in a video wall. Imagine if someone was breakdancing over this floor, or making snow angels. I think it would look great. There's already a whole camera-less scanner photography movement (as beautifully exemplified by Kevin Lyons' Floraphilia site). This could be the equivalent of scanner video.
I looked into it, and and the Linux scanner drivers can support up to 100 simultaneous scanners, which is a 10x10 grid and should be enough for a decent sized dance floor, or a corner of one. Of course people couldn't actually dance on the scanners themselves, but if you placed them directly under some hard plexi, maybe the depth of field would still be good enough to get decent results.
I'm writing this in the jury waiting room in the San Francisco Criminal Courthouse, waiting to find out whether I'm going to be picked for jury duty. The place is incredibly full of a remarkably broad group of people, like an airport waiting lounge during a snowstorm. The 1960s clock is broken, always pointing at 8:45, and there's a sign underneath it (printed in rainbow colors) that says "Decorative Clock Only." That's one solution.
So this is the perfect time to address to all of the responses to my smart furniture manifesto. First of all, thank you to everyone who responded. I like the dialogue. Second, I restate your points below, partially to condense the length and partially as an exercise to understand what it is that you're saying so that I can respond to it appropriately. My apologies if I misrepresent your statements.
Dave says | I hear |
Furniture is not dumb, people are dumb | People aren't going to get any smarter, but furniture can and should compensate for our failings when it can. Really this applies to all technology, and I think furniture design can do better. |
People weren't designed to sit in most chairs | Current furniture is often designed for looks rather than comfort—smart furniture would allow more flexibility to achieve both |
You will pry my Aeron from my cold, dead ass | Yes, Aerons are undoubtedly comfortable and an achievement, but they're like an HR Geiger monster mechanically and I think, unnecessarily. |
The Murphy bed is a great space saver and closer to smart than most | Absolutely. It was an elegant technological solution to a problem (small apartments created by rapid urbanization in the early 20th century). It cleverly leveraged off of the metalworking expertise that was created in the late 19th century. We should have more of those today, leveraging off of the information technology expertise created in the late 20th. |
Adam's points | My responses |
Desks and chairs are part of a system, and good ones are designed to be reconfigured by the user to suit their needs, rather than some program of the designers. That's one of the reasons why integrated seating/working surfaces fail. | I completely agree that all of these things need to be part of a system, and nowadays designing technology (which furniture has always been, even when it was made of wood, wool and iron) in isolation no longer makes sense. Allowing for adaptability is a tricker question, though. Sure there should be flexibility in the design, but one of the reasons that traditional furniture had ambiguous function was that it had to. Then, again, it would be weird to have six Aerons at the dinner table or a leather club chair next to a work surface, so it's not like "traditional" furniture design is all that flexible, either. Besides, maybe smart furniture would present possibilities for more flexibility? |
Adam likes his Murphy bed and doesn't see why it should be quaint. | I'm not saying it should be quaint, just that it is. It's of a class of furniture, like wash basins and hat racks, that are no longer nearly as popular because of how our society functions. Modern McMansions are build under different social considerations than when your house was built, so they don't have drawing rooms or root cellars, but they do have media rooms. The Murphy bed is a reminder of that time, so it comes off as quaint. |
Dumb furniture is easier to maintain and doesn't depend on the electrical grid to work. |
I agree that dumb furniture is easier to maintain, but I'm not
sure how much that plays into people's considerations anymore, so
I'm not sure how much it matters to my point that furniture needs
to become smarter. With the exception of people who seek out
older furniture (which is a sizable chunk of the population, but
probably not the majority), its function in society is as dictated
by fashion as anything else. That makes it as frequently
disposed-of as everything else. I too like furniture that lasts
(in fact most of my furniture is pre-Modern antique), but my
values are clearly not those of the majority of Ikea visitors.
And so many things aren't going to work when the grid goes out that I'm not too worried that maybe my smart table won't work as advertised. Granted, key devices should still more-or-less function even without juice, but that's part of good design. |