Carbon fiber, miracle fiber from the 70s, seems to be making inroads into the furniture industry. I think it's potentially an interesting metric of how quickly this industry can absorb new technology, or maybe it's just that carbon fiber has only recently gotten to be cost-effective enough to profitably mass-produce furniture (though I find that hard to believe, since the markup on furniture has to be at least that on motorcycle mufflers, and those have had carbon fiber on 'em for years).
In the past 6 months I have seen 3 carbon fiber chairs appear:
What does this mean for smart furniture? I think it means that at least someone thinks that there's a sizable market for non-designer furniture that's made in nontraditional ways. A lot of innovative stuff, like in any early adopter situation, is bought purely because it's made in some wacky way or out of some wacky material; it's when things are bought for what the wacky does, rather than for what it is, that things take off.
I feel that information is a kind of material that is manipulated by technological tools and projected into the world as objects, so the opening of the market to new materials is good news. It's an interesting datapoint.
And here's an interesting carbon fiber/kevlar twill material that could be even cooler.
From boingboing by way of Cassidy, the gravity lamp from Front Design in Stockholm. It has a sensor and some very basic "robotics" in it (I think it pulls some wires and the rods straighten like tentpoles), but it's cute. This is the same group that did a memorable non-tech conceptual furniture piece I saw in Milan: it looks like the vase version of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" (to see it, go to their site, click on Projects, then Design By, then Motion). They've also done some other clever technology-based design, including a robotic table that figures out how to stand, and an amusing 3D version of the glitchcore music philosophy (that's the one where the byproducts of digital recording are used as the basis of new music--Matmos and Oval are probably the ones who do it best) in the form of a candle holder, as misrendered by a rapid prototyping machine.
Cool stuff.
I'm proud that an article I wrote on group personas has appeared in Boxes and Arrows, the excellent IA and UE journal.
Entertainment, education, and collaboration software is often used by two or more people simultaneously. Each of these groups has a different set of needs and expectations, and each can be modeled as a group persona, rather than as individual users.
Thanks to all of the B&A folks for guiding and editing it (and running the Star Trek quote: I can't believe it!) and to the workshop participants for providing the excellent experience that inspired it.
Slashdot brings a link to a fake window made of LCD panels. Superficially, this is another wacky outgrowth of the casemod world, judging by the presentation of the how the thing was put together (it's classic casemod style, complete with random anime babe desktop pattern), but I think it's also an interesting interaction between the casemod world and the ambient display world. He could easily adapt it to be like the now-classic Ljungblad and Holmquist Mondrian Ambient Weather Display and present literal content, leveraging the domestic context.
OK, that's starting to sound convoluted. I guess what I mean is that it fits into a tritely domestic setting much more easily than the minimal Modernism of a lot of ambient display, and that makes it much more likely to be accepted by the large group of people who find even IKEA Modernism too cold. Familiarity is important when designing objects for the mass home market, and this feels very familiar, even if it's actually a pretty profoundly weird thing, the inverse of the old bricked-up window.
The following paragraph caught my eye (really, the eye of Google's news alert) in this story on Apple's new G5 iMac design:
"Sony has another desktop, the W series, whose overall design feels more like the iMac. It feels more like modern furniture design than a consumer electronics product. In fact, we have one in our living room. People are always commenting on what a beautiful design it is. When the keyboard is folded up it doesn't really look like a computer."
It's a minor point, but telling. Some thoughts:
What this points to me is a recognition that technology's role is continuing to fade into the background and people are starting to desire technology that doesn't advertise itself as such. Not that that's a big revelation, but it's interesting to see how these ideas are appearing as desires.
Sorry to beat this dead horse, but several people have recenly asked me for the version of the Smart Furniture Manifesto that was published in Metropolis Magazine in June. It's one of the articles from that issue that they didn't put online, so I can't just point to it. It's philosophically similar to what I wrote last year, but it expands and clarifies the ideas somewhat.
The first twenty years of my father's career as an automotive engineer were spent under the hood, tweaking tiny screws on carburetors to make them produce the right mixture of air and gas. The last ten, he rarely left the cab of his test vehicle, all the tweaking done with a terminal. The difference is not just one of a new kind of technique, or comfort, but a whole new approach that embodied knowledge about engines in the form of information, instead of metal.
I'm a user experience designer, what used to be called a user interface designer. I design how people interact with technology, with software, hardware and web sites, and I'm constantly looking at the world through the lens of technological change and its affect on people.
I also like furniture. Not as a designer, but as a consumer. And it is as an outsider to the world of furniture design that I see a world trapped in amber. Furniture design is stuck in the esthetics of mid-century Modernism, looking at the world through an Industrial Revolution mindset of material manipulation. When new tools are used, it's to make the same old things, maybe a little slicker, maybe a little cheaper.
Understanding that manifestos are a dangerous thing for authors—on one hand, there's the risk of militantly stating the obvious; on the other, exposing a disconnect with reality—here's my challenge to all furniture and technology designers, in the form of a manifesto:
As tools, current furniture designs use little of the information available to them. The Allsteel Raptor, one of the most information-savvy chairs out there, uses the weight of the user to adjust the geometry of the chair, which is clever, but the mechanics are baroque and its structure is forever fixed. It can only use a fraction of available information about the sitter and the environment.
The question is when it will happen, what form it'll take and who'll make it. It can be cubicle walls that know who's inside them based on the IDs of the cell phones nearby and change the pictures in the picture frames accordingly, or it can be a café stereo that plays songs off of visitor's laptop playlists, or a bookshelf that lets you search the text of the books that are on it.
If something can do its primary purpose more elegantly and efficiently because it is smart, it is better. Why else design new things? Furniture that adapts to our desires, habits and bodies, that makes our experience of the world more comfortable, is better than furniture that doesn't. Smart furniture can do this better than regular furniture, therefore, it's better.
As our lives change, the tools of our lives need to change with them. Our world seems to be increasingly flexible, diverse, and information rich than it once was. This makes it more complex. Furniture defines our living environment and is the primary tool that can reduce the complexity of our lives, but it's almost never used for this.
Imagine a child's bed that monitors her sleep patterns and adjusts to give her (and you) a good night's sleep. Imagine a club chair that through subtle, continual adjustments to its shape, allows you to spend an afternoon sitting in your living room without requiring a yoga class afterward. Smart furniture has the capability of reducing the complexity and increasing the comfort our everyday lives using information. To not begin designing it now would be to let technology—rather than people's needs—drive how it works.
Smart furniture presents the possibility of building more utility and more esthetic possibilities than regular furniture. Since people like what works better for them, they'll like smart furniture more. Dumb furniture isn't without its advantages: it's simple to make and works for a long time without upgrades; it doesn't crash when the power goes out—but how much do those factors plays into people's considerations of what to buy? Furniture's function in society today is as dictated by fashion as longevity or flexibility. That makes it as frequently disposed-of as everything else. If smart furniture can satisfy people's immediate needs better than dumb furniture, many of them will prefer it. That's why they buy Ikea in droves.
As lifestyles, work styles and workplaces change, as the tools with which we live and work change, furniture adapts. The Murphy bed was an elegant technological solution to a social problem (small apartments created by rapid urbanization in the early 20th century). Suburban American homes today have little need for Murphy beds (or hat racks, or wash basins).
Smart furniture will be part of the movement toward more flexible work and living environments already underway and will, as co-evolve with the new environments to change how furniture pieces are defined and differentiated. Desks have already turned into "work surfaces." Merge those with active noise cancellation dividers in a meeting space and you get The Cone of Silence as a new type of furniture.
Furniture that is most tool-like is likely to benefit from the potential of smart furniture first. The two areas which have the most tool-like furniture are the office and the kitchen. Trash cans, for one, are crying out to be smarter.
The bed is a particularly good candidate for becoming smart, since beds are generally close to power outlets, don't move a lot, can hide a lot of technology and are used for a fairly well-defined range of activities.
Cars are tightly integrated furniture systems tuned to a specific set of tasks. What differentiates them from a Herman Miller office suite is that they are more closely integrated and, out of necessity, they're bolted to a set of wheels and a motor.
And, yes, this means that, by extension, motorcycles are chairs. Really fast chairs.
When was the last time you had to set the choke on a new car?
As a tool for work, I think that the Aeron is a best office chair design in many years, but its complexity points to an antiquated attitude to work. Its Rube Goldberg-esque array of controls belongs to an era when having a chair for a task defined a job. If the trend is away from having one task and one chair, it's away from one set of chair settings.
As a user experience designer, I see the mechanistic controls of the Aeron giving the illusion of customization and flexibility, but really creating a new set of concerns for the sitter. It assumes that someone needs to care enough to understand the ergonomic information provided to configure it, which assumes that their job is such that this is important. I bet few Aerons get configured correctly.
One of the core ideas behind Modernism was to let the materials guide the design, to maximize the possibilities inherent in the technology. Information may be the most malleable and most powerful material because it enables other materials to behave in ways impossible through other means, like the rebar in concrete. Whenever information processing has been added to a purely mechanical product, it's profoundly changed how that product is made and what it can do, generally making it both cheaper and—from the perspective of the user—better. It's time for furniture to join that trend.
So is Smart Furniture a panacea for all our ills? Here I must abandon my idealism and recognize that just like all technologies, there are plenty of potential downsides. On the most basic level, it can introduce all kinds of complexity and failure modes that don't currently exist. From a privacy perspective, it can reveal details about us, reveal to our employers when we're not at our desks and to our lovers when we're not in bed. But all of this stems, really, from bad design. Design without considering people's experiences. Design that happens when things are not designed at all, just built. Which may be the most important reason to start designing smart furniture as soon as possible.
The Wall Street Journal had a piece on circuit bending in yesterday's paper.
It's interesting to me to see this surface, but it only makes sense: technology is getting more pervasive, it's cheaper, so there's less risk in breaking it and the DIY esthetic is being encouraged through all of the TV shows about making and modifying stuff.
I wonder if there's a relationship between cultural penetration of a technology, the power of the technology and affluence to people's interest in modifying it for purely their own pleasure? I mean, it was about 50 years after the introduction of the automobile that hotrodding took off, but only after America was pretty rich and the 454 Chevy big block became commonplace. Now it's about 50 years after the beginning of computers and we're an affluent culture...so what's the current tech equivalent of the 454?