You can download a 1MB PDF of my presentation with slides and a full transcript.

Here it is on Slideshare (click through and look at the speaker notes to see the transcript):

And here on Scribd:

Unintended Consequences: design [in|for|and] the age of ubiquitous computing

Here's the full transcript:

Good morning! Thank you very much for inviting me. I've heard great things about this event for years and it's an honor to be here. Today I'll be talking about ubiquitous computing and, very broadly speaking, design.
First, let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm a user experience designer. I was one of the first professional Web designers in 1993. I've worked on the design of hundreds of web sites and many digital consumer products. I also regularly work with companies to help them create more user centered design cultures so they can make better products themselves.
I sat out the first dotcom crash writing a book based on the work I had been doing. It's a cookbook of user research methods.
And 2001 I co-founded a design and consulting company called Adaptive Path.
...and three years later I left it, and I left the Web altogether, to found a company with Tod E. Kurt called ThingM in 2006.
We weren't sure what we were going to be but it's turned out that we're a micro-OEM. We design and manufactures a range of smart LEDs for architects, industrial designers and hackers.
This talk is based on my book on ubiquitous computing user experience design. It came out last September and it's called "Smart Things" and it's published by Morgan Kaufmann.
I want to start with a little history. I love the history of technology. This example comes from Harold Innes, who was a political economist and Marshall Mcluhan's mentor, wrote about technologies and empires. He has an interesting take on papyrus. According to him, it nearly brought down the Ancient Egyptian empire, and ended up changing it forewver. Before papyrus, writing in ancient Egypt was the process of slowly inscribing information permanently on immobile things like obelisks and tomb walls. Information moved slowly, formally. It was easily controlled and constrained.

When papyrus was invented, it seemed like a great idea for those in power. The pharaoh could administer his empire from a central location and wouldn't have to rely on messengers. Now he could send lots of precise instructions and scribes could write down complex ideas, such as those about geometry. But papyrus is not stone. It's easier to write on, orders of magnitude easier. So, people wrote more. A lot more. They were writing so much that they needed a less formal florid writing system, and more people learned to read and write. Suddenly, and by suddenly I mean over the course of hundreds of years, this meant that knowledge, and the control that comes with it, was no longer be centrally controlled. People started to get strange ideas. They started to ask why it was only the Pharoah who got to go to heaven. Scribes, the nerds of their era, were suddenly quite powerful. Surprisingly powerful. Dangerously powerful.

The Pharaoh--and I can't remember which dynasty this was, maybe the 19th?--decided that this was really endangering the stability of the Empire, which was under a lot of stress anyway. He needed to do something drastic. He made the all the Scribes report directly to him. They were elevated to the same level as priests and the position became hereditary and bureaucratic. No one else was allowed to write. Amazingly, this worked, and the literacy that was
The interesting thing is that the people who invented papyrus did not create it to threaten Egypt. Quite the contrary. And the scribes, they were just producing content. Moving symbols around. They were not intending to undermine their government.

No one involved intended to nearly topple Egypt with papyrus. There was nothing inherent in the technology that could have predicted this. No, it's that technology always, always has unintended consequences.
We who make technology have a strange perspective in its role in the world. We feel that because we make it, we understand it. We like to think we can predict where it will go and what it will do.

The problem is that our perspective is tiny and incremental. We usually miss the real deeply transformative change that happens outside our frame of reference. Often it's the people who create a technology that are the most surprised by its effects.

These are two small piece of Scott Weaver's toothpick sculpture of the Bay Area.
The whole thing looks roughly like this. It took him 30 years and a bazillion toothpicks.

As technologists, as human beings, really, we are great at seeing the details, but in many ways we're cognitively equipped to to see the whole. We're terrible at seeing emergent phenomena that come from the confluence of thousands of small things. Big social waves brought on by technology have to be nearly on top of us before we see them.

We're currently in the upslope to such a shift brought on by something familiar, something that we may think we have a handle on, but which is creating deep social shifts we couldn't have predicted.
I'm of course talking about Moore's Law, since that's where all conversations about the implication of digital technology start. When people talk about Moore's Law, it's often in the context of maximum processing power. But it's actually something different. It's actually a description of the cost of processing power. It's a model of how much more processing power we can fit into a single chip that's priced at a predictable pricing point this year than we could last year. This means that it's not just that processors are getting more powerful, it's that PROCESSING is getting cheaper.

For example, at the beginning of the Internet era we had the 486 as the state of the art and it cost $1500 in today's dollars. It's the processor that the Web was built for and with. Today, you can buy that same amount of processing power for 50 cents, and it uses only a fraction of the energy. That decrease in price is the same orders of magnitude drop as the increase in speed. This is not a coincidence, because both are the product of the same underlying technological changes.

What this means in practice is that embedding powerful information processing technology into anything is quickly approaching becoming free.
We see this most readily as a proliferation and a homogenization of digital devices because virtually any device can now do what every other device does. This is why we're seeing all of this churn in form factors, since the consumer electronics industry is trying to figure out how they can sell yet one more screen of a different size. Four years ago it was smart phones, three years ago it was all netbooks, two years ago it was tablets, now it's 7-inch tablets and connected TVs. They're all essentially the same device in different form factors.
That's fine, but it's the most primitive of the transitions that's happening.
Simultaneously, the number of wireless networks in the world grew by several orders of magnitude.

This is a video by Timo Arnall that envisions how saturated our environment is with networks, and it's not even counting the mobile phone network, which covers just about everything. This means that virtually any device, anywhere can share data with the cloud at any time. People right now are excited about moving processing and data storage to the cloud and treating devices as terminals. That's certainly interesting, but it's also just the tip of the iceberg. That's like saying the steam engine is really great for pumping water out of mines. Yes, it's good at that, and also creating the industrial revolution.
It is thus no longer unthinkable to have an everyday object use an embedded processor to take a small piece of information--say the temperature, or the orientation of a device, or your meeting schedule--and autonomously act on it to help the device do its job better. Information processing is now part of the set of options we can practically consider when designing just about any object.

If you look at what happened when the price of writing fell, or when extracting aluminum became two orders of magnitude cheaper in the late 19the century, or when electric motors became significantly cheaper and smaller in the 1920s you see dramatic material and societal change. When something becomes cheap enough, when cost passes a certain tipping point, it quickly joins the toolkit of things we create our world with.
In other words, information has become a material to design with.

And with that, we have entered the world of ubiquitous computing, the world Mark Weiser roughly .
Because we have information as a design material, we no longer think it's crazy to have a processor that creates behavior in a toy, or for a bathroom scale to connect to a cloud service, or for shoes to collect telemetry.

This capability of everyday objects to make sophisticated autonomous decisions and acting using arbitrary information is new to the world and it is as deep an infrastructural change in our world as electrification, steam power, and mechanical printing. Maybe it's as big of a deal as bricks. Seriously, it's a huge change in how the world works, and we're just at the beginning of it.
Today it's relatively simple to make a device sense the world with a great deal of precision.

There are thousands sensors that convert states of the world into electrical signals that can be manipulated as information. This also includes sensors that sense human intention. We call these "buttons", "levers", "knobs" and so on.
Our things can make physical changes in the world based on input. Devices made from the perspective of treating information as a design material can autonomously affect the world in a way that no previous material was capable of.
Information can be used to store knowledge about the state of the world and act on it later. This could be just a single piece of data.
Or it can encode very sophisticated knowledge about the world. This is a Blendtech programmable kitchen blender. With it you can program a specific sequence of blender power, speed and duration and associate that sequence with a button on the blender. it allows you to embed experience and knowledge about food processing into the tool, which can then produce that as a behavior, rather than requiring the operator to have that knowledge and develop the experience.

Why do this? Well, if you're Jamba Juice, which is a large US smoothie chain, your business depends on such programmable blenders so their staff don't have to be trained in the fine points of blending and their product is always consistent. Their profit margins depend on knowledge that's encoded into their blenders, knowledge that's accessed with a single button.
This is the control panel of Blend Tech's home blender. Blenders used to have buttons for different speeds. They described WHAT you were doing. Now, with embedded knowledge, it's about the desired end result. It's about WHY. The software handles the what.
One of the most transformative qualities of information is that it can be duplicated exactly and transmitted flawlessly. This has already changed the music and video industry forever, as we know.

But it also means that device behavior can be replicated exactly. We've become acclimated to it, but--stepping back--the idea of near-exact replication in a world full of randomness and uncertainty is a pretty amazing thing, and is a core part of what makes working with information as a material so powerful.

Image: N-Trophy, 2000-2003, Kelly Heaton, Feldman Gallery: http:// www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhhea03.html
Finally, and most profoundly, things made with information do more than just react, they can have behavior.

Information enables behavior that's orders of magnitude more complex than possible with just mechanics, at a fraction of the cost. This is a modern small airplane avionics system. It consists of a bunch of small fairly standard computers running special software. It's a bit like a flight simulator that actually flies.
Found on: http://www.vansairforce.com/community/showthread.php?t=51435
Compare that to a traditional gyroscopic autopilot, what it replaced. Every component is unique, it does very little, and to change its behavior you have to completely reengineer it.

When you make something with information, you enable that thing to exhibit behaviors that are vastly more sophisticated than what was possible with any previous material.
That is the wave that's basically on top of us.
So what can we as designers do in this situation?
Well, we're possibly the luckiest ones.

For the last 20 years we've been building a digital representation of the world on the Internet. We call the the Web, and if you look at it as a unit, it's a rough and unorganized, but fairly complete model of most things in the world and how they interact.

Until now, however, it was disjoint from the thing that it was modeling. We left it up to people to make the connection between this map of the world with the world itself. We had to resort to things like stickers to tell people in the real world that a given object, or location, had an information shadow in the cloud.
But that's quickly changing.
Here's Toyota and Salesforce's plan for having your car continuously embedded in both Toyota corporate's network and your social network. The factory can update the car firmware remotely and the car can text you when it's done charging. The information shadow of the object, it's representation in the cloud, and the object have been glued together.
For Web designers this is great news. As the model of the world and the world merge, as the map and the territory become increasingly intertwined, who knows the most about the map? It's us. We're been swimming in it longer than anyone else. And as things are increasingly made using information as a material thanks to the inclusion of cheap processing and networking, we're the ones who know how to design for it.
Colliding galaxies, NASA
Because we're way ahead of the curve in terms of figuring out how digital things should talk to each other.

Everything that communicates needs to do in some standard way, and increasingly that way looks a lot like the Web. Here's a slide from a project by Vlad Trifa and Dominique Guinard of ETH Zurich. They've build a middleware layer that makes every physical objects look basically like a Web site. They call it, appropriately, The Web of Things. It doesn't sound particularly farfetched. They're just applying stable technical standards that were developed when Web servers were as powerful as today's smart TVs to things like, well, smart TVs.

This allows us to transfer our skills easily, since we can now mash up objects how we mash up web sites.
That's a way of treating devices from afar as you would Web sites, but people's use of devices close by is also becoming more Web-like.

When devices are used to access online services people begin to see through them to the online world they provide access to, rather than looking at them as tools in their own right. In many
ways we no longer think of experiences we have on devices as being "online" or "offline," but as services that we can access in a number of different ways, unified by brand identity and continuity of experience. Our expectation is now that it's neither the device nor the software running on it that's the locus of value, but the service that device and software provide access to.
These devices become what I call "service avatars." A camera becomes a really good appliance for taking photos for Flickr, while a TV becomes a nice Flickr display that you don't have to log into every time, and a phone becomes a convenient way to take your Flickr pictures on the road.

Thus, the service and the device become increasingly inseparable and we who create the services effectively control the devices.
For example, you can now get Netflix on virtually any terminal that has a screen and a network connection. You can pause a Netflix movie on one terminal and then upause it on another.
Because to the Netflix customer, any device used to watch a movie on Netflix is just a hole in space to the Netflix service. It's a short-term manifestation of a single service. The value, the brand loyalty, and the focus is on the service, not the frame around it. The technology exists to enable the service, not as an end to itself.

This is one way that objects in the world and the digital online map are becoming the same thing, a thing that we as interaction designers, control.
Here's a telling ad from Amazon for the Kindle, which is one of the purest examples of a service avatar based user experience. This ad is saying "Look, use whatever avatar you want. We don't care, as long you stay loyal to our service. You can buy our specialized device, but you don't have to."
Jeff Bezos is now even referring to it in these terms.

This leads to another experience design conclusion. The core of the product is not the web site that you're designing, or the product you're designing--it's not any of the avatars of the service. The core is the service that lies underneath. The avatars reflect that service, they deliver the product in context- appropriate ways, and their design is very important since they are how people experience the service, but the most important part of the design is the itself.

Thus, when we are designing FOR the Web, we are increasingly designing for the world.
So what's the upshot of all of this? How do these pieces fit into place?
It's still pretty early, and--like I said, we're terrible at identifying emergent phenomena--so we don't really know what this ubicomp elephant looks like. We do, however, have some pointers to what kinds of changes we could see.
Source: Banksy's elephant.
For example, what happens when you mix information shadows and service avatars? You get a blurring between what's a product and what's a service.

When you sign up with a car sharing company like Flexicar or GoGet you become a subscriber to their service.

Each specific car is an avatar of its respected service, actively connected to the service at all times. You can use it any time you want, but you can only open the car and start the engine the service allows it. Your relationship with these cars becomes something different than either renting a car or owning one, sharing elements of both. It's a new kind of relationship that we don't yet have a good word for. And it's a relationship that's created by the capabilities of underlying technologies that didn't exist or were impractical 20 years ago.
This is the German Call-a-Bike program, run by the rail service. You need a bike, you find one of these bikes, which are usually at major street corners. You use your mobile phone to call the number on the bike. It gives you a code that you punch in to unlock the bike lock. You ride the bike around and when you've arrived, you lock it. The amount of time you rode it automatically gets billed to your phone, by the minute. Each bike is an avatar of the Call-A-Bike service.
Photo CC by probek, found on Flickr.
Here's another example that points to some exciting possibilities and that also straddles this model of not quite ownership and not quite rental. Bag, Borrow or Steal is a designer purse subscription site. It works like Netflix, but for really expensive handbags.
It's fashion by subscription. From a user-centered design perspective, it's great. Here's a class of infrequently-used, highly desired, expensive objects whose specific instantiation changes with the seasons. You don't want a specific bag as much as you want whatever the current appropriate thing to fill the dotted line is, but actually keeping up with that fashion is expensive.

This service lets you own that bag possibility space without actually owning a single bag.
Photo CC by bs70, Flickr
Here's another one called Rent the Runway that has expanded this idea to dresses and accessories.
How long until you get a subscription to Zara and instead of buying your clothes, you just pay a monthly fee to get whatever is seasonal for your type of work in your part of the world at your price point.
We already have Exactitudes and people seem quite comfortable with it. Why not turn it into a subscription business model for Zara?
Another effect, and one which may be the most profound of all, is how our increasing reliance on embedded algorithms shifts relationships of authority and responsibility. This isn't necessarily bad--I, for one, am happy to let Google Maps plot routes for me since it only gets it spectacularly wrong every once in a while--but the more we embed sensors in our world and use automatically processed information to make material changes in the world, the more power we implicitly give algorithms and the more authority we give their designers.

For example, San Francisco has instituted a dynamic parking pricing system called SFPark. Sensors that look like speed bumps are embedded in the pavement. They sense whether a car is in a given parking space or not. This information is uploaded to the cloud where three things happen to it: it serves as the data source for an app that shows drivers where there are empty spaces, it tells meter maids where there are cars with expired meters, and--most interestingly --it uses the parking frequency data to adjust parking prices dynamically. Their stated goal is that the algorithm will price the parking so that there's always two available spaces on every block. Theoretically, a spot in a busy part of town that costs 50 cents an hour at 5AM may cost $50 an hour by 1PM. The people that run this program in San Francisco understand the potential danger of letting such an algorithm run completely free and they've intentionally limited both the price range and how often it changes, but the fact that they felt they had to do that shows that a public negotiation with algorithms that control the world has already begun. You can see a similar negotiation happening with smart electrical meter pricing.
This kind of negotiation is happening all the way to the personal level, down to individuals and their relationship with themselves.

Right now the Quantified Self movement is quite popular in the San Francisco Bay Area. People are using a wide variety of sensors to measure things about themselves so that they can optimize their bodies and lives. Here's the cloud- connected pedometer from Fitbit, Bodymedia's multi-sensor cuff. The sleep sensor from Zeo. They're all designed to collect data about you, then process it, perhaps share it, and visualize it. They're great examples of service avatars made with information as a material. But there's something about them that unsettles me.

At their core, they're shifting intrinsic rewards, the positive internal drive for being healthier, getting better sleep, being more fit, to extrinsic rewards-- making numbers go up. But those extrinsic rewards are controlled by algorithms, rather than their owners' judgment. What these products are saying, in effect, is that we can become the people we want to by giving up some of the control of our lives to these digital devices. Perhaps that's true--people depend on a lot of tools--but what results is a hybrid between a person with goals and a set of algorithms that purports to tell them whether those goals have been achieved. This is likely to have many unintended consequences. We trust algorithms and sensors because they look objective, but are they? How do we know?
This is the Water Pebble. It aims to reduce water usage by timing your shower and telling you then you hit your designated shower time. The way it works is that when you first use it, you push a button and take a shower. That sets the baseline. From then on it works like a shower timer. The algorithmic part of it comes in when, after a while, it starts slowly reducing the amount of time it gives you, so that you progressively build a habit of using less water.

My personal experience with it, however, is that its algorithm for behavior change doesn't match my ability to actually change. It reduced the amount of time it gave me to shower, and I was following along with it, until my change curve deviated from its. Instead of helping me change my behavior, it just sat there at in the shower drain blinking red and mocking me for not being good enough. I couldn't reason with it, I couldn't get it to change its algorithm to match my capabilities, so I stopped using it.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't enter into these relationships, but that they represent a deep shift in how we relate to the world. We shift our trust and the responsibility of making sense of the world to algorithms more than our own capabilities. We are likely going to spend the rest of our lives negotiating power relationships with embedded devices, in a way that no people have ever
And we can expect many unintended consequences. The designers of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and text messaging did not, and could not have predicted, a new papyrus-level crisis in Egyptian government. And yet they provided the medium through which that revolution happened, largely confirming Ethan Zuckerman's assertion that any technology that can be used to share cute cat pictures can be used to overthrow a government.

We, those who grew up on the net and who design it, will be the ones who create ubiquitous computing, not the roboticists or network engineers, and ubicomp will fundamentally change the world and us along with it. We have tremendous power and enormous responsibility. And it's our responsibility to enjoy ourselves, make great stuff, take huge risks, and be thoughtful about the implications of what we're doing without ever forgetting that we have no idea what's going to happen next.
Thank you.

You can download a 720K PDF of the presentation and transcript. GigaOM's Matthew Ingram also covered my talk.

Here it is on Slideshare (click through and look at speaker notes to get the transcript):

Here it is on Scribd:

The Internet of Things to Come: elements of a ubiquitous computing innovation ecosystem

The transcript is as follows:

Good morning. Thank you for inviting me. It's an honor to be back. Today I'm going to be talking about the Internet of Things. Or, more specifically, how I believe that the landscape in which we create ubiquitous computing devices, such as the things that we call The Internet of Things, is about to fundamentally change.

First, let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm a user experience designer. I was one of the first professional Web designers in 1993. I've worked on the design of hundreds of web sites and many digital consumer products. I also regularly work with companies to help them create more user centered design cultures so they can make better products themselves.

I sat out the first dotcom crash distilling my experience into a cookbook of user research methods.

And 2001 I co-founded a design and consulting company called Adaptive Path.

...and three years later I left it, and I left the Web altogether, to found a company with Tod E. Kurt called ThingM in 2006.

We weren't sure what we were going to be but it's turned out that we're a micro-OEM. We design and manufactures a range of smart LEDs for architects, industrial designers and hackers.

Last year my book on ubiquitous computing user experience design was published. It's called "Smart Things" and it's published by Morgan Kaufmann.

I also organize an annual summit of people developing hardware design tools for non-engineers. It's called Sketching in Hardware and it's this event that's probably most influenced the talk I'm going to give today.

Talking about The Internet of Things is a challenge because there are so many different definitions. This is Time Magazine's illustration of the Internet of Things for their "Best Inventions of 2008" edition. I love this illustration is because it makes no sense no matter how you think about it, which is actually quite an accurate representation of how confusing the many definitions of the Internet of Things are right now.

Gartner has put it on their hype cycle, which means that all kinds of people are describing what they're doing as The Internet of Things, regardless of what they're actually doing.

I can't describe to you what the Internet of Things is, or is going to be. What I can do is tell what components I think are going to be in it, and how I think it's going to come about.
Its components will likely include digital identification through RFIDs or other technologies. These can, for example, tell you where your food was grown...
Source: Yottamark

It will almost certainly include pervasive networking that's used to collect telemetry generated by a wide variety of devices and then store and process it in the cloud. This will, for example, allows your car to be continuously embedded in both Toyota's corporate network and your social network..12!
It will also include embedded sensing in everyday objects that connects them to the cloud. This is Green Goose's sensor platform. They're based here in San Francisco and they put a sensor, a processor, a battery and a wireless communication chip into a puffy sticker that you can put on anything.

Combining these components into services will challenge existing industries. Car sharing, for example, is so heavily dependent on Internet of Things technologies it's hard to imagine it working otherwise.

The Internet of Things will then likely revolutionize infrastructures such as meter reading and parking collection, changing how we relate to our world on the scale of cities.
These are undeniably all pieces of the Internet of Things elephant..15!
The problem is that we're still pretty blind about what the elephant really looks like.
We're about to find out a lot more. There are a number of pieces that have recently begun to fall into place which I believe will create an ecosystem for the rapid development of Internet of Things products, technologies and companies, and that's what I'd like to talk about today.

Here are the six things I think make up this ecosystem.

I'm going to start with the nerdiest stuff first. Semiconductor manufacturers are putting increasingly more functionality on chips. Things that used to take five chips, as this diagram from Renesas Electronics shows, can now be done on one chip. This has all kinds of benefits from an assembly standpoint, but it also has an additional benefit. It creates an abstraction layer around a unit of functionality, in this case an LCD driver, to creates a single building block that's meaningful in human terms, rather than just electronic terms.

This is the start of object-oriented hardware. Each block is an atom of functionality that communicates with other blocks over a local network.

One block can do all of the work to connect to any phone network in the world.

Another is a complete GPS system.

Yet another is a multiaxis accelerometer that does the necessary math to clean up the signal.
This abstraction of knowledge into silicon means that rather than starting from basic principles of electronics, designers can focus on what they're trying to create, rather than which capacitor to use or how to tell the signal from the noise.

Assembling electronics has gotten very cheap. It's not just that it's cheap to ship stuff to Asian factories, but it's gotten surprisingly inexpensive to assemble hardware in medium sized runs yourself. Not ten units, which you can do by hand, and not a million, which requires a serious setup, but, say 1,000, or 5,000. This puts the idea of making small run electronics into cottage industry magnitude and brings it back closer to the hands of designers.
This is one of Sparkfun Electronics pick and place machines.

This is Adafruit's, who work out of a loft in New York. Source: Adafruit

This is DIYDrones' the manufacturing company Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine runs in his space time. These are small companies that are nevertheless big enough that they decided to make their own electronics, because it's now a reasonable business decision.

After twenty years of the Web, there's a lot of familiarity with it, and each new generation of designers and developers is more immersed in Web-like ideas. They increasingly think of digital technology as inherently anchored to the cloud and intuitively understand the possibilities that networked connections provide. There are embedded hardware products, hardware objects, that will do all of the provisioning of a service in the cloud once a connection is made. I grabbed this image from Arrayent, who is a company that makes a little hardware blob that connects virtually anything, in this case a smoke detector to their cloud service.

Moreover, there are now services such as Pachube, which was recently acquired, that allow an arbitrary data stream from any net connected device to share that stream with any other device. Pachube will do the buffering, the protocol translation, the analytics, everything. One device publishes an output stream, another device then subscribes to it it. It's a system that has its roots in Web mashups, now mapped to hardware

One of the most exciting changes is the movement of hardware development tools online. Hardware development used to be a solitary activity done in a lab with an oscilloscope and a soldering iron. Now it's becoming increasingly a social activity thanks to a new generation of online tools.
Upverter, a Y Combinator-funded startup that just launched their beta, is a product that integrates electronic design with social collaboration. It's like SourceForge, or GitHub for hardware.

This is Fritzing, a open source project for online social hardware design. They will even print the circuit board for you and mail it to you.

Once you have social collaboration and the publishing and subscription of designs, schematics and code, you have the equivalent of View Source for hardware design. That, in turn, means that designers no longer have to start from scratch or from electronic textbooks or worry about asking noob questions on discussion boards. It's a model taken directly from how the Web grew.

The Arduino platform is probably the most mature and successful product to have come out of this type of collaborative technology environment.

It has become the reference platform that people extend to accomplish specific things. Here's the Ardupilot drone controller from the DIYDrones folks.

Here's one from All Power Labs that's used for precisely controlling an alternative energy gasifier unit.

Here's Google's Open Accessory development platform. It's also based on the Arduino.
There were microcontroller platforms before, but the Arduino's popularity and flexibility makes it the Linux of Internet of Things hardware. It is not the killer app, but it forms the bedrock on which applications are built.

The final component of the ecosystem is probably the most important and least developed. It's a marketing and distribution mechanism that allows people to sell hardware in low volumes so that they can gauge interest and generate operating income.

Kickstarter, in this instance, acts like a group buying site for products that don't exist yet, giving developers feedback about the popularity of their idea and teaching them how to position it for a market before they've made a single product.

Etsy allows very small run electronic products.

Even fab.com, which sells limited edition high design products like rugs and backpacks sells low run
electronics.

These channels are immature, but they're becoming increasingly popular. In effect, they're doing an end run around the traditional consumer electronic ecosystem to address the long tail of electronics buyers. That also happens to be where much of the greatest innovation happens.

We've already seen such a combination of inexpensive infrastructure technologies coupled with online collaboration systems and a deployment and distribution mechanism that allows for rapid iteration with low overhead.

It's the core of the Lean Startup philosophy that's proven so successful in creating a bunch of new companies and services. If we look at Eric Ries' definition of what makes a lean startup, we can see all the pieces in this new ecosystem.

The tools are free and open. The costs for testing and assembly are low.

Object oriented hardware and social tools enable rapid iterative development, while cloud computing allows for rapid deployment of associated services.

Although they're immature, we're getting increasingly more low volume sales channels to test out ideas. I've singled out Kickstarter because in addition to sales, it provides feedback even before there are any sales, which is even more in line with the lean startup philosophy.

In the end what I am describing here is not the Internet of Things, or ubiquitous computing, but it is the innovation ecosystem that will lead to the Internet of Things.

Thank you.

Here it is on Slideshare:

Here it is on Scribd:
Life in the Pre-Pre-Cambrian: a presentation for the MS Social Computing Symposium

And you can download it as a PDF.

Here is the transcript:

Good afternoon. Thank you for inviting me.

First, let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm a user experience designer and entrepreneur. I was one of the first professional Web designers in 1993. Since then I've worked on the user experience design of hundreds of web sites. I also consult on the design of digital consumer products, and I've helped a number of consumer electronics and appliance manufacturers create better user experiences and more user centered design cultures.

In 2003 I wrote a how-to book of user research methods for technology design. It has proven to be somewhat popular, as such books go.

Around the same time as I was writing that book, I co-founded a design and consulting company called Adaptive Path.

I wanted to get more hands-on with technology development, so in 2006 I founded ThingM with Tod E. Kurt.

We're a micro-OEM. We design and manufactures a range of smart LEDs for architects, industrial designers and hackers. These LEDs reduce the cost of including RGB light into projects from days to minutes, they've been somewhat successful as such niche components go. It has been quite exciting to design both the user experience of a component and a company.

I also organize an annual event called Sketching in Hardware, sometimes with Matt here as cohost, on the development of electronic hardware toolkits for non-engineers. In the five years we've held the event I believe we've had a significant part in lowering the barriers to entry into hardware development for designers, artists and students. Just last month Fred Martin, one of the participants last year, brought a group of Indian students from knowing nothing about hardware to building functioning robots in under a week using Arduinos and the other tools he picked up at Sketching.

Crowdlight is my newest venture, founded a couple of months ago, again with Tod Kurt and now with Ashwin Gulati. This is another hardware startup that we are bootstrapping through ThingM. I am very excited about it, but I can't talk about it in public. Talk to me offline if you'd like to hear about it.

I also recently wrote a book called "Smart Things". In the book, I describe an approach for designing digital devices that combine software, hardware, physical and virtual components. I have some copies here. Please feel free to leaf through them, and if you like it, keep it.

I'm not a social scientist or someone who has designed much social software, so I decided to take the opportunity of this invitation to think a little bit about how the design of devices changes as the number of devices a person has grows.

When people talk about ubiquitous computing, they're usually talking about this world, once where everyone has access to dozens or hundreds of devices. However, we're not there yet. We're down here, in the beginning of the up slope from this point. Today many people are connected to many people, but only through a couple devices. We are, however, adding new devices on a pretty regular basis and as with all technological progress the length of time between new devices within this category is shrinking. This is a critical moment in the history of ubiquitous computing because it's here where many of the archetypal uses, the longstanding killer apps, will first be invented. So in other words, the seeds of the Internet of Things is being planted in the time of the LAN of things, which is the era we're entering.

I want to talk about a couple of forces that I think are driving the design of objects in this world.

The first is a shift from generic devices and software to specialized devices and software. When computing was expensive, you had one or two general purpose devices that had deal with almost every situation. This necessitated design compromises that resulted in devices and software that could do almost everything, but did none of it well. It was then up to the user to take these generic tools and making them appropriate to the current situation.

Now that processing is so cheap, you can have a combination of 10, 20, or 30 computing devices and apps for the price of that one device, and you can acquire new functionality as needed. This means that every device and software package can have a narrower purpose.

However, something else is happening. Compute power, low cost and small size means that virtually any device can now do what every other device does. We're seeing a proliferation and a homogenization of certain classes of devices. This is why we're seeing all of this churn in form factors. Three years ago it was smart phones, two years ago it was all netbooks, now it's tablets and connected TVs. They're all essentially the same device in different form factors.

The primary value of these devices is that they provide access to services in the cloud. Their utility lies primarily outside of what the devices themselves do.

This is reinforced by the lasting legacy of the Web, which has created a robust interlocking infrastructure of network and compute services that I'm sure we're all very familiar with. More importantly it also created a shift in people's expectations. Today, most people understand that the experience you see on one device is often a part of something that's distributed throughout the world. There's no longer a need to pack everything into a single piece of software, and there's no expectation that everything will be there.

If we chart these tends, two broad classes of digital products emerge.

If we follow the general to specific axis, we see a shift is to more narrow-function devices that are designed to do a small, specific set of things really well. They primarily differ in what those specific things are. I call these devices appliances.

If we follow the local to remote axis, we find general-purpose devices that do roughly the same set of things, and differ primarily in size. They exist to provide access to online services, in a form factor that's appropriate to the context in which they're used.
I call these devices terminals.

This leads to the first significant design challenge that all this technology brings. It's a tectonic shift in the definition we give to digital objects. I'm sure that at some point in pre-history there was little differentiation between tools. This is a rock that you scrape with, and that's a rock you pound with. But since then, there's been a lot of necessary differentiation of function. This is a fork, this is a spoon, this is a spork. That sort of thing. When we work with digital materials, we create devices that, at some pretty deep level, have interchangeable functionality. There's no reason that a digital camera can't play streaming video or a TV take digital pictures. Under the hood, from the perspective of an operating system, they're basically identical. That is absolutely not the case when you compare a car and a dishwasher, even though they're both made of metal. This erosion leads to some serious confusion and misguided products, such as the current rash of random Android products.

People are misplacing the locus of end-user value in the basic functionality of the system and abdicating doing the hard work of figuring out what a device is for. What this means is that until we've collectively stumbled through this growing phase of confusion, we're going to have a phase where a lot of people don't understand what something is for, or how it's different from something else, or what to call it.

The other big design tectonic shift I see comes from the fact that because these things are now connected, their value moves from the device to the service it represents, and the actual objects become secondary. They become what I call service avatars. A camera becomes a really good appliance for taking photos for Flickr, while a TV becomes a nice place to run a high res Flickr widget, and a phone becomes a convenient way to take your Flickr widget on the road. People see "through" each device to the service it represents, devaluing the device to nearly nothing. This is one of the reasons that traditional premium device manufacturers are having a hard time competing. They haven't realized that there's almost no premium in a device whose only purpose is to access a service. People don't care who makes the hole in space for them, they just want the hole. They want the thing that will give them access to their transmedia story to their current use context, even if that transmedia story is the they're telling about yourself.

This quality will fundamentally alter the shape and functionality of these devices. Some will become so deeply embedded in their service, that they're not even owned anymore, they become product service systems. In the interest of reducing maintenance costs, the design of these objects will start to resemble that of old Ma Bell phones. Others will become completely disposable because there is no inherent value in the delivery mechanism once the message has been delivered, like newsprint. Still others will have clever modular systems so that they can theoretically be future proofed through upgrades.

The other big design tectonic shift I see comes from the fact that because these things are now connected, their value moves from the device to the service it represents, and the actual objects become secondary. They become what I call service avatars. A camera becomes a really good appliance for taking photos for Flickr, while a TV becomes a nice place to run a high res Flickr widget, and a phone becomes a convenient way to take your Flickr widget on the road. People see "through" each device to the service it represents, devaluing the device to nearly nothing. This is one of the reasons that traditional premium device manufacturers are having a hard time competing. They haven't realized that there's almost no premium in a device whose only purpose is to access a service. People don't care who makes the hole in space for them, they just want the hole. They want the thing that will give them access to their transmedia story to their current use context, even if that transmedia story is the they're telling about yourself.

This quality will fundamentally alter the shape and functionality of these devices. Some will become so deeply embedded in their service, that they're not even owned anymore, they become product service systems. In the interest of reducing maintenance costs, the design of these objects will start to resemble that of old Ma Bell phones. Others will become completely disposable because there is no inherent value in the delivery mechanism once the message has been delivered, like newsprint. Still others will have clever modular systems so that they can theoretically be future proofed through upgrades.

The upshot of all this is that we're about to see a precambrian explosion of device-types that span uses, scales, and continents as we collectively stumble around and try to figure out what it means when many people have many devices and they're telling many interwoven stories with them simultaneously. We'll yearn for the clarity when all we had to do was figure out where the pixels went or how to make style sheets render correctly on two browsers.

It's going to be very exciting and if it resembles previous such booms, it'll last for about twenty years before the archetypes settle down. During it, we're going to have to figure out the relationship between three interlinked social networks. The one we have as people, the one we have with the devices in our LAN, and the one that those devices have with other devices. We'll take it one step at a time, working through unhelpful interaction metaphors, overly complex data interchange standards, imperfect information brokerage, misbalanced financial models, and just plain bad design. What we'll be left with after that is an array of new tools and new classifications of tools, along with a giant pile of electronic waste.

In other words, to get from here to there, we're going to have to be thinking really hard, and it's going to be chaotic as hell, with as many random successes as there are failures, but at the end of this we will have renegotiated how we define concepts as fundamental as ownership, the value of an experience, the boundaries of objects and how we define what something is made from and what it's for. I think this is a huge change, and I'm very excited to be part of it. That's why I started the new company.

Thank you.

Download the PDF (1.2M), which has all the notes, or flip through it using Slideshare.

• I talk about communication as a core property of information as a material and show an example using adidas_1 shoes and the Nike+iPod about how swapping emphasis of one material property (actuation) for another (communication) completely changes the experience of a product.
• I expand my discussion of object oriented hardware a bit to talk about how device teardowns of modern electronics show how object oriented current electronics already are.
• I discuss how information, when used as a decorative material, creates new relationships with objects and how this could lead to what Matt Cottam calls heirloom electronics.
• I try to dovetail the notion of service avatars to the notion of information as a material, and tie it into my "dotted-line object" discussions (see my 2009 Etech presentation, The Dotted-Line World).

You can Download the PDF (1.3M PDF) or follow along with the Slideshare embed below. All the notes are on Slideshare, too.

Full transcript

First, let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm a user experience designer and entrepreneur. I was one of the first professional Web designers in 1993. Since then I've worked on the user experience design of hundreds of web sites. I also consult on the design of digital consumer products, and I've helped a number of consumer electronics and appliance manufacturers create better user experiences and more user centered design cultures.

I sat out the first dotcom crash writing a book based on the work I had been doing. It's a cookbook of user research methods.

And 2001 I co-founded a design and consulting company called Adaptive Path.

I left the Web behind in 2004 and founded a company with Tod E. Kurt called ThingM in 2006. We're a small ubiquitous computing company and we design, manufacture and sell ubicomp hardware.

This talk is based on a chapter from my new book on ubiquitous computing user experience design. It came out in September and it's called "Smart Things" and it's published by Morgan Kaufmann.

This book is my attempt to create a framework for the different kinds of activities, and the products of those activities, involved in the design of devices that use information processing, but which are not general purpose computers. As a designer, I find it useful to have interesting constraints, and this book is my way of trying to create some.

The book has lots of illustrations, techniques and in-depth case studies of a number of commercial products, but also what I consider to be important concepts. This talk is largely from the conceptual side of it.

This talk is based on a chapter from my new book on ubiquitous computing user experience design. It came out in September and it's called "Smart Things" and it's published by Morgan Kaufmann.
This book is my attempt to create a framework for the different kinds of activities, and the products of those activities, involved in the design of devices that use information processing, but which are not general purpose computers. As a designer, I find it useful to have interesting constraints, and this book is my way of trying to create some.
The book has lots of illustrations, techniques and in-depth case studies of a number of commercial products, but also what I consider to be important concepts. This talk is largely from the conceptual side of it.

I want to start by mentioning a curious phenomenon. If you any of you follow developments in microprocessors, you'll notice that the clock speed of today's new CPUs is basically the same as that of CPUs from five years ago. For those of us who used computers in the 80s and 90s, this is very confusing. We watched clock speeds go from 6MHz in 1983 to 3GHz in 2003. During that time, we became used to clock speeds as the measure of power and value in information processing.
But after 20 years during of a logarithmic increase that spanned 3 orders of magnitude, suddenly clock speed abruptly stopped going up in 2004. The industry went from exponential growth in clock speed to no growth, zero growth, in one season. It's like someone slammed the emergency brake.
I call this phenomenon Peak MHz.
Unlike oil, we're not literally running out of CPU clock cycles, but we are seeing a reevaluation of how we understand the value that computers provide, and this has resulted in a shift in the strategy of microprocessor makers. What happened in 2004 was, broadly speaking, that chip manufacturers saw that we were running out of uses for big, energy-hungry, hot processors, and they shifted the game. Since 2004 the competition has shifted from raw CPU to making smaller, cooler, cheaper chips that can do as much work as older chips, while using fewer resources.

Here's a slide from a talk Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel, gave last year. Notice that instead of talking about numbers going up, processor manufacturing has become all about pushing numbers down. Instead of competing on doing more with more, they are now competing on doing the same with less. Less power, smaller size, and lower cost.

One of the main effects of this shift is that in addition to pushing the price, size and energy consumption of the latest CPUs down, it also pushes the price of all previous processing technologies down along with it. For example, at the beginning of the Internet era we had the 486 as the state of the art and it cost $1500 in today's dollars. It's the processor that the Web was built for and with. Today, you can buy that same amount of processing power for 50 cents, and it uses only a fraction of the energy. That decrease in price is the same 3 orders of magnitude drop as the increase in speed to 2004. This is not a coincidence, because both are the product of the same underlying technological changes.

When a technology falls in price this much, it opens up enormous possibilities for new products, while creating fundamental changes in society as the new technologies displace established social systems and networks.
Steam engines, for example, lowered the price of harnessing energy by orders of magnitude...and the Industrial Revolution was born as people found all kinds of new uses for mechanical energy. Mechanization suddenly became an option for making and using things where it never existed, or was highly impractical.

You can see similarly transformative effects if you look at what happened when the price of extracting aluminum dropped by two orders of magnitude in the late 19the century, or when electric motors became significantly cheaper and smaller in the 1920s. When something becomes cheap, it quickly joins the toolkit of things we create our world with. It becomes a design material. Sometimes for better and other times for worse.
In the last five years cheap, small processors have drastically lowered the cost of taking information in, evaluating it, manipulating it, rearranging it, and acting on it. It is no longer unthinkable to have an everyday object use an embedded processor to take a small piece of information--say the temperature, or the orientation of a device, or your meeting schedule--and autonomously act on it to help the device do its job better

This new System on a Chip from Microchip has about as much processing power as that initial 486, but is also has an onboard video controller that can drive a VGA-class screen, a USB controller for peripherals, a 24-channel analog to digital converter for sensor, and a capacitive sensing driver that can drive a touch screen. It costs about $5, uses less power than a keyring LED flashlight, and fits on a chip the size of your fingernail. It's also not unusual. Almost every semiconductor maker makes similar products.
Products like this mean that information is quickly becoming a material to design with. Enabling objects to make autonomous decisions and act using arbitrary information has now joined the palette of options a product designer has to work with when trying to create a compelling, effective new product. Regardless of what that product is.
I believe that this is as deep an infrastructural change in our world as electrification, steam power, and mechanical printing. Maybe it's as big of a deal as bricks. Seriously, it's a huge change in how the world works, and we're just at the beginning of it.

If information is a design material, what are its material properties? Sure, at some level there are basic information theoretic properties such as bandwidth, noise and complexity, but those are the microscopic properties, the equivalent of basic nuclear forces in material science. They won't help us design a Tickle Me Elmo Extreme, which is a device that's only practical to make using cheap information as a material. What are the MACROSCOPIC properties of information that we can use to design with?

• It can sense the world. There are thousands sensors that convert states of the world into electrical signals that can be manipulated as information. This also includes sensors that sense human intention. We call these "buttons", "levers", "knobs" and so on.


• Actuators, which is the generic term for anything that can make a physical change based on input, can be triggered based on information. Thus, information can be used to autonomously affect the world in a way that no previous material was capable of.


• Information can be used to store knowledge about the state of the world and act on it later. This could be just a single piece of data, such as what a mechanical thermostat does when it stores the temperature you'd like to keep your house at, or something much more sophisticated, say, storing an image of everything you look at, which is what justin.tv was doing a couple of years ago.


• One of the most transformative qualities of information is that it can be duplicated exactly and transmitted flawlessly. This has already changed the music and video industry forever.


• But it also means that device behavior can be replicated exactly. We've become acclimated to it, but--stepping back--the idea of near-exact replication in a world full of randomness and uncertainty is a pretty amazing thing, and is a core part of what makes working with information as a material so powerful.


• Networking technology enables devices made with information to communicate autonomously. The cactus on the left in this photo is a cell tower in the desert that enables mobile devices in cars passing by it to communicate to the world at large. That communication, as we know, can be machine to machine telemetry, Google Map tiles, pictures of your friends, or new firmware for the devices.


• Information enables behavior that's orders of magnitude more complex than possible with just mechanics, at a fraction of the cost. This is a modern small airplane avionics system. It consists of a bunch of small fairly standard computers running special software. Compare that to a traditional gyroscopic autopilot where every single component is unique, it does very little, and to change its behavior you have to completely reengineer it.


• Finally, information lets you encode knowledge. Modern cars doesn't stall or need chokes because automotive engineers have installed specific sensors and actuators that embody their knowledge of internal combustion engine thermodynamics into a set of algorithms that adjust the car performance dynamically in response to data. This is a Blendtech programmable kitchen blender. With it you can program a specific sequence of blender power, speed and duration and associate that sequence with a button on the blender. it allows you to embed experience and knowledge about food processing into the tool, which can then produce that as a behavior, rather than requiring the operator to have that knowledge and develop the experience. Jamba Juice's business depends on such programmable blenders so their staff don't have to be trained in the fine points of blending. It may seem like a small thing, but consistent blending is the cornerstone of their company and this embedding of knowledge into the tool wouldn't have been possible if the blender wasn't made with information. The behavior is the value.

If you just thought, "Wait a minute. I know all this and, besides, Norbert Weiner covered this in Cybernetics in 1948." you're right. This is not new. We are intuitively familiar with these properties because we've been using computers for a long time. You can probably come up with many examples of products that exploit each of these properties.

However, now it is more relevant than ever, because now these qualities can be distributed throughout the environment in a way that's never been economically feasible before. It's like the difference between Leonardo Da Vinci writing about mechanized flight and Douglas using new manufacturing techniques, and materials such as aluminum, to made widespread commercial flight practical.
We're now at a point where theory can become reality, and we're now in the position where we actually have to make it happen.

Now I would like to speculate about treating information as a material that affects design.

First, it changes the way that we think about hardware. Because information can encode knowledge, it makes it easier to reduce complexity, including the complexity of information technology itself. Embedded processors make it possible to create an abstraction layer around basic sensing, processing and actuation components to creates building blocks that are meaningful in human terms, rather than just electronic terms. Each block is an atom of functionality that has a CPU and communicates with other blocks over a network. This is the start of object-oriented hardware. What you see here are mostly all prototypes that make it easier to demonstrate this idea, but this is already how many modern devices are constructed.

A modern digital device is already more like a small network of interacting components than a monolithic product of a single ground-up engineering process. Here's iSuppli's teardown analysis of the Nokia N8. Nokia itself makes almost none of the components. They buy them off the shelf like Lego bricks and combine them to create a final product. From an interaction design standpoint, object oriented hardware means that rather than starting from basic principles of electronics, you get to focus more on what experience you're trying to create, rather than which capacitor to use. Most designers don't smelt their own iron to make things out of steel, or grow their own hardwood trees to make things out of wood. Similarly, object-oriented hardware turns information from a raw material into a design material.

ThingM, my company, makes a set of such atoms of information processing that emit light. Our BlinkM line of smart LED products makes it very easy to put controllable RGB light into arbitrary locations with no electronics knowledge or color theory. Pick some up today at fine electronics retailers worldwide. OK, end of sales pitch.

So what's made with these atoms? On the next larger scale, we see new personal tools. Today we have digital pedometers, Internet connected bathroom scales, networked parking meters, and cars that don't stall, but there will be many more. Pick nearly any object, add information to it, and you get a new object. My favorite example of this the adidas_1 shoe, which was put out 5 years ago and then almost immediately discontinued. It has a pressure sensor that a small embedded processor uses to estimate the qualities of the surface being run on and adjusts the heel in between strides to optimize the resiliency regardless of what surface you're running on. The buttons adjusts how it responds. Sensing, processing, acting on the world. For me it represents how a small amount of information, carefully deployed can profoundly change an object.

Nike and Apple took this same basic concept and shifted the emphasis on actuation to an emphasis on communication. Now that tiny bit of information enables your shoe to becomes the key ingredient in transforming your shoe from something you run with, to the entry point to a new way of experiencing the world. You get analytics, a social network, and all of the other things that the Web does well.

At a still larger level, we see information used as a decorative material. Just as you can use wood to hold up a house or make a sculpture with it, so information can be used to create incredibly beautiful, profound esthetic experiences. It has already revolutionized music and cinema, but treating it as a permanent material, rather than a medium, creates fantastic new opportunities.

This in turn is causing our relationship with electronics to change, as we start to see objects made with information more than just disposable consumer electronics, but as something that becomes an inherent part of our lives. Matt Cottam, an industrial designer, has started exploring the concept of heirloom electronics. What does it take to create devices made with information that have both the operational longevity and long-term utility of traditional heirlooms? How can we integrate the functional and esthetic properties of electronics such that our digital devices do not less interesting and useful with time? These are all questions we're going to have to think about.

Next, our understanding of what a device does, and where its value lies, is changing when devices are made with information. We already have some experience with connected devices that are so tightly coupled to digital services in the cloud that they're useless without them. An ATM is a computer that's useless without the network it's connected to, and mobile phones are nearly useless.

We will see many more such devices. I call them service avatars. They are the physical representatives of a services that's in the cloud, rather than being useful as standalone devices. The value of the device dissolves in favor of the service itself. A camera becomes a really good appliance for taking photos for Flickr, while a TV becomes a nice Flickr display that you don't have to log into every time, and a phone becomes a convenient way to take your Flickr pictures on the road.

Let me give you an example. You can now get Netflix on virtually any terminal that has a screen and a network connection. You can pause a Netflix movie on one terminal and then upause it on another. This may feel a bit novel, but it also seems natural. Why?

Because to the Netflix customer, any device used to watch a movie on Netflix is just a hole in space to the Netflix service. It's a short-term manifestation of a single service. The value, the brand loyalty, and the focus is on the service, not the frame around it. The avatar exists to enable the service, not as an end to itself.

Netflix appliances are created for a single reason: to make it easier to access Netflix. That's what Roku does. It turns every terminal that's not already Netflix enabled into a Netflix terminal. The Boxee box does that for the Boxee service. The new Apple TV does it for iTunes. This is a fundamental shift in our relationship with everyday devices.

One final example of how our relationship to everyday objects changes once they're made with information. Once you start making things with networked trackable information, those things develop information shadows. Once you can digitally identify an object, first you can get all kinds of information about it. You can know where it was made, what it is made of, what your friends think of it, how much it sells for on Ebay, how to cook it, how to fix it, how to recycle it, whatever.

More importantly, however, you can turn that object into service avatar. Most airlines, for example, don't own their own planes and haven't since 1965. They lease them from General Electric, sometimes complete with flight crew and ground crew. GE actually owns them and, as I understand it, in turn leases the engines from another division of itself. When an airline needs more capacity, it leases some more. What an airline owns is a promise from GE that it will provide the service of flight to the airline for a specific period. GE's engine division, in turn provides the plane division with the service of thrust. When you make thing with information, you make this kind of affordable and profitable at ever smaller scales.

When you buy into a car sharing service such as City Carshare or Zip car you subscribe to a service.
Each car is connected to a central network. You can only open the car and start the engine when your specific keyfob RFID is scheduled to open and start it. It uses a GPS to track where the car is, whether it's been dropped off at the right location, and how far it's been driven. All of that is transparent to you, the subscriber. The relationship you have with these cars is different than with a rental. It's much more like having your own car because you have access to it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with very little advance notice.

However, unlike an owned car, it's a car possibility space. This is an ad from Zipcar that shows the implicit power of this kind of system, from the consumer perspective. From the social perspective, it means that resources are used more efficiently: the economies of scale for buying and repairing a fleet of vehicles is significantly lower than individual ownership. From the corporate perspective, it represents an ongoing source of revenue.

This is the German Call-a-Bike program, run by the rail service. You need a bike, you find one of these bikes, which are usually at major street corners. You use your mobile phone to call the number on the bike. It gives you a code that you punch in to unlock the bike lock. You ride the bike around and when you've arrived, you lock it. The amount of time you rode it automatically gets billed to your phone, by the minute. The program would not be possible without item-level identification and wireless networking technology and is much more successful than all of the free bike programs because it has built in financial incentives for everyone involved, and yet provides significant social goods.

Here's another example that points to some exciting possibilities. Bag, Borrow or Steal is a designer purse subscription site. It works like Netflix, but for really expensive handbags. It's fashion by subscription and it again points to a new way of thinking about everyday objects. It changes the meaning of ownership and it changes the incentives in the design of everyday objects in a profound way.

Notice a trend? It's getting cheaper all the time, roughly tracking the price of tracking individual objects and communicating their status. Information is fundamentally changing out relationship to the physical objects around us.

When taken all together, all of these changes mean that at a large scale, our environment is growing increasingly information-based on a fractal level. Small information devices make large information devices that combine to form environment-sized devices made with information as a core material. There's great opportunity here to create an ecology of services embodied as robust, valuable, exciting new tools with focused, limited functionality, tied together with item-level identitification and wireless networks. Whole classes of things that can enrich our lives and bank accounts are now possible thanks to the way ubiquitous computing interweaves services and devices at an intimate, everyday level.

Any new material creates both possibilities and problems. We didn't get flying cars, but nor did we didn't have to fight atomic hydroplaning Soviet battleships. It is our responsibility as creators of information technology to understand the properties of information, explore its capabilities, and build tools that make it easier to do the right thing with information than to do the wrong thing. It is more our responsibility than it is Intel's, or LG's or the government's. They're just mining the raw ore. We're the ones who decide what to make with it.

Thank you.

You can download the PDF presentation, which includes a complete transcript, or check it out on slideshare:

Here's the jittery video:

Here is the transcript:

Good afternoon! Thank you Surj and Om for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here.

First, let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm a user experience designer and entrepreneur. I was one of the first professional Web designers in 1993. Since then I've worked on the user experience design of hundreds of web sites. I also consult on the design of digital consumer products, and I've helped a number of consumer electronics and appliance manufacturers create better user experiences and more user centered design cultures.

In 2003 I wrote a how-to book of user research methods for technology design. It has proven to be somewhat popular, as such books go.

Around the same time as I was writing that book, I co-founded a design and consulting company called Adaptive Path.

I wanted to get more hands-on with technology development, so I founded ThingM with Tod E. Kurt.

We're a micro-OEM. We design and manufactures a range of smart LEDs for architects, industrial designers and hackers. We're also spinning off a new company that's going to apply this technology to the consumer space. I have lots to say about that, but this talk is about something else, so talk to me offline if you'd like details.

This talk is based on a chapter from my new book. It's called "Smart Things" and it came out a couple of weeks ago. In the book, I describe an approach for designing digital devices that combine software, hardware, physical and virtual components.

THREE TRENDS

I want to start by talking about three trends that are combining to create a new class of digital products which are distributed through the environment and linked by cloud-based services. These devices not only create many opportunities for innovation, but they represent a new way of thinking about both products and services.

1. EXPENSIVE TO CHEAP

The first trend is a product of Moore's Law. Normally people think of Moore's Law in terms of processor speed, but the same technologies that makes the latest chips powerful push the price of older technology down. We have now reached a point where many powerful technologies are priced like basic commodities. For example, the Intel 486 was the processor that the Web was built for and with. It cost $1500 in 1989. Today you can get as much processing power for about 50 cents.

This new System on a Chip from Microchip has about as much processing power as that initial 486, but is also has an onboard video controller that can drive a VGA-class screen, a USB controller for peripherals, a 24-channel analog to digital converter for sensor, and a capacitive sensing driver that can drive a touch screen. It costs about $5, uses less power than a keyring LED flashlight, and fits on a chip the size of your fingernail. It's also not unusual. Almost every semiconductor maker makes similar products.

This means that you can now include powerful processing and networking in almost anything, and start rethinking the design of everything in terms of embedded digital technology. The "how" problem of creating ubiquitous computing has almost been answered. Now the questions are what to create, and why.

2. GENERIC TO SPECIFIC

The answer to these is being driven by two other shifts.
First, is a shift from generic devices and software to specialized devices and software. When computing was expensive, you had one or two general purpose devices that had deal with almost every situation. This necessitated design compromises that resulted in devices and software that could do almost everything, but did none of it well. It was then up to the user to take these generic tools and making them appropriate to the current situation.

Now that processing is so cheap, you can have a combination of 10, 20, or 30 computing devices and apps for the price of that one device, and you can acquire new functionality as needed. This means that every device and software package can have a narrower purpose.

3. LOCAL TO REMOTE

The third trend is that the lasting legacy of the Web has been a shift in the value digital technology from being primarily local to being primarily remote. The Web demonstrated that moving functionality online enables access to more compute power, continuous updates, real-time usage analytics, and (of course) social connections. It also created a shift in people's expectations. Today, most people understand that the experience you see on one device is often a part of something that's distributed throughout the world. There's no longer a need to pack everything into a single piece of software, and there's no expectation that everything will be there.

What I think is most interesting, however, is that these shifts appear to be the first part an even larger transition, one where devices are simultaneously specific AND deeply tied to online services. In this model, the service provides the majority of the value, and can be represented either as an inexpensive dedicated hardware device, an app running on a terminal, or anything in between.

It's an approach that combines the precision of appliances with the flexibility of terminals to create a fundamentally new class of products that can fill every possible niche where a service may be appropriate.

I call these devices service avatars.

SERVICE AVATARS

As value shifts to services, the devices, software applications and websites used to access it--its avatars--become secondary. A camera becomes a really good appliance for taking photos for Flickr, while a TV becomes a nice Flickr display that you don't have to log into every time, and a phone becomes a convenient way to take your Flickr pictures on the road.

Hardware becomes simultaneously more specialized and devalued as users see "through" each device to the service it represents.

EXAMPLE: NETFLIX

For example, you can now get Netflix on virtually any terminal that has a screen and a network connection. You can pause a Netflix movie on one terminal and then upause it on another. This may feel a bit novel, but it also seems natural. Why?

Because to the Netflix customer, any device used to watch a movie on Netflix is just a hole in space to the Netflix service. It's a short-term manifestation of a single service. The value, the brand loyalty, and the focus is on the service, not the frame around it. The technology exists to enable the service, not as an end to itself.

Netflix appliances are created for a single reason: to make it easier to access Netflix. That's what Roku does. It turns every terminal that's not already Netflix enabled into a Netflix terminal. The Boxee box does that for the Boxee service. The new Apple TV does it for iTunes.

EXAMPLE: VITALITY

Let me give you another example. This is Vitality's Glowcap, which is a wireless network-connected pill bottle appliance that's an avatar to Vitality's service for increasing compliance to medicine prescriptions. When you close the cap, it sends a packet of information through a mobile phone-based base station to a central server and it starts counting down to when you next need to take your medicine. When it's time, it lights up the LED on the top of the bottle.

However, the real power is in the packet of data it sends. That packet opens a door to the full power of an Internet-based service. Now Vitality can create sophisticated experiences that transcend a single piece of software or a single device.

For example, another avatar of the Vitality service is an online progress report that can be used interactively or delivered by email. It's like Google Analytics for your medicine.

Health care practitioners get yet another avatar that gives them long-term and longitudinal analytics about compliance across medications and time.

To me, this kind of conversation between devices and net services is where the real power of The Internet of Things begins.

Vitality has developed a complete system around this service that includes a social component, and different avatars for patients, patients families, health care practitioners and pharmacies. Each avatar looks different and has different functionality, but they're perceived, and designed as a single system.

I think it's a model of how many everyday things are going to be designed in the future.

Soon designing objects that have significant social lives in the cloud will become just how everything is made.

In preparation, I recommend a shift in thinking away from whether to make an app, a mobile web site, a platform, or a dedicated device, and to start thinking about how you design your service, and what avatars will best facilitate that service.

Thank you.