Brilliant. From Russell of course.
Archive for the ‘internet-of-things’ Category
Robots at home: the role of a more personal internet of things
April 19, 2011I’ve been thinking about the role of product design in the upcoming flurry of domestic robot solutions that will soon be thrown at us as consumers. Some quick thoughts.
1. Roomba & AR Drone are only the beginning, the latter entering the doors of our homes through the iPhone’s compatibility. There was a lot of “can I control this from my iPhone” type questions at InnoRobo. The iPhone’s role might grow to control all home tech, however small it might be. This might see the universal remote control market completely disappear in the next 10 years as a result.
2. The objective of Homesense was always to try to look at the home as a hyper-personalised space you couldn’t just stick technology in mindlessly. Assumptions about people’s behaviours and habits were kept to a minimum, if only in the choice of technology we gave them to play with. People made a lot of different things. Home is a highly flexible space where technology lives and dies quickly, objects get used daily or once a year. It’s very hard to operate as a designer in that space without taking this into consideration as robotic companions don’t have a single function. They are not like designing salt and pepper shakers.
3. The politics of domestic space and chores is complex (nice paper by G.Bell here also this ) I like the role of Blinky in this short film. The parental and family tensions that permeate that home is a natural part of what makes a home and not a house. It is intimately linked to why we buy some things. A robot cannot hope to avoid being part of those decision mechanisms.
4. Soft Internet connected devices
I’m quite intrigued by the future appearance of wireless devices that don’t have screens on them at all. I’m reminded of my friend Dana Gordon’s Undercover project. A blanket that plays music in an ambient and personal way. That’s understanding what the power of product design is and automation in a quiet, intimate way.
5. Non-essential goods.
In all this, we have to keep in mind how we treat technology in the home. It’s not about publicly showing off, in the same way we buy phones and clothes. The tensions are different, and the expectations are different too. To close with a comment from a long-time Roomba owner:
A Second Vacuum is a Must
Don’t expect to have any Roomba operate as your only vacuum. They do a great job of keeping the mess down, but we still rely on our Dyson to do it’s weekly job.
It’s gonna get interesting all this.
On CBC
April 12, 2011CBC’s Spark program and the lovely Nora Young interviewed me about robots and internet of things. Listen here.
Chasing the Future: a talk on emotional robots
March 29, 2011 Chasing the Future: challenges and opportunites in the design of emotional robots
View more presentations from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino
Look for the speakers notes for details. I’ll write a separate event report on RoboLIFT tomorrow.
Thoughts on Internet of Things
May 25, 2010Personal ubiquity
July 19, 2008It took me a while to digest Janne’s post on why ubicomp is a broken concept, mostly because on principal I tend to disagree. It’s also a bit in response to Tom Coates’s altered version of his talk with Matt Jones that he gave at Foocamp called “Personal Informatics”.
Firstly I think the starting point for thinking about ubiquitous spaces, objects etc is not necessarily that they are meant to be smarter, but perhaps more that they are meant to report better. Not smart, just less dumb 
Andy’s house is the obvious example of this. I think there is tremendous interest at the moment about being able to gather more efficiently stuff that is just lying around, invisible and not particularily useful. Innovation often comes from taking things we know and mashing them up with things we didn’t know we didn’t know. Someone pointed out the other day that we’re ultimately creeping towards AI with all these “clever” systems, but I think it might just be the reverse, we still hold the brain, we’ve just outsourced the synapses.
Also I think there are plenty of areas to think about in regards to the results of ubiquitous systems, information and data. One of the most important things, in my opinion has to do with evaluating the amount of behavioral or operational change based on the digestion and synthesis of all this data. It’s no use collecting the temperature and light levels inside a building if it isn’t with the aim to perfect your heating system or prevent collective seasonal depression for eg. Even on a personal basis, its no use me being able to monitor my heartrate everyday, because it only puts me in the “now”, an ephemeral place of thought and decision-making. One thing about technology, is that it tends to make people generally lazy about their levels of commitment. Perhaps we should push instead for the development of technologies and applications that encourage people to invest time and effort in an activity (think Honey we’re killing the kids).
Furthermore, what’s interesting about this idea of personal ubiquity is that some of it could possibly be shared online, so no longer relying on a sturdy and professional infrastructure other than the internet itself. Seeing people play around with Pachube and the Ethernet Arduino shield, makes things really exciting.
All in all I think the ubicomp ideas of the future will be more personal, more persuasive and lighter than what we’ve seen so far.
Uneasy intimacies
July 18, 2008
I never thought ubicomp would come out of an iPhone app. If anything, Exposure has the power to connect us with objects and lives that were lived around us in the past, as long as they’ve been geotagged first. Matt and I had a look, sitting on our couch at home, and found pictures of people who are probably our neighbours having a bbq, portraits, etc. There was something uneasy about seeing pictures of people who cease to become strangers yet aren’t familiar at all. A whole future of perception lies ahead.
To see or not to see?
April 15, 2008
Random thoughts triggered by Nicola’s link.
What if what was going to be a major roadblock to ubiquitous computing is the idea that as users, we want to be able to point to where a “technology-enabled” object lies? That we cannot live with the idea that we no longer have an on/off relationship like the one we have with our phone or laptop. Can we come to accept the implications of “ubiquitousness” and give up the ability to encapsulate technology in our hands, inside a thing we can kick, curse or accuse?
Can we accept that we may no longer be able to see where exactly technology operates because it’s unevenly distributed and invisible? For John Doe, questions will arise like how much technology is ubiquitous technology? How distributed and where is it distributed and for what purpose? It’s not only going to be a preoccupation of the systems but of the urban human psyche, it will affect how we relate to technology in general and our perception of it as something that is controllable or something much closer to Big Brother: controlling, everywhere and impatient.
People-less services
February 25, 2008
Let’s start with an anecdote:
I spent Friday on the go on a mad one-day trip to Amsterdam and then Eindhoven and back to London. Not as mad as you’d think, it was a totally self-indulgent decision I took at the last minute and ended up meeting old friends and new ones. Just lovely to be in the Netherlands as well. One my way back I didn’t have enough time to stop in town to had to settle for the sad choices at Schipol airport. I ended up getting a pannini at Per Tutti, some dodgy italian food chain. The waitress handed me a thick plastic-cased coaster and asked if I knew what this way for? I cleary looked like I didn’t so she went on to explain that when my sandwich will be ready, this coaster will ring and blink and I can come and get it at the counter. At first I thought: wow the future we’ve been talking about is getting nearer by the day, but wasn’t entirely thrilled either. The coaster reversed the role of the waitress and got clients off their backs, this also limited the reliance of the company on good and friendly staff as the interaction with the customer was limited, even more than usual. This felt like an efficient service definitely, but also one that made you feel even more like a number.
A few days later during the course of a conversation with Janne the larger implications dawned on me. The question for service design in the future isn’t only how will services be made more ubiquitous, engage people in different ways and get people to use things, but it’s also going to be: how are we going to be designing services that still involve people altogether?
Will our idea of progress eradicate the need for people to occupy a role in the service industry because we’ve designed them out?
In countries like China and India where population is a big issue, they are turning to solutions that see the problem in an opposite way. Each service must be broken down so as to involve (and pay) as many people as possible.
Does that mean that in the future, dealing with people in services will be seen as a less-productive method of obtaining something? Surely that’s not why so many of us complain about feeling unimportant and like a number when we interact with banking services. So it’s interesting to see that approach in the food industry which perhaps points the way to future changes.
Desirable techno-jects
November 6, 2007(Another set of random ideas about the Internet of things)
Matt likes to show off to me his latest games and Portal got my attention.
If you don’t know the game, pictured above is the “Weighted Companion Cube” that you have to save and move as the game progresses and “take care of”.
It’s really interesting to me that a relationship is encouraged with this virtual object that is in essence, not classically attractive. Building this online relationship of course meant that now there are rumors that the cube will be available in plush for this Xmas.
It’s now becoming apparent that relationships of desire towards “objects” can be first established online, through experience of a game, to then lead to an offline sale and expansion of that relationship in the real world through a very different experience.