Appliances evolve

Mike Kuniavsky is a consultant, designer, author and researcher focused on technology and its effects on the people who use it. He is a cofounder of ubiquitous computing device studio ThingM and was a founding partner of Adaptive Path, a San Francisco internet consultancy. You may have read his 2003 book Observing the User Experience seeking to understand the relationship between people and products. His new title Smart Things expected in 2008 from Elsevier, will discuss the design of mobile and ubiquitous computing devices. In his receiver contribution, Kuniavsky tries to get to the bottom of the role ubiquitous computing appliances play in the household. Here's what he found: they will fundamentally change the nature of the home and our experience of it.

http://www.orangecone.com/
Kuniavsky's site

http://www.thingm.com
ThingM

Artwork for this article by Christina Getsios & Mike Homatter

1947 was a big year. That year, Bell Labs invented the transistor and Levittown, New York, the first modern American suburb and the model for most others to come, opened for business. 1947 was not only the beginning of the Baby Boom, but of a whole new lifestyle of electronic home appliances. The Boomers, who begin to retire this year, are the first generation (at least in the US) that mostly has no direct experience of pre-suburban life and pre-electronic media. Their perspectives are deeply embedded in our view of home life: what houses are for, how to use them, how to see ourselves in them. From silvery refrigerators that say we mean business when we're cooking for pleasure to video game systems that recreate the bowling alleys that have disappeared from corner strip malls, the shape of appliances reflects the values of this generation.

The grandchildren of Baby Boomers carry with them two generations of experience with domestic electronics. They've never lived in a world without the internet or mobile phones and they are comfortable with the idea of an environment filled with networked electronic devices. For the toddlers of this generation, amazon.com lists 5 different kinds of toy ATM: today's children learn that a piggy bank is not a place to put your money, but a physical representation of a banking service.

Simultaneously, the cost of information processing has never been so low. The power of an Intel 486 processor, which sold for $900 in 1989, can today be included in a device for 50 cents. With prices so low, including information processing in a product becomes less an exotic research project and more a competitive calculation akin to selecting plastic over rubber or aluminum over steel. Manufacturers will likely soon begin to use information from the domestic environment in an effort to make appliances more effective and more attractive to buyers. Some will even succeed. Treating information processing as a design consideration is a tectonic shift on the order of electrification. As with that earlier shift, ubiquitous computing (the term coined by the late Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC in the early 90s) will bring massive changes to the shape of our tools, our perceptions of ourselves and society as a whole.

This means that our everyday domestic devices will soon change. Hybrid devices, "smart things", have already begun to appear and will continue to do so, blurring the lines between furniture, tool, computer and robot. The familiar will become a little smarter, while the things we define as "computers" will grow to resemble the things we define as lamps, stoves and maybe even chairs and tables.

Today, information is starting to be treated in product design as if it was a material, to produce a new class of networked computing devices. Unlike general-purpose computers, these exhibit what Bill Sharpe of the Appliance Studio calls "applianceness". They augment specific tasks and are explicitly not broad platforms that do everything from banking to playing games. A general-purpose computer such as a laptop is an unfocused tool that can do a range of things, based on the software it's running. That makes it wonderfully flexible, but in exchange for this flexibility, its design must be general enough to encompass all of those things. Thus, it's not particularly good at any one thing, and necessarily more expensive than a specialized device.

Video games, mobile phones and cable TV decoder boxes, which are all specialized networked computers, can be considered the first generation of ubiquitous computing appliances. By augmenting familiar tools (TVs, phones) ñ piggybacking, in a sense, on the commonplace ñ they have become popular appliances. Now, however, entirely new classes of home appliances are appearing that are acceptable to an early adopter audience with ten years of familiarity with mass internet connectivity, digital telephony and nearly as many years of consumer-grade wireless networking. Soon, however, a much greater group will have that kind of experience.

"Ambient displays", a term coined in 1998 at the MIT Media Lab are one such new appliance class. Ambient Devices' Ambient Orb and Violet's Nabaztag help us use and prioritize the flood of available networked information, a specialized task supporting many data sources and growing social familiarity with digital data. With ambient displays information becomes a kind of dynamic decoration that communicates, but does not require active engagement. Before the idea of displaying information in the periphery, nearly all information delivered by computers was treated with roughly the same high priority, requiring direct attention and active management. The designers of ambient displays recognized that we swim in a soup of networked information of varying importance, but our access to it ñ the appliances we have for making use of it ñ do not prioritize it. Now that so much information is available, ambient displays are appliances for making it convenient. This is not unlike a previous generation's relationship between the mechanized production of clothes, which reduced the cost of clothing and thus increased the amount of it, and the popularity of washing machines.

http://tangible.media.mit.edu/content/papers/pdf/Ambient_Disp_CoBuild98.pdf

Another emerging appliance class is the home medical information appliance. General-purpose computers with websites do not serve many people who have long-term health needs. They're bulky, expensive and complex. Health Buddy, made by Health Hero, is a ubiquitous computing device designed to help patients living with a range of health issues from diabetes and asthma to substance abuse. From a hardware standpoint, it's an inexpensive networked computer with 4 buttons, but as per Sharpe's definition it's an appliance because it's tuned to a small number of tasks: it asks people simple questions about how they're doing, and based on the answers, it responds with advice about their condition while communicating their status to their doctors. This is a new way of relating to medical information in an environment of pervasive computing and networking. It does not replace or augment an existing communication channel, but creates a new one. For the generation of people born in 1947 who have incorporated dozens of new appliances, something like the Health Buddy could be just another one, like color television, microwave ovens, calculators and DVD players.

Applying the idea of inexpensive computing and networking to nearly any object in our homes changes that object in profound ways. How long before our flowerpots "twitter" us when our flowers are parched (check out plantsense.com and botanicalls.com for a clue)? How long after that before those twitter messages are collected across neighborhoods to monitor neighborhood microclimates? How long after that before that data is aggregated by breeders who develop flowers that thrive in a specific part of town? Maybe never for this (admittedly farfetched) example, but what was once unimaginably complex now becomes merely involved. USC professor Julian Bleeker has given a name to such objects that communicate over networks, blogjects.

http://research.techkwondo.com/files/WhyThingsMatter.pdf

Theorist Ben Cerveny calls the flow of knowledge, connections, people and information fragments created by wireless networking and information processing a luminous bath of data. We are awash in potentially useful, interesting, or entertaining information. We can choose to ignore it, but without new tools, we cannot manage it. Once immersed, we realize the possibilities for ambient displays, home medical terminals and blogjects, devices that were unthinkable before the luminous bath. Now they are likely only the first of their class.

Other such appliance classes will surely come, and like all tools throughout history, these will make certain things easier, create new possibilities, and have broad social effects that go beyond their intended functionality. Electric appliances of the 1920s promised labor reduction for women in the home, but instead brought raised expectations (wall-to-wall carpets, for example, would have been impossibly impractical before electric vacuum cleaners). In the end, they did not reduce the workload at all, though they did allow us to have cleaner houses and more clothes.

We are on the cusp of another profound change akin to that seen by the Baby Boomers. Ubiquitous computing appliances will change the fundamental nature of the home and our experience of it. The house of 2047 will likely not be filled with robotic humanoid servants, be an automated factory of leisure or resemble any of the other images that current domestic technology programs envision. It will be something different, and it will change imperceptibly, appliance-by-appliance, upgrade-by-upgrade, shift-by-shift, year-by-year. Our understanding of what constitutes an object will change: is an ATM a single device, an outpost of a system, or the physical manifestation of a service? Is a phone? Is your bed? And as we use and change these appliances, they will change us, too, as every great shift in the capabilities of our tools has in the past.