Products Are People Too
Okay, influence number three is something I’m calling, for lack of a better phrase, ‘engaging technology’ [I’ve previously given a talk on Engaging Technology.]
What I’m wrapping up in this phrase is two things. The first is physical computing and tangible interactions. You know, computing which is inside plastic toys and gadgets, instead of on computer desktops, that you interact with by shaking or blowing or whatever. That’s a field I work in now, so it’s a big influence.
The second thing I’m wrapping up is cognition. My big learning, from writing Mind Hacks, was that our brains are hardwired to allocate more attention to certain things – like blinking lights, as opposed to slowly changing images – and make continuous assumptions, like that light comes from above. And, you know, if our technology was aware of how cognition works, it would engage us in subtle, polite ways too. [I’ve also spoken about attention and Mind Hacks as they relate to interface design. Politeness has been a watchword for a while—exemplified in particular in a project called Glancing. Tom Armitage referenced Glancing in his excellent reboot presentation covered politeness with considerable depth and thoughtfulness: The Uncanny Valet.]
I think it’s tradition that I mention Natalie Jeremijenko’s Dangling String in my presentations at reboot. She installed this at Mark Weiser’s ubiquitous computing lab in the mid 1990s, a piece of red flex hanging from the ceiling. It was wired up to the network so that it would jiggle when the network was really busy.
It’s a lovely design. Out of the corner of your eye, it disappears when everything is fine, but jumps out at you when the network is suddenly really busy and you know there’s probably something to fix. Or, if you’re not the system administrator, it’s time to go to lunch. It thoroughly takes advantage of its physicality to gently interrupt us, and act in a social space, in ways that are really, really hard to do with screen-based technologies.
So this is a big influence for me. The brain is important, the physical world is important. It’s all about materiality.