From Pixels to Plastic
What i want to see is widgets everywhere [more]. This is such a great interaction design paradigm that it shouldn’t be locked to the screen.
What you’re seeing here is a hardware widget platform by Canon, on their combination copiers. it’s a Java platform called MEAP (information in this interview), and the idea is that you develop simplified, custom interfaces that better map to the activities of the people in your office. The example they give is a notifier: If you’re copying 500 sheets, it should email you at your desk when you’re done. That’s a tiny task, so you can imagine people wouldn’t bother if it was buried in some totalising menu structure. But as a simple widget, people would use that.
What if my camera was a widget platform?
If I was a pro-am photographer on a month-long safari shoot, I could grab a custom camera interface from the Web, set up to provide easy-access presets to the light and movement conditions I’d face. I’d repurpose a couple of the external buttons to twiddle parameters in the presets, and have a perfect wildlife interface for four weeks. At home, I’d revert to the general purpose interface or get another one.
How about my washing machine?
I’d have an interface on my washing machine that had only the single setting I use. I’d load and set the machine early in the morning or late at night, and it’d then display a red, flashing “ready to go” button that I could slap on my way out of the house, after my morning shower. Perhaps it would use a hardware API to the pressure on the water intake, to refuse to start if the shower was in use.
I, as a paid-up member of Generation C, would like to help design the products in my home to make them better for me and people like me. i would like to share my improvements, and make the product more worth buying. You’d think this would be an easy sell.
Yet Canon charge $5,000 for the SDK and a royalty for each widget you deploy. And this is meant to sell more photocopiers?
Hell, don’t even give me a widget platform. Just give me a serial connection out on my washing machine and a documented hardware API. We can do the rest.
Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we’ll be there soon. Meanwhile there are progressive products that are helping us make these ideas really, and that’s why I’m very excited about the Chumby. As a networked, hardware, widget platform, it will help us take complex activities and wrap them up into specialised, simple interfaces which can be part of my home and not part of my computer.