Context Magazine Smart Homes? A Stupid Idea
"A blind enthusiasm for technological advances is a very costly habit to indulge. It ignores the real nature of peoples’ busy lives, the scarcity of their attention, and the rising irritation we all have with devices that clutter our homes and confuse us. Yet, periodically, companies manage to convince one another that some big new trend is simply unstoppable. The last time this happened was in the postwar period when the hot theme was convenience. So, firms rushed to sell us electric knives and can openers, mixers, ice cream makers, electric knife sharpeners, and popcorn poppers. Did this deliver on the promise of convenience? No way.

"Smart homes" aren’t inevitable. Homes will continue to get smarter, of course. But they will do so by being more responsive to our activities—directly, respectfully, gently, in ways that amuse and beguile. Above all else, in ways that are gracefully accommodating. If you want to build a really hot product, start there."

redux [10.21.00]
The Standard Home on the Web
"Home networking is nothing new. Homes are already thoroughly wired for lighting, security, phones and more. The Internet home will connect all of the in-home networks, then connect each with any number of outside networks. For the fridge to talk to the computer, at least two networks – the home electrical network into which the fridge is plugged, and the telephone, firewire or wireless network into which the computer is connected – need some way of interfacing. And if the fridge needs to send you e-mail at work, it needs some way to communicate outside the home network.

But the obvious question is, do consumers want all this interconnectivity? Will we ever really need our fridge to e-mail us that our milk is past its prime?”

"After IBM ran a series of ads in which a dishwasher repairman shows up at a home because the dishwasher contacted him for service, Parks Associates held focus groups to gauge reaction to the commercial. "Consumers absolutely hated that," says Scherf. "People want more control of their lives, not less; they want to be the one to make the call, not the dishwasher."

redux [06.27.00]
News.Com Keep it simple, Handspring co-founder urges
"As founder of both Palm and Handspring, which makes a PDA (personal digital assistant) based on Palm's operating system, Hawkins referred to his own misconceptions of the device market, as well as to industry-wide missteps, many of which were driven by misreading consumer needs and interests, he said.

"It's not so easy to do," he said. "People get swept up in conventional thinking, which is often wrong."

Hawkins pointed to the idea that computers should adapt to people intelligently as an example of such misguided thinking. Rather than expecting so-called smart devices, designers should create practical tools that people will want to learn to use, like the keyboard, he said."

ZDNet Smart Homes, Dumb Ideas
"I've been getting a lot of press releases lately from newcomers to the computing scene who expect to make a killing when the "smart home" comes into its own. This pipe dream has been floating around the business for years and always reemerges during boom times when people are rich and can't seem to figure out what to do with their disposable income. There's nothing like wasting your money on a smart home.

The idea sounds reasonable on the surface: Create an energy-saving home that monitors itself and make everything networked and coordinated. But the basic idea always expands into something silly."

OReilly.Com Dialog with an Internet Toaster
""Why haven't you given me any new scripts to run for the past two months?" whined my toaster.

I was so surprised I almost dropped my Wheaties on the floor. It didn't bother me that the toaster spoke out of turn; I had installed the adaptive interface as a lark when I got the thing six months ago. What threw me was simply how many months had passed since I became bored with writing scripts to rotate English muffins or adjust the top-brown feature to the thickness of the cheese.

"Hardware problems," I said to gain time. Jeez, what was the world coming to--how could I let my own toaster make me feel guilty?"

redux [06.15.00]
Fast Company Design Vision
""We know how to do amazing things," [Thackara] says, "and we're filling the world with amazing devices. But we cannot answer the most important question: What is this stuff really for?""

"The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. So forget "personal" computing, Thackara says, and embrace "social" computing. "As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material. There are few limits to the number of services that we could develop if we simply took an aspect of daily life and looked for ways to make it better.""

redux [04.13.00]
The New York Times A Chip in Every Pot
[requires 'free' registration]
"Russell Robertson was grappling with an unusual assignment.

As an industrial designer, his mission was to figure out how kitchen appliances will be designed when, as he put it, "the fridge talks to the coffee pot."

His eyes twinkled as he spoke, but he was not kidding about the basic concept. In fact, while the idea may have once sounded ridiculous, predictions of the advent of such devices are now becoming almost clichéd."

"But predicting whether a technology will be adopted is critical for companies that want to succeed, or even survive, in the marketplace. The ones that can figure out what will be deemed useful, superfluous or downright ridiculous will win. And today, as tiny, wireless computer systems are being perfected and the Internet is allowing the distribution of data in seconds, dozens of appliance manufacturers are betting that some sort of pervasive-computing devices will come to be considered as necessary as a telephone. The trick, for them, is to figure out which ones."

""But one of the main reasons that companies with new products stumble, Professor Utterback said, "is that they fail to appreciate or investigate the marketplace." Many companies simply ask, "What can we do with the technology?" And once they determine what they can do, he said, they assume that people will want it."