Why have we yet to be enchanted by the internet of things?

If customers are to embrace the new era of connectivity, devices must be imbued with a touch of magic, says MIT researcher

Consumer uptake of smartwatches have been slower than expected. Photograph: Aleksey Boldin / Alamy/Alamy

One of the leading thinkers in the new computing sector known as the internet of things (IoT) can’t help but look at all the flashy, expensive, feature-packed gadgets on the market today – things like Google Glass or the Apple Watch – and keep coming away with the same thought: too many device makers keep getting it wrong.

Given the nature of his chosen field, serial entrepreneur David Rose – who’s also a researcher with the MIT Media Lab, where he’s taught for six years – might be expected to want the next generation of connected devices to pick up where smartphones leave off. Indeed, that seems to be the nature of the race to figure out what the next dominant computing platform looks like, whether it’s Facebook snatching up Oculus or Microsoft working to bring its HoloLens to fruition.

It’s all a variation, in other words, on either staring at a screen or porting the screen to a new platform. It’s here that Rose diverges from many in the rest of the industry.

Plenty of his professional peers with high hopes for the potential of the IoT regard it as harbinger of a post-smartphone era, of a future when almost anything we own, use and wear can be connected to the web and in turn give us some measure of value. Rose, however, doesn’t want IoT devices that become mere smartphone replacements or even primary computing hubs.

Instead, the framework through which he considers the IoT is actually informed partly by something surprisingly low-tech: the memory of his woodworking grandfather’s basement workshop.

In a book he published last year, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire and the Internet of Things, Rose sums up his hope for the future of technology: he wants it be dominated less by glass slabs and more by tools and artefacts, just like his grandfather’s space was filled with.

His grandfather, for example, never hunted for the one tool to serve as an all-purpose tool hub or for a tool that would eliminate the need for other tools. His shop was filled with hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, clamps and more – and they all enchanted the young Rose because even in their simplicity, those tools could lead to a multiplicity of imaginative creations.

“It took some time for me to understand why the smartphone, while convenient and useful for some tasks, is a dead end as the human-computer interface,” Rose writes in Enchanted Objects. “The reason, once I saw it, is blindingly obvious: it has little respect for humanity.”

Instead, Rose wants to see – and is working to create – more objects that draw inspiration from magic and fairy tales. To him, a good example of an “enchanted object” – never mind that it’s only found in J R R Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings – is something like the blade Sting that belonged to the hobbit Frodo.
The blade’s purpose in Tolkein’s story was straightforward. But in addition to serving as a weapon and a defensive tool, it also glowed blue in the presence of orcs, giving the object its quality of enchantment. The inspiration of Frodo’s sword can be seen in something Rose invented a few years ago – an Accuweather – connected ambient umbrella with a handle glows if rain is expected in the next 12 hours.

“I’ve been working on and interested in the change in how we interact with technology for a while now and am convinced it’s undergoing a giant shift,” Rose said. “We’re seeing a cultural yearning or need to solve this issue about how most of our attention is being soaked up by screens. So what I’m interested in is in taking old infrastructure, things like locks or thermostats, connecting them and making them simpler to use.

“The big interface change enabled by these purpose-built, bespoke things is they can be so much simpler. They don’t have to do as much. I’ve always been drawn to human-computer interaction and interface design, making objects and services that interact in ways people feel are natural and intuitive.”

Indeed, such a shift is at this point already seen as a foregone conclusion in some corners. The technology company Cisco, for example, has forecast that between 50bn and 1 trillion devices will be connected to the internet before the decade is out, creating an economic impact of $14.4tn.

For years, Rose has been at the centre of that trend. In addition to giving presentations about product innovation, at the MIT Media Lab he teaches about and researches “subtle, ambient interfaces.” He’s also currently the CEO of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based image recognition software startup Ditto Labs.
Before that, he co-founded a wireless healthcare company, Vitality, which he also led as CEO. It produced an internet-connected medication packaging device, GlowCap, that represents the kind of “enchanted object” Rose wrote about in his book.

The IoT space he spends a considerable amount of his research and time on today is comprised of everything from wearables to so-called smart homes to connected vehicles. One reason the space is so hot – the economics has caught up with the technology. Things like inexpensive cloud computing services and the ability to pack more raw computing power into smaller devices have made it possible to connect more products than ever before.

IoT for consumers

Before we even get to an entirely connected reality, though, among the obstacles in the way is the fact that plenty of such devices already have landed with a thud, met with a lack of enthusiasm and consumer buy-in.

As Rose sees it, there’s a reason some of the highest profile IoT devices like the Apple Watch haven’t exactly caught fire yet.

“The Apple Watch suffers from trying to do much,” Rose says. “The idea of an enchanted object really starts with something that’s ordinary. You start with something that’s familiar, and you’re adding a new sensor or display or feature.”

The indispensable parts that come next include simplicity and a sense of delight.

“One thing I think we can expect is that there really won’t be any product category in the future that isn’t connected,” Rose said. “One of the inevitabilities the IoT also will bring is not only changing business models but a fusion of capabilities. Now you need things like search capability and character recognition to look at the data these new devices are collecting. So, lots of interesting new partnerships will be spawned by these old school product companies.”

Every year, among his usual presentations, Rose leads a workshop on enchanted objects at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. His partner in the endeavor is a magician from London, Adrian Westaway, and during the class students are set loose at retailers such as Ikea. They return with ordinary household goods they’d like to repurpose into an “enchanted object.”

“The discussion we have is focused on the intersection between tropes of magic and how that could be mapped into service around the IoT,” Rose said, adding that he teams up with a magician because they’re “very good at understanding emotional arcs. Where to draw your attention, how to tell a backstory, timing”.
His students have prototyped objects, such as a bench that reads online dating profiles of people sitting on it and uses that to nudge compatible strangers together.

Not surprisingly, people like to ask Rose where all this is going. Those people include Hollywood producer J J Abrams, who once stopped by the MIT Media Lab to see prototypes and demos of products being worked on.

Abrams followed up his visit with an email to the Lab: “Fifty years from now,” he wrote, “what will computers be called?”

Some of Rose’s students and colleagues hazarded a guess. In his book, Rose recalls one student who answered, “I think they will be called nothing. They will ‘be’ us and power everything under the sun.”
Whether or not that’s true, of course, Rose plans to keep working toward his vision that those computing devices of the future also end up enchanting us along the way.

Source : theguardian
 
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