David Rose - Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things

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To my children Rayna and Adam, and to yours.

The vision for a more humane interface between technology and people is in your hands.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Confucius

W HAT MAKES SOMETHING magical? Enchanted?

Im not talking about deceptive magictricks and sleight of hand. This book is about how to strategically design and develop products that are engaging and essential, that resonate with the latent needs of those who use them, and that create an emotional connection with us human beings. I have spent nearly twenty years developing Internet-connected things (toys, furniture, lighting fixtures, jewelry, and more), and I remain disappointed that so few products succeed in enchanting us. Instead, they are difficult to understand, frustrating to use, overwrought with features. They diminish rather than empower us.

This book is meant to catalyze the imagination of designers, business strategists, and technologists to craft more delightful products and more enchanted experiencesand to remind everyone who uses Internet-connected things (which is all of us) that we should expect more from the tools, devices, and playthings that are such an enormous part of our lives.

Whats the secret to creating technology that is attuned to the needs and wants of humans? The answer can be found in the popular stories and characters we absorb in childhood and that run through our cultural bloodstream: Greek myths, romantic folktales, comic book heroes, Tolkiens wizards and elves, Harry Potters entourage, Disneys sorcerers, James Bond, and Dr. Evil. They all employ enchanted tools and objects that help them fulfill fundamental human drives. In this book, I link the fictions and fantasies that so beautifully express these desires and the role of modern inventions. My goal is to change the way you think about computers and computer-driven things and how we interact with them.

I teach at MITs Media Lab, where one of the great benefits of my work is the constant stream of visitors who pass through day after day: business executives, dignitaries, musicians, architects, designers, technologists, and the occasional Hollywood producer. They come in search of insight into how our lives might be different in the future and how technological change might affect their work.

One spring afternoon, J. J. Abramsproducer of the television series Lost, Fringe, and two Star Trek moviesstopped by to see demonstrations of prototype technologies and to talk about magic and science fiction. A few days after his visit he sent an email in which he asked a provocative question: Fifty years from now, what will computers be called?

He got plenty of responses from my students and colleagues. Syn. Neuro. Heisenberg. Mother. Your Excellence. One student, Katherine, replied, I think they will be called nothing. They will be us and power everything under the sun. And Csar agreed: Probably we will just say something like Im going in, and people will understand what they mean.

The conversation that Abrams spurred was not really about names but rather about the relationship we will haveand want to havewith future technology. Do we want more tablets and screens? How do we feel about robots and wearables? What about enchanted everyday objects?

What personality do we want our technologies to possess? Domineering or polite? Should our technologies look cold or cute? Do we want to interact with them as smart tools or as caring agents? Should every child be required to learn to code or is a zero learning curve the ideal? Do we want computers to become more human or humans to become more like computers?

I hope to shed light on these issues through the stories of some forty Internet-connected things and to explore the ramifications of how the human-machine interface impacts the design of wearable technology, medical devices, vehicles, communication tools, musical instruments, drawing instruments, our homes, our workplaces, and, in the future, almost every nonhuman element of our lives.

In Part I of the book, I describe the four likely technological futures: Terminal World, prosthetics, animism, and enchanted objects. In Part II, I explore the six human drivesomniscience, telepathy, safekeeping, immortality, teleportation, and expressionand the dialectic interplay of the fictions and inventions associated with those drives. Part III is about how to design enchantment, including how to think about the major abilities of enchanted objectsincluding gestureability and glanceabilityand how to approach the design process as a ladder of enchantment, from augmentation to story-ification. In Part IV, I look ahead at how larger systemsour homes, our workplaces, and our citiesmight be transformed through enchanted objects. I leave readers with six fantasies of what I would love to see come next.

While this book is meant to appeal to both general readers as well as specialists, Im particularly interested in your willingness to flex and consider the world from three perspectives: technology, design, and business. It takes a polyglot to understand and make smart decisions about human-centered products, so your ability to understand and communicate with other scientists, engineers, designers, psychologists, executives, and entrepreneursas well as customers and usersis essential to taking part in the next wave of the Internet.

Welcome to the age of enchanted objects.

I HAVE A recurring nightmare. It is years into the future. All the wonderful everyday objects we once treasured have disappeared, gobbled up by an unstoppable interface: a slim slab of black glass. Books, calculators, clocks, compasses, maps, musical instruments, pencils, and paintbrushes, all are gone. The artifacts, tools, toys, and appliances we love and rely on today have converged into this slice of shiny glass, its face filled with tiny, inscrutable icons that now define and control our lives. In my nightmare the landscape beyond the slab is barren. Desks are decluttered and paperless. Pens are nowhere to be found. We no longer carry wallets or keys or wear watches. Heirloom objects have been digitized and then atomized. Framed photos, sports trophies, lovely cameras with leather straps, creased maps, spinning globes and compasses, even binoculars and booksthe signifiers of our past and triggers of our memoryhave been consumed by the cold glass interface and blinking search field. Future life looks like a Dwell magazine photo shoot. Rectilinear spaces, devoid of people. No furniture. No objects. Just hard, intersecting planesCorbusiers Utopia. The lack of objects has had an icy effect on us. Human relationships, too, have become more transactional, sharply punctuated, thin and curt. Less nostalgic. Fewer objects exist to trigger storytellingno old photo albums or clumsy watercolors made while traveling someplace in the Caribbean.