INBOUND Bold Talks: Amber Case "Calm Tech: Designing for the Internet of Things"

Hi, everyone. How are you doing? Okay, Good. Great. How many of you are overwhelmed by technology? How many of you are too distracted to answer that question right now? Okay, who's heard this overused quote, 50 billion devices are going to be online by 2020. Cisco and some other large companies like to take credit for this. And usually it's part of this utopian future video scenario, right? Like in the future, everyone will have their own perfect condo and have the same San Francisco accent. Every time you ask Siri to take you somewhere, it understands you completely the very first time, right? The problem is that there's a lot of video editing involved in the 20 takes that it takes for you to actually get that right with Siri. And God forbid if you actually have an accent that's anything other than what Siri was trained on. One of the co founders of Siri actually took me through all these different videos about somebody with an Irish accent that's trying to order a sandwich. Siri's just like, I have no idea what you're saying. So I like to go through these futuristic scenarios and I like to ask, does this actually sound good? Is it actually going to be interesting in the future? Are we going to have things that work really well? And I like to consider a few different options. The first one is the smartwatch, right? Instead of having smarter technology, I think it's important to have smarter people. And right now we're just kind of getting distracted by all of these things. When the Apple watch came out and you actually put it on, it said, oh, let's just mirror the behavior that you have on your phone already. So instead of having all the notifications on my phone, I also had all the notifications on my watch too. And the issue is that a lot of designers will design something the same way for all the devices. Like, the world is not a desktop, right? Like, we interact with our world in a different way than we do when we're sitting at a desktop with our full attention in front of us, where we can sit for two hours and pay attention to everything, right? We're in the checkout line. We don't want to get like a news alert on our smartwatch. We don't want to have the news alert show up on the smartwatch when we're trying to like scan the boarding pass as we go through, through the airport, right? So it's getting in the way of our everyday life. Or you have like the smart fridge. Like, I keep talking to these large design companies, they say, we want to do a smart Fridge. And maybe it locks you out if you have a dietary restriction, right? So this person needs to go on a diet, right? And so now you can't get into the fridge unless you're taking out these items. Oh. And it tells you, you know, if the bananas in your fridge are no longer ripe, I'm like, bananas already have a built in mechanism for telling you that they're not ripe. They turn a different color. It's awesome. I was like, that's a really great technology that's really smart. The big problem is that maybe your friend comes over and they're diabetic and they have an attack and they need some sugar or something like that. You can't open your fridge. It's like, I'm sorry, Dave, you can't do that. Gosh. Well, the other problem is that maybe you get one of these smart fridges, or maybe you inherit a smart fridge when you get a new apartment. And you, you have to learn how to use this technology already. When you go into a new apartment, you have to figure out, how does this thing work? If I press the faucet this many times, will it actually turn on? And then if somebody stays at your house, it's like, turn this this way and then turn this way, and then wait five seconds so that the shower comes on already. We're having problems with our analog technology. We don't need another layer on top. And what I call the dystopian kitchen of the future is if all of these different companies with all their different programming languages and all of their different protocols somehow get into your house at the same time. It's like, oh, sorry, you can't open the fridge now because it's incompatible with the burner. And the burner's set too high. And until the burner cools down, you can't open your fridge anymore. Right? Like, there will be these really annoying popups and things happening all over the place. So I think that we're kind of in this era of interruptive technology, which we all experience every day. And I really would like to advocate for the opposite, which is a term called calm technology, which is technology that gets out of the way and lets you live your life, that kind of amplifies you as a human and connects you to other people and then works, right? Like, if we think about the most calm technology, one of the most invisible technologies is electricity. It flows everywhere. We only notice it if it doesn't work. And it's flowing through this room right now. Right? We just use it every day. And that's infrastructure, right? Like, it's a big issue if it goes down, but it doesn't go down that much, right? Can you imagine having an Apple TV that worked that way? That would be incredible, right? Instead, you turn on the Apple TV and it says, would you like to download a software update? No, I want to watch a video. How about you not have to download a software update? It's fine as is, right? Like, maybe every two years, everybody downloads a new update on, like, update day, where you finally download all of the updates that you've been postponing on your technology because you actually need to get a task done. So this is. Who's heard of Xerox parc, right? So this is a great research center. A lot of interesting things happened during this time. The modern graphic user interface came from here, a lot of innovations in Ethernet and the modern web. But Mark Weiser and John Sealy Brown were these two interesting individuals, and they created the idea of quantum technology. In the beginning, they made this world that they called pads, tabs and boards. In the mid-90s, they said that we'd have all these little devices where we'd have many devices to one person instead of one person to. Or instead. Instead of many people to one device. And that that would fundamentally alter our relationship with technology and that it would cause a number of issues like bandwidth concerns, attention concerns. And so they wrote a paper called the Coming Age of Calm Technology. First you have a mainframe computer, and then you have the desktop, and then you have mobile, and then you have this Internet of things, right? So Mark Weiser was the father of ubiquitous computing, which we now call Internet of Things. And this is my favorite quote from him, that the scarcest resource in the 21st century is not going to be technology. It's going to be attention. And we need to really, really design our applications to understand people's attention and understand just how much attention they take. So let's look at some principles of calm technology. There's many more than this, but I'm just going to go over my favorite ones. The first is that technology shouldn't be requiring all of our attention, just some of it, and only when absolutely necessary. And I'll give you an example of this. So a tea cuddle, you set it, you forget it. And under its own design, it will alert you when it's done, you can leave the room and come back and it will tell you when it's ready, right? This is a piece of calm technology because it waits. It lets you do something else in the background and then it shouts to tell you that it's done. It's really simple, really mundane and people use it. Another example is that technology should be empowering your peripheral vision. So just like in the tea kettle example, you can't attune, like if you take your vision off of something that you're doing and attune it to something else, you can't really multitask like that and have full resolution understanding, right? So let's look at like our focus right here is very high resolution. But as you go off to the sides, you have low resolution, but you still have the ability to pay attention to something. So if you design technology that gives you information towards these sides of your attention, you can still attune to like five or 10 things in the background or without having to focus all of your attention there. And the problem with a lot of design technology right now is that it's causing you to focus right here in front of you on everything. Everything is designed as an alert and that takes all of your attention. So we can do all these things with lights and sounds and buzzes and things like that, that you can just do so many more things. And we're not really taking advantage of that spectrum of notifications. So here's an example. This is a weather light. So it's a light. It's a hue light bulb connected to a weather report. And it just shows the color of the weather that it's going to be during the day. And then there's a little iPad on the wall so you can actually look at the weather report. So you wake up, go into your kitchen and it's blue, so you know it's going to rain or it's sunny. Like it's a yellow sunny feeling, right? So then you know it's going to be that. It's really simple. You just feel ambiently the weather, right? And what it's going to be. And then you can get more information by looking at the wall. But you're not woken up by this disembodied computer voice like in all of those futuristic ads that say, hey, hello, and it's 75 degrees out and sunny. And here's the news. People don't generally want to be woken up like that. Like they just grab their phone and they can read it. But if you can kind of feel something, then it's more interesting. It's compressing that sense of having to pay attention to everything in front of you, over to the side or all around you, so that you can just notice what it is. Another example is that technology should be amplifying the best of technology and the best of humanity. When you try to make technology that acts like a human, you end up making humans act like technology, right? So if you have Siri try to act like a human, you end up having a person say something three times in a row in a robotic voice to Siri to make Siri work, right? So instead, I really like this app called Sleep Cycle. If you haven't used this app, it's fantastic. So you put it, like, under your pillow at night, and it tracks your movement and it will track your sleep cycles. And you can set an alarm. That's smart. And it will wake you up in a proper sleep cycle, so that even if you have less sleep, you'll wake up refreshed. So this is something that really amplifies what you can do, as in sleep, and what the computer can do, which is record your sleep and wake you up in an intelligent way. Instead of just waking you up at 7am when you set the alarm, it'll wake you up sometime before your alarm is set, and you'll feel refreshed. Like, I used it last night and I didn't get that much sleep. But I feel great. Technically, I feel really good. Number four, technology can communicate, but it doesn't need to speak again. You don't need to use a disembodied voice to get your point across. You can use something like haptics or a sense of touch. So this is my favorite example of that. I can see people kind of like straightening up right now. So this is a smart posture sensor, and you wear it around your back, and when you're slouching, it sends you a buzz, right? It's like a mini version of your mom being like, sit up straight. That's bad posture. Like, sit there. But what it does is it's a personal alert, so it's not giving you a notification on your phone. Hey, you need to sit up straight, which you would then resent and say, no, I'm not going to sit up straight. It just sends you a buzz. And so over time, you just sit up straight. Normally, I'm not wearing that right now. I should probably do that. But it's a really fantastic device, and it's a really great way to use other senses than just sight and sound in order to give somebody an alert. I had a friend who got an insulin pump and it would beep and other people could hear the beep, and he was really embarrassed by it. I said, probably the insulin pump should buzz because no one can hear it, right? Like, if it's buzzing in a movie theater and it's really slight, then it's not possible to hear. But his was beeping and everybody in the movie theater could hear. During, like, a really serious movie, they're like, turn off your phone. He's like, it's an insulin pump. It's attached to me 24 hours a day. I can't change the alert style, right? So, like, when you design technology for people, you have to really understand the situations that they're going to use it in. And then finally, the right amount of tech is the minimum amount to solve the problem and nothing more. Like that great design quote. Good design is where you take something away until there's nothing left to take away. So there's an example of this. Like, the greatest technology is boring, right? Like this toilet occupied sign on a plane, right? You can be red, green, colorblind and still understand what it has to say. You don't have to translate it into 50 different languages. You can not have your glasses on and have horrible vision and understand ambiently whether the bathroom is occupied or not. It's a friendly universal symbol. And so, in conclusion, a person's primary task in calm technology should be being human, not computing all of the time. And that if good design allows people to accomplish their goals in the least amount of moves, then calm technology allows you to do the same thing with the least amount of your attention. And because that's going to be the scarcest resource in our new world, and it already is, the more we pay attention to people's attention, the more we'll make products that people love, that go into people's lives, that people use for a really long time. And the more we'll make sustainable businesses that don't just go out of trend or out of style in six months and fall apart. So I'm going to publish this book soon from O'Reilly on this, where he goes through all these different examples and should be interesting to read, even though it's a technical book. So if you want to order it, you can. If you don't, then don't. But thank you so much. It's great to be here. I hope we make the world a better place.