Ben Bashford -Design thinking for connected things: My Talking House
Whilst doing this project it’s become more than clear that Twitter is a great channel for smart objects to use to communicate with people and I know there’s a number of Twitter connectedobjects already but there’s something really interesting that happens psychologically when it’s your own house talking to you.
At the moment all the sensor data is aggregated into this single “voice” that I’ve called Home Unit 1 for the time being. It’s interesting that even though I know it’s the output of multiple distributed sensors it feels like it’s a single entity - and it became much more pronounced when I made the messages feel more human.
So my house talks and what is says appears alongside all the things my friends are saying. I can listen to my house from wherever I am that has a network connection.
This is great, but it raises some interesting questions….
ONLY CONNECT
A couple of years ago, I worked on an ISP’s plan for a next-gen wireless service. The part of the project that took the longest was the Connection Manager. To this day, I can say “Connection Manager” to a few of my former colleagues and see the shudder.
This month, we’ve been building our own wireless connection management system at work, because we’re unhappy with the Android default UI. You don’t want to know how many revisions it’s had, how many edge cases there are to cope with. My colleague who’s been working on it got disheartened, but I was able to tell him the story of the Connection Manager and reassure him that he’s not alone.
People expect wireless networks to “just work.” But they can be flaky, capricious beasts, and your device can’t always know where the source of the problem is. When you can’t rely on the OS default, you have a lot of work ahead of you to make it feel effortless.
