SXSW2013-Jenson

Bears, Bats, and Bees
The Internet of things needs our help

10 March 2013

@scottjenson

jenson.org

Sunday, March 10, 13

Parlaylabs


I’ve been lucky to to be a UX designer at some very innovative companies. I’m currently Head
of UX for Parlay labs, a startup in Palo Alto.

?


People are surprisingly conservative when it comes to innovation. Everyone wants innovation but are deathly afraid of risk...

When we reﬂect on how far we’ve come, most people just focus on speed size and cost, assuming that is the core force moving
forward. But these are *safe* predictions, of course things will get smaller/faster/cheaper. That is incremental innovation. We almost
always fall into the same trap of just extending the current paradigm, just making it a little cheaper, a little smaller, and a little faster..


What’s happening next? Easy, it’s the iWatch! The reason people are so excited about the
iWatch is that it makes so much sense (from a certain naive perspective) Soon to be followed
by the iRing and the iTieTack. These are ﬁnd products but they are just a fairl conservative
extension of our existing paradigm.

Default Thinking

I’ve written about this before, in a few articles and a book chapter about how throughout the
history of technology we never take a shiny new technology and run with it. We almost always
turn around and use it for an something were doing yesterday. We evaluate a new technology buy
the tasks done by the old. A classic example is how people initially read radio plays on TV. Of
course, they quickly ﬁgured it out but that’s how we humans work: we stumble our way into
innovation. It’s why designers like to prototype, we dont know what we don’t know.

We look at the present
through a rearview mirror;
we march backwards into
the future

Marshall McLuhan



So while we’re all breathlessly waiting for the iWatch, what has actually been happening?


Things like the Nest come along


and the Twine hobbyist sensor, and GloCap, a smart pill bottle the calls you when you forget to
take your pills, and about a dozen smart light bulb projects on kickstarter. These are wacky crazy
new directions that don’t with with our current understanding.


But if you throw in the idea of a smart city, things really start to get confusing. We
are in a situation where the world is running ahead of our ability to conceptualize
what is happening. The iWatch is a ﬁne product that is extending and old model. It
doesn’t help us make sense of this crazy explosion of new-ness.

“It took us more than 20 years, but computing
has ﬁnally moved from conserving resources
ingeniously to squandering them creatively.”

-- David Gelernter,Yale


Cheap computing can go into anything the problem is our extreme lack of imagination as to
what this could be.

Coordinate

Control

Discover


Every time I talk about the IoT I get questions that show that people really, deeply don’t
understand what it is about. My favorite example is the smart toaster, the derogatory poster
child of the IoT. When people teach that “I don’t want apps on my toaster” I want to shake
them by their shoulders! “That’s *your* old paradigm, not mine. Smart devices are not about
apps! Thy are about 3 basic layers of functionality.

Bears ....Big Screen + General OS

Bats .... focused function device

Bees ....only data


As a designer, I feel strongly there is power it words. The IoT is such a messy ball of stuff that it’s
hard to talk about it. It’s useful to break it up into three basic groups: Bears, bats, and bees.

http://jenson.org/of-bears-bats-and-bees-making-sense-of-the-internet-of-things/

Bats .... focused function device


Both Bears and Bees are somewhat old school. What they are trying to do is fairly well established.
What I ﬁnd most interesting are Bats as they are breaking new ground and creating not only new
product concepts but how to even things about functionality.

Just in Time
Interaction


There is a wide range of devices from the nest down to bus stops (which are just a steel pole
stuck in concrete) There is a continuum of device from standalone processor to a tagged object
that points to a web page. But, from a design point of view, they are all the same: they want your
attention and you need to interact with them. The problem is that we are still using our old school
paradigm of ‘native apps’ to deal with them. While I might be ﬁne with an app for my Nest, am i
going to download an app for ever store I enter, every smart poster to see, or every smart
museum I enter? As we move to single use experiences, apps become hopelessly quaint.

mobile apps must die?


It’s why I wrote Mobile Apps must die! People thought it was a rant about web vs native apps
but that wasn’t it at all. Apps can’t be the only tool in the tool kit. Are we really going to have
an app for every store we go to, every product we buy and every new interactive device that is
coming our way?

http://jenson.org/mobile-apps-must-die/

Paradigm
Shift

Model Crisis


We need a paradigm shift: to see things in a new way. Thomas Kuhn talked about how shifts
occur in the scientiﬁc community. Before every great shift was a ‘model crisis’ where things
started to fray at the edge. Nothing dramatic, the old guard always yells relax, thing are ﬁne
and the new blood keeps pushing for something new. It’s a classic tension.

What is our model crisis?

Software Buy Install Reuse


What is our model crisis? We are moving from a model based on Software, where we buy,
install and reuse

What is our model crisis?

Software Buy Install Reuse
Experience Discover Use Forget


To one based on experience where we discover, use and forget.

When I buy a smart toaster I don’t want to buy the software, that is a meaningless concept

So what do I want?

1: Break out of “App Myopia”

2: IoT is just the web.... for hardware


So what do I want? I’d just like to push a few memes down the hill... If we don’t know *what*
we want we’ll never invent it. Native Apps are a hold over of the 1960s, tying you into the
ecosystems of Bears. They are ﬁne for that world but in a world of exploding serendipitous
interactivity, they are just getting in the way.

Smart devices are JUST LIKE the web. They need to be found by every device in a free an open
way. Everything else, from security to monetization can be added on top.

http://jenson.org/app-myopia/
http://jenson.org/was-the-internet-just-an-accident/`

Next
‘Google’


We need an open source ‘Growl’ like app that ﬁnds all devices nearby and presents them to
me. Eventually, this service will need a cloud component to rank it but this too should be
open so that Google, Bing, etc can all play. Indexing the physical world is the next google

So what do I want?

1: Break out of “App Myopia”

2: IoT is just the web.... for hardware

3: Simple way to interact


We need to stop thinking of the mobile web as a shoehorned version of the desktop web. The
mobile web is going to go where the desktop and native apps can never go....

Toyota Prius
68
Maria Jenson
Musée du Louvre
T-Mobile Clear
Bang & Olufson
Notifications Justine
Crêpes
Notifications from David
New SMS
Notifications
New SMS from David
New SMS from David
3G
2:12 PM


Here is a quick example but it applies just as much to Google Glass as to Smart phones, or
even smart TVs...

3G
2:12 PM

JIT ecosystem



In thinking about the future, it’s easy to be blinded the the giants of the day. The iPhone is
great, it was a major step forward but it is not the model we need for the internet of things. It
still has a place, we just need to grow past it to a more ﬂexibly and open model.


Power to the people

scott@jenson.org
@scottjenson

jenson.org
Hot or not...


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