Internet of things MAGIC AS METAPHOR ||Tech wise||

MAGIC AS METAPHOR:

One of the main issues with introducing any new technology or service that 

is radically different from the norm is getting people to understand and 

accept it. Early adopters are generally happier looking a bit strange or doing 

things somewhat awkwardly to reap the benefits of the new gadgets; 

however, for the technology/service to catch on, you need to persuade the 

majority to take it up.

In addition to the technology becoming capable of a particular action, we 

often need society, for wont of a better term, to be ready to accept it. There 

are many examples when the main difference between a failed technology 

and a wildly successful one is that the successful one arrived a few years 

later, when people were more receptive to what was offered.

Technology blogger Venkatesh Rao came up with a good term to help 

explain how new technology becomes adopted. He posits that we don’t see 

the present, the world that we live in now, as something that is changing. 

If we step back for a second, we do know that it has changed, although the 

big advances sneak up on us over time, hidden in plain sight. Rao called 

this concept the manufactured normalcy field (www.ribbonfarm.com/

2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/).

For a technology to be adopted, it has to make its way inside the manufac-

tured normalcy field. As a result, the successful user-experience designer is 

the one who presents users with an experience which doesn’t stretch the 

boundaries of their particular normalcy field too far, even if the underlying 

technology being employed is a huge leap ahead of the norm. For example, 

the mobile phone was first introduced as a phone that wasn’t tethered to a 

particular location. Now broadly the same technology is used to provide a 

portable Internet terminal, which can play movies, carry your entire music 

collection, and (every now and then) make phone calls.

The way that portable Internet terminals made it into our manufactured 

normalcy field was through the phone metaphor. Introducing technology to 

people in terms of something they already understand is a tried and tested 

effect: computers started off as glorified typewriters; graphical user interfaces 

as desktops....

So, what of the Internet of Things? Arthur C. 

Clarke has claimed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguish-

able from magic,” and given that the Internet of Things commonly bestows 

semi-hidden capabilities onto everyday objects, maybe the enchanted objects of 

magic and fairy tale are a good metaphor to help people grasp the possibilities.

Other projects have a less obvious influence.

Enchanted mirrors seem a popular choice in design research, although they 

haven’t quite reached the capabilities of the evil queen’s “Mirror, mirror on 

the wall” in the Snow White tale. They tend to show information which is 

useful as you start or end your day, in line with the expected times when 

you’d use a bathroom mirror. You get the time and can check appointments 

and traffic and weather information while having your morning shower. 

Presumably, it is merely a matter of time before one shows the number of 

“Likes” you have on Facebook, thus turning it into the modern equivalent of 

the evil queen’s query to know “who is the fairest of them all?”

Given David Rose’s thinking around enchanted objects, it’s not surprising 

that Ambient Devices, the company that he used to run, has a couple of 

examples. The ambient orb is a “single-pixel display” that can show the status 

of a metric of its user’s choosing—the price of a stock, the weather forecast, 

the pollen count. Like the crystal ball whose shape the orb mimics, it shows 

you information from afar.

Ambient Devices then took the idea one step further and built an enchanted 

umbrella. It can read the weather forecast, and the handle glows gently if 

rain is expected, alerting you to the fact that you may need to pick it up as 

you head out of the house.

The magic of these devices isn’t the epic magic of The Lord of the Rings; it’s a 

more mundane, everyday sort of magic that makes tasks a bit easier and lives 

a little more fun. But that’s the point: using our understanding of magic and 

fairy tales to help make sense of these strange new gadgets.

Of course, tales like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice show us the danger of trying to 

use magic to reach beyond our capabilities. When the apprentice tries to 

ease his chores by using magic, that he doesn’t fully understand, to enchant 

the broom, things get out of hand. It takes the timely return of the sorcerer 

to restore order. So far, our Roomba automated vacuum cleaners seem 

relatively well behaved, but we should be wary of creating Internet of Things 

devices whose seamless “magical” abilities give them behaviours or control 

interfaces which are hard for their owners to comprehend.

As well as trusting that your devices will do your bidding, it is also impor-

tant to trust them to safeguard any data that they gather.

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