Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers by Chipchase Jan & Steinhardt Simon

Author:Chipchase, Jan & Steinhardt, Simon [Chipchase, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

A Whole New World Outside Your Door

As we’ve seen, mobile technology has dramatically changed people’s behaviors outside the home, from carrying less to remembering less to owning less. All sorts of things have become possible. It feels like a major advancement just to have a digital map instead of a paper one in a place like Los Angeles; in parts of the world like Uganda it’s a major leap forward when a mother with a very sick child can use a mobile phone to find the nearest doctor and not have to worry about carrying her child ten miles to the nearest town only to discover there’s no doctor there.

This evolution is certainly not without perils, from the annoyance of losing one’s phone to the collective suffering caused by a major system failure or a security breach. We’re still learning what it means to be at the mercy of the network; in my own experience, network disconnections have resulted in everything from the minor irritation of losing a phone signal in the canyons of Manhattan to the challenge of being stuck at a hotel in Tanzania with a nonworking credit card and no other form of payment.

Even though we can’t entirely trust networks, we still put plenty of faith in them because they can—and increasingly will—do for us what we can’t do for ourselves, or at least can’t remember to do. Over the next few years we’re likely to see more points of reflection designed into objects that are increasingly connected to one another. In Tokyo today you can walk up to vending machines and, before you decide to spend your last few hundred yen on a soda, place your wallet against a sensor that will read your Suica card and tell you if you have enough credit left on it to take the train home or buy the soda, or both.

As networks and infrastructure get smarter and faster, we’ll also see our notions of convenience change; instead of paying for the convenience of having the right atoms and molecules in the right place at the right time, we now pay to have the right bits and bytes where and when we want them. This means more data portals in more places, but it also means more everyday objects that we can interact with, and that can understand us and interact back. Perhaps all those objects will become connected through a public, networked infrastructure, where anyone can walk up to any node of the network, be recognized by the network, and have access approved and initiated within seconds. What would it take to create that? Is it even feasible? I can’t say, but it’s a possibility that bears considering when we think about the future of how people will carry and use objects outside their homes.

In some ways, we’re already in that future, though it’s easy at times to take for granted what it really means to be connected when we’re out there. Sometimes the best way to get a sense of our networked selves is to see what happens when we get off the grid.

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