Smarter design for the smart home
has a hou se he’s worked hard to make pretty, so why woul d he want to fill it with ugly smart home tech?
A lot of tech companies have a big blind spot when it comes to design. Steve Jobs famously said that Microsoft’s problem was that “they just have no taste”, a barb that felt almost cruel in its precision. In the era of tech firms getting into interior design, effectively, by creating smart home products, it now fits more as a jab against a whole industry than one against Redmond.
Recently, I saw a template design from Amazon of a possible smart lamp with Alexa built in. It was basically an Echo Plus, but the top three quarters are a tube of light instead of silver plastic. And it was exactly as ugly as that sounds. The Amazon Echo is, subtly, an excellent piece of technical design that actually avoids some pitfalls that Apple itself fell into, even though it had the Echo around for two years to learn from. I’m mostly thinking of the indicator light – the HomePod’s is only visible from above, whereas the ring of lights indicating Alexa activity runs around the top corner of the Echo, so it can be seen from any angle. It’s built really well as a tech product… but it also looks like a tech product. The second-gen version added a cladding of fabric or wood veneer to fit in better, but the end result was, still, very techie; a faintly monolithic tower that appeals to the sci-fi fan in all of us, but less so the home makeover show fan.
I think the HomePod is the best-looking smart speaker not because it is an especially pretty design, but because it is the most innocuous. That’s less of an endorsement of Apple as it is an indictment of the rest. Smart hubs are often hunks of plain plastic, cameras are shiny eyesores, air quality sensors foul up the place… there have been some great smart home designs, though they’ve often been from Yves Béhar, and he can’t design literally everything.
I think part of the problem is that they’re still designed with the tech in mind first, then a nice veneer is added. But if you want to sell an air quality monitor to someone, maybe it should be something they want to have visible in their home first. I remember, back when Habitat was an upmarket store, it collaborated with shoe maestro Manolo Blahnik on a striking metal shoehorn. It was almost impossible to get hold of, and not because there was a sudden need to subdue stubborn footwear. It was an objet d’art in its own right, and people wanted to display it.
Mondaine, a famous Swiss clockmaker, just released a wall clock in its minimalist style, with connectivity and sensors built in. This is more like it – I want the clock anyway, and the extras just push it over the top.
You might have already spotted the contradiction: having declared that too many companies have no taste, I’m now suggesting they create actual art. But maybe that’s a reminder that if tech products are going to be in more areas of our lives, they’ll need the input of more than coders and engineers.
Smart tech is still designed with tech in mind, and a veneer added
ABOUT MATT BOLTON
Matt is the editor of Future’s flagship technology magazine T3 and has been charting changes at Apple since his student days. He’s sceptical of tech industry hyperbole, but still gets warm and fuzzy on hearing “one more thing”.