‘Embedded in the background’
Daragh Byrne is an assistant teaching professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrated Innovation Institute, which offers a master’s degree in integrated innovation for products and services. It’s an interdisciplinary approach combining design, engineering and business, and students are well-versed in what’s new in the consumer approach to IoT.
Ultimately, products that can talk to each other, and to humans who employ them, must be well designed. This might be fewer screens, not more, in the house.
“One of the things I talk to my students about often is, we’re already saturated with information. We have a lot of screens calling out to us throughout the day,” Mr. Byrne said.
“We are putting these things in the rooms of our home. We don’t want all of them to be extremely needy. We want them to excel gracefully, we want them to be glanceable, embedded in the background, integrated.
“It should be in your line of attention only when you need it.”
“Frictionless” was the word used by Ben Arnold, executive director and industry analyst for The NPD Group. A recent 24-month tech industry forecast from The NPD Group predicts the smart-home device category of products will grow 90 percent from 2016 to 2018.
“It has taken a while for this market to gain traction; we are so used to thinking of consumer technology as ‘What can I watch on this? What can I play on that?” Mr. Arnold said.
“The question is: How do I get from having a speaker on my kitchen counter to being able to adjust the temperature in my home ... even beyond being able to connect those dots, what is the benefit to me?” he added.
Consumers seem to be more comfortable with the technology. And the ease with which some voice-activated IoT devices operate recently became, literally, child’s play.
A Texas 6-year-old reportedly ordered Alexa to buy a dollhouse and four pounds of cookies. According to The Verge, when a TV newscast in San Diego mentioned the caper, the anchor said, “I love the little girl saying, ‘Alexa ordered me a dollhouse.’”
This triggered Echos and Dots within hearing range of some households watching the newscasts. An unspecified number of dollhouses were added to Amazon shopping carts, although none of the orders apparently were completed.
Amazon allows users to