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TIME MAGAZINE, JUNE 4, 2001, VOL.157 NO.22
Don't Wire, Be Happy
If your phone could talk to your refrigerator, would your life improve? Two tech wizards discuss the merits of souping up
Donald Norman and Michel Mayer are paid to make our lives easier. Author, consultant and former Apple advanced research executive, Norman is a passionate advocate for making computers simple. Mayer heads an IBM division that explores new ways to use the Internet to link everything—from your air conditioner to your cell phone. In a three-way phone conversation, TIME Asia technology editor Michelle Levander in Hong Kong, Mayer in Monte Carlo and Norman in Chicago discuss future inventions, human communication and why even tech wizards get so frustrated with their home VCRS that they want to hurl the remote at the TV.
TIME: Look at how many people don't know how to operate their vcrs. What will happen if their entire home is interconnected?
Norman: It's going to get worse before it gets better. It's going to be a disaster. Actually I've decided to go on a crusade against the complexity of home theaters. I just bought one and it comes with six different instruction manuals and about seven different remote controls. It's a complete mess. Even I, pretty expert on technology, am just baffled. I can no longer just watch TV. I've got to go to all these remotes and all this jargon that I shouldn't have to know about.
Mayer: When your dishwasher sends a remote alert and your utility meter is being read remotely, those tasks should be as invisible to you as the power grid, which is very complex. We know it's there because the user interface is pretty simple. You put the plug in.
TIME: Why do I want my cell phone to talk to my air conditioner?
Mayer: The whole history of technology and progress is about why we use more and more things. For comfort and capabilities and then, hopefully, for the fun of it.
TIME: What are your guiding principles in deciding which parts of the wireless Internet are worth investing in?
Mayer: A big chunk needs to go into the buildup of the infrastructure—all the wireless networks, the back-end servers and software. So getting homes connected with affordable technology is a pretty sure bet.
TIME: How do you tell which devices are going to take off—or die?
Norman: People need social interaction. If you look at technology, the biggest wins have been in communication. Hence the rise of the telephone and the cell phone and systems like SMS [short messaging] and i-mode, which are incredibly horrible to use. No sane person would use a cell phone to type. Yet, nonetheless, in Japan millions of people use i-mode.
TIME: When I stroll through futuristic Internet homes, they seem to be about engineers trying to prove something rather than human interaction. What are you skeptical about in this wired life?
Mayer: We can use RF, or radio frequency tagging, on grocery items today. You put things into your fridge and it can keep the inventory and tell you the milk is outdated and automatically connect to the grocery store to replenish the basics. I have seen those demos. I think they are very nice. I think it will be centuries before people in real homes rely upon that. But shift that just a little bit to a soda machine in a public place and it makes sense: look at the business case for roughly the same capabilities—the vending machine can wirelessly call back to headquarters to ask to replenish the soda.
Norman: I RF tag my car already so when I go along the highway, I just zip through the toll booth. Here's another application. Suppose you wanted to fix a Boeing 777. There are so many manuals that they won't even fit into the airplane. So the poor mechanic has to figure out before he goes out to the plane what is wrong so he can get a printout of those couple of pages and carry them with him. Almost always, he gets the wrong pages and has to go back. Well, this is a real win for electronic menu delivery. Basically, you wear a little display on your eye and you carry a little computer on your belt and all the manuals are available to you.
TIME: Both of you think that futuristic wireless technology will fly first in the business world. When does this trickle down to the individual?
Norman: These things change our lives. Let me give you a historic example. When Alexander Graham Bell first developed it, no one could guess that the phone would become so important that we would strap it to our bodies. Early on, there was a case where a person reported his house was on fire with the telephone and the fire department said, "I'm sorry. You have to use the fire box." People made up these wonderful rules of what was permitted. And that's true of all new technology. When Edison invented the phonograph, he thought he had invented the paperless office. You would just dictate your letter into the phonograph and mail the cylinder to the other person who would play it back. And everyone has invented the paperless office ever since. But that doesn't mean that the phonograph was a failure.
TIME: Is there one device that you really want? And how far away is it?
Norman: I'm quite content. I know there will be things that change my world. But you don't know that you really can't live without it when you don't have it.
Mayer: Think about all the ways people interact with you personally and professionally. You have your cellular phone, the voice mail of your cellular phone, your phone at work with phone mail. Your phone at home with an answering machine. Your pager. Your device with one e-mail system. Your main e-mail system. Probably your private e-mail system. Then you have all those accounts—like your bank. You have a gazillion passwords. So it would be a big simplification of my life if someone makes all of this seamless.
We are interrupted by a buzz from one of Mayer's cell phones. He carries three.
Related Sites
Don Norman
Department of Computer Science
IBM's Almaden Research Center
IBM's BlueEyes Project
IBM Pervasive Computing
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