This article was taken from the October 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Over the past four years, the Walt Disney Company has been engaged in a secretive effort to redesign the Disney World experience. It'll go like this: you buy your ticket online and plan all the details of your visit. Then you'll get a wristband in the post, which will be a passport to the experience you've curated.
Snug around your wrist, the so-called MagicBand will use radio frequency to communicate with sensors around the park, all orchestrated by software that effectively turns Disney World into a computer interface. You can enter the park by holding your hand up to a kiosk; you can arrive at shows with 30 seconds to spare, having already reserved your seats; you can jump on to rides that you've selected previously without waiting in long queues; you can buy anything you want with a wave. An It's a Small World character could call you by name and wish you a happy birthday.
So could Mickey, who could also greet you at a preselected meeting time. This is all in the service of fun, of course, but it is also a glimpse of the future: an integrated experience, a smooth hybrid of real-world and digital interactions.
This represents a new frontier for design. Over the past 30 years, as every facet of our lives, from shopping to schooling, has migrated on to computer screens, designers have focused on perfecting user interfaces -- placing a button in just the right place for a camera trigger or collapsing the entire payment process into a series of swipes and taps. But in the coming era of ubiquitous sensors and miniaturised mobile computing, our digital interactions won't take place simply on screens. As the new Disney World suggests, they will happen all around us, constantly, as we go about our day.
Designers will be creating not products or interfaces but experiences, a million invisible transactions.
Already we're seeing a groundswell of new products that insinuate themselves seamlessly into users' lives. These include personal sensors such as Jawbone's Up, the voice- and gesture-controlled Xbox One, hyper-intelligent apps such as Highlight that alert you to interesting people in your immediate vicinity, and Automatic, a device that communicates with your smartphone to tell you when you are driving inefficiently. But this is just the beginning. Within the next five years we will be surrounded by embedded devices and services. Just as the rise of the screen challenged designers to create software interfaces, the rise of screenless digital interactions will challenge them anew.
After all, it's one thing to invent a unique kind of digital experience in Disney World, a controlled space where people expect magic. It's altogether trickier to do the same thing in people's houses, offices and bedrooms -- the most intimate areas of their lives -- in a way that feels both natural and inevitable.
Bill Buxton bears a striking resemblance to Doc Brown from Back to the Future -- more strapping than you'd expect for a mad scientist, his bald head rimmed with a snowy hedge of hair.
In conversation, he can be piercingly intense. And, just like Doc Brown, in 1985 he unleashed a breakthrough. Buxton, a lifelong musician who has also worked for Xerox PARC and Silicon Graphics, created one of the world's first multitouch interfaces when he turned an electronic drumhead into a tactile synthesiser control.
That drum was a progenitor of every touchscreen in use today.
In the mid-aughts, Buxton wrote an article that helped define a new discipline called experience design -- a focus not on products or devices themselves, but on the impact they have on people's lives. As an example, he wrote about two orange-juice presses -- an electric model and a manual lever press called the OrangeX.
The electric juicer had flimsy plastic buttons, and the motor screeched to life with an annoying whir. The OrangeX required a bit more effort but also sported an inverted rocker crank that gradually transmitted more force as you pressed down. Buxton's point was that the OrangeX created a feeling of tangible mastery that helped him enjoy the juice more. Designers didn't shape just gadgets but behaviours and visceral responses around those devices.
Today, Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, says the next challenge for experience design is to create a constellation of devices, including wearable gadgets, tablets, phones and smart appliances, that can co-ordinate with one another and adapt to users' changing needs. This focus on the totality of our devices stands in contrast to where we find ourselves today: constantly adding new gadgets and functions without much thought as to how they fit together. (For instance, anyone lugging around a laptop, iPad and iPhone is also carrying the equivalent of three video cameras, three email devices, three media players and probably three different photo albums.) Even as our devices have become simpler individually, the cumulative complexity of all of them is increasing.
Buxton has said that the solution is to "stop focusing on the individual objects as islands". He has come up with a simple standard for whether a gadget should even exist: each new device should reduce the complexity of the system and increase the value of everything else in the ecosystem.
To see what he means by increasing the value of the ecosystem, consider the phone syncing built into many cars. After you link your phone, the vehicle boots up its own voice-recognition technology so you can make hands-free calls. When you leave the car, you simply grab your phone and it blinks to life again. The car and phone engage in a quiet dialogue geared towards providing only the capabilities you actually need.
If all our devices interacted so co-operatively, whole new possibilities would begin to emerge. For example, Frog, the company best known for the Apple IIc's industrial design of the early 80s, has been building a prototype light-bulb that will sense where people are in a room and project touchscreens on to walls or tables. Now imagine if a device like that could communicate with your mobile gadgets -- if the light bulb, sensing your presence in the kitchen and knowing the apps on your phone, projected your cooking apps on to the refrigerator when you began preparing dinner.
To deal with such complexity, our devices will have to become smarter. Dave Morin, CEO of mobile social-networking company Path (wired 05.13), has a maxim to explain how to think about the coming age of experience design: "AI is the new UI". That is, the effort and attention that designers once poured into interfaces should be extended to code that doesn't just react to the push of a button, but anticipates your actions. For instance, Path will automatically update your location when it senses that you've settled somewhere new. But that's really just a proof of concept. Morin's maxim hints at the silent conversations that our phones and wearable devices will have with the world around us -- and each other. For example, Apple's new mobile operating system, which uses Bluetooth Smart to share data with devices in your vicinity, could power a number of these kinds of intelligent background features.
Innovations like these present great challenges for designers.
Today's app and software designers already have an understanding of how customers interact with products. They know down to the pixel where to place a button, how fast a screen should scroll and how to make an app simple but not simplistic. But as designers move off screens and into the larger world, they'll need to consider every nuance of our everyday activity and understand human behaviour every bit as well as novelists or filmmakers. (Otherwise they may engender the same kind of backlash as Google Glass, a potentially cool product that unleashed a torrent of privacy concerns.)
That will require a shift in how tech designers view the world.
Matt Webb, CEO of Berg, a London design firm that has created forward-looking prototypes for clients such as the BBC, Google and Nokia, says it will demand thinking way beyond today's standard scenario of a person working on a computer. For example, he says, "Our technology can't understand what it means to be in a room of two to six people. I find it totally nuts that when you sign in to something, no one else can use it. Imagine having to sign in to a light bulb before turning it on!"
Berg is trying to solve that problem by inventing a system that will allow multiple users to share smart, connected devices which will be able to adjust to their individual tastes and preferences. "That's the world we actually live in," says Jack Schulze, Berg's cofounder. "But it really is a massive challenge for software."
Just consider how these challenges apply to Netflix, for example: if your spouse watches something on your account, it probably renders the company's super-sophisticated recommendation engine worthless. Netflix is trying to address this problem by creating a feature allowing multiple user profiles on one account. "But even that is the wrong solution," Webb says. "When we watch television together, that group isn't just multiple people added together. That group is something more." It's easy to imagine a smarter, future version of Netflix -- one that uses, say, an Xbox Kinect camera to recognise who's in the room and can determine everyone's overlapping interests.
The true potential of experience design comes as that kind of sophistication is applied to all our interactions. "We have all these incredible benefits to our online life," says Jake Barton, founder of Local Projects, a media design firm, "and they're suddenly being applied to physical space." Take the example of Warby Parker, the US online eyewear retailer that has begun opening retail shops.
Imagine if the shop automatically brought up your online profile -- allowing you to focus only on the glasses that the company's computers know you already like. Or look at Nespresso, whose physical stores offer its customers an RFID card that allows automatic billing and personalised service based on purchase history. Barton believes the next step will be to create a universal, portable electronic identity that allows all of our experiences to be that customised. Companies such as digital-payment pioneer Square are already working to build just that.
In the wrong hands, this is a dystopian prospect -- technology's unwanted intrusion into our every waking moment. But without the proper design, without considering how new products and services fit into people's day-to-day lives, any new technology can be terrifying. That's where the challenge comes in. The task of making this new world can't be left up to engineers and technologists alone - otherwise we will find ourselves overrun with amazing capabilities that people refuse to take advantage of.
Designers, who have always been adept at watching and responding to our needs, must bring to bear a better understanding of how people actually live. It's up to them to make this new world feel like something we've always wanted and a natural extension of what we already have.
Cliff Kuang is a senior editor who writes about design for wired US
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
