In addition to our podcast discussion, we’re happy to announce a six part monthly series on smart ware in partnership with our friends at respected user experience publication UXmatters. That series is going to be starting later this month with the issue that comes out on September 25th. So let’s start our smart ware discussion with what we’re calling a tribute to dead machines. So we’re calling this a tribute to dead machines because we’re fully expecting that machines that are smart are going to feel like they’re alive.

Technology has … even if it had preceded our species, technology has certainly been one of the qualities that most marks humanity and who and what we are. There’s been multiple epochs over history where different things were happening in technology, but what we’re going to be talking about is basically the things that been happening since 1950 give or take. So the technologies that were coming to a head during World War II which included early computing technologies, which included nuclear and certainly the weaponization and the power usage of nuclear technologies among many others led to this explosion in science and technology in the 1950s up to the present. Core among them the technology of computing.

So computing was expensive. It was limited access. It was something that required science or some type of advanced degree to use. So you can see those themes really shaped the way computing comes into our culture. So it’s this something. I won’t call it a leap but it’s cordoned off. It is not the consumer or the everyday usage that we see now. Dirk, your thoughts on the era of big machines.

Now, I look back on my collection of floppy disks and all of the tricks that I learned for the terminal on my PC and it’s fun nostalgia, but I’ll tell you from a user experience standpoint, that era of computing was pretty fraught and difficult, although I must say it really hooked me as well. So you got those two poles, the lousy user experience coupled with this complete and utter fascination with this computing technology that was now in my home. Dirk, did you have a similar experience like that?

So as the ‘90s came and particularly with the rise of the Internet, the utility of the personal computer just exploded. Now despite that explosion, the personal computer still was like … it was still this thing that for most people sat in a corner or in a room that wasn’t frequently used and people would go to special case use their personal computer and then get up and stop using it again. So it was ugly. It was mainstream in a sense that many people had it, but not mainstream in the sense that there were a lot of people who would have listed computer use as one of their core hobbies or things that were most central to their life.

So the things you could do on computers, the capability of computers, the access to information but also the bidirectional sending of electronic communications through the Internet, these are all things along with … always improving user interfaces particularly once we got into the mid-90s with the formalization of the field of user experience and beyond. Personal computers were continuing to get better, but they also continue to either sit on your desk at work or in a corner of your house as opposed to be core to your experience of living.

There was this evolution of computers from being this machine into a more personal object. We aren’t fully there in terms of integrating the computer into lifestyle yet, but at least you begin to see this aesthetic uptick, this appreciation for the fact that this thing is going to be in my house or in my school or in my business. It should at least looks like something as opposed to a beige Lego brick. That was perhaps a sort of underappreciated change I think and I didn’t really understand the significance of a well-designed industrial design computer, but that would start to become more evident as we went into this next era which of course we’re still living in right now which is the mobile era of computing. Dirk, do you want to do a little summary of the evolution of mobile?

There were other competitors or I guess before an iPhone there weren’t competitors but there were other smart phones that while perhaps not as nice as the iPhone, not as full featured as the iPhone were clearly down the path of it but it was the iPhone and the specific design of that device that created the explosion of mobile computing, which took computing and made it something that was an integrative part of the lifestyle of most people of middle class and above certainly, but even people who are less affluent throughout the first world and even beyond, and took computing from something that was a big box of sat in the den with something that was more task based to something that is woven into our lifestyles.

In many ways is replacing analog things that came before it and really has shifted computing into being something that is almost a direct extension of ourselves as we go through our life normally as opposed to this thing that we use just on a task basis before we go back to our normal lives.

So the iPhone is really just … and smart phones in general are just a sneaky way of getting everybody to carry around computers in their pockets which if you told me that in the ‘80s people would be carrying around … everyone, everyone would be carrying a computer in their pocket, I never would’ve believed you but here we are. So we can see how the computer became personal, became beautiful, became part of our everyday lives over these three different eras of computing.

Now there’s this scent in the air, this change which we’re calling smart ware which is of the computer becoming a more integrated companion with people. So we can begin to see this trend emerge in some examples of computing that we sort of take for granted today but are really the precursors, the beginnings of what we’d like to call smart ware. So one of those things that’s just coming online now are the self-driving cars like the Tesla automobile as one of the first commercially available self-driving cars. This realization of sort of a much smarter physical digital platform isn’t entirely successful, is it Dirk?

Going back to mobile and why the iPhone was such a revolutionary device is that it combines so many things into one. That’s what brought the masses is it was your new phone and it was your new camera and it was your new music playing device. It was your new GPS navigational system. It just killed all of these other categories. It killed all of these other use cases and that’s what made it so remarkable. We’re in this era now and I think you have some other examples.

We’re in this era now of smart ware where the products that are coming out are not transformational in the same way. They’re clunky, they’re clumsy and they certainly aren’t taking advantage of the full panoply of opportunities that smart ware have to offer. Their oftentimes very narrowly in … particularly IoT or machine learning and not leveraging all of these things that are coming to a head together.

As a person with sort of a high technology frustration tolerance, if I’m getting frustrated with it, I can only imagine what folks who might not be nearly as tolerant are feeling. So the Echo once again provides ostensibly sort of this next generation smart ware platform which uses a combination of voice recognition and other services to create something that should be magical and instead sometimes ends up sort of flat on its face.

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