Brian Prentice

Boy oh boy – my digital life just keeps getting better!

Just last year, as I was starting to use the MP3 feature of my phone, Apple made me realize I could use the phone feature of my MP3 player. Of course, I’ve been known to listen to music on my GPS device while I’m using the GPS capabilities on my phone to get directions. I just bought a micro-projector but I also plan on falling back on my phone’s micro micro-projector. My projection TV has a web browser even though I often watch TV from my browser. And if I still can’t figure out what else I can do with all the different devices at my disposal there’s a thousand other ideas in an App Store just a couple of gestures away.

That’s the beauty of technology – there’s no device, no software, no web site or service that can’t be improved with a little pimping up. Right?

But just yesterday, I was observing a gentleman on my train home doing his email from his laptop PC, while listening to his iPod. He had to stop to take a call, which he did, on his MP3-enabled Blackberry. When I got home I was standing in my kitchen, pondering this man’s flagrant affront to the benefits of convergence, when I couldn’t help but notice my surroundings.

Something sparked!

I dashed out of the kitchen and ran to my entertainment room upstairs. I turned on my TV, swapped the input settings and powered up our Nintendo Wii. A few waves and clicks and I had launched the inbuilt browser connected to my home’s wireless network which I have set up in my PC room right next to the kitchen. I jumped into YouTube and found the following video:

Now I love these quaint insights into the way we once thought of consumer technology. And it’s nice to think of a time when a woman could find gainful employment as a model without being an anorexic 17-year old. But what struck me is that 50 years ago there was something disturbingly modern in the way technology was being designed to better our lives. Notice how kitchen design was based on an assumption of functional convergence navigated via easy push-button interfaces?

Back to my kitchen I went and then it hit me. After half a century of technology and industrial design innovation what do I have in my kitchen? A refrigerator, a stove, an oven, a toaster, a coffee machine, a dishwasher, and the legacy of years of unwanted, but graciously received Mother’s Day gifts – an entire cupboard dedicated to a salad spinner, a juicer, two different food processors and a George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Machine.

As well intentioned as mid 20th century device manufacturers were, it turned out there was never a market for a single and coordinated environment that refrigerates, grills, fries, slices, dices, makes julian potatoes and then cleans up after itself.

With the luxury of 20-20 hindsight maybe what is technically feasible is not necessarily desirable. The vast majority of humanity, it would seem, prefers to work with “single-purpose” technology. That is a product designed to do a thing well rather than lots of things not so well. That was certainly the case with me and my kitchen.

Could it be true? The ramifications were staggering. A few taps, twists and pulls on my iPhone’s browser and I found out that a comprehensive study of mobile phone use by AMTA/ARC in Australia found that just over 20% of mobile phone users had ever used the device to listen to music or browse the Internet. In fact, only 50% use voicemail! The Pew Internet & American Life Project from December 2007 found that only 19% of their respondents have ever used a phone or a PDA to send an email and only 8% did so on a daily basis.

The realization dawned on me. It’s not the guy on the train who didn’t get the value of technology convergence. I was the one with the problem. I’ve been assuming that the more things a piece of technology does the more powerful it is. And it’s powerful technology that’s supposed to enrich people’s lives. I bought into this vision and I’ve spending too much with other people that have done the same thing.

But the reality for most people is that the way they really want to interact with technology is the way I interact with my kitchen.