The button paradigm is too deeply ingrained to let it go. The devices simply change the way in which you press a button, but the system is exactly the same. Two examples of AI/ML powered devices, and in both cases the step beyond the ‘button interface’ has not yet been made. Which, because you have a routine, is something you can actually practically do. It’s way more work to do that than to setup a schedule. Now, my routine does change a lot, so in my case it was pretty much useless, but even when you have a very fixed routine, in order to teach it to Nest, you need to give it a ton of commands. Nest learns your routine very well, mind you - if that routine doesn’t change. I was eager to see how well it would ‘learn’. Now, there are even ‘smarter’ smart appliances, such as Nest, for instance, that claim to learn what to do. Something Google Voice can learn a lot from. It is a quiet, non-obtrusive bit of information that tells me something about the time. It is something I have learned to anticipate. It goes with the seasons, and changes the time to turn on the lights every day. It is something I don’t need to think about. In fact, the Zapier setup I have that turns the lights on when the sun goes down gives me much more of a ‘smart’ feeling than the whole Google Voice setup. I have to explicitly tell Google to change the lights. In fact, when I visit friends, the idea that I can’t ask Google to do it feels strange. Google works so well, thatI hardly ever touch a button to change the lights. In many cases it manages to correctly command my Hue lights to a lower setting. Today, when I want to change the light settings in my house, I tell Google Voice to dim the lights. What do you need to do, exactly, to use your computer to read this text? And what do you need to do if you want to stop and find another article? The movements you make, the thought process you use to plan these actions has been moulded by the ‘button’ paradigm. And, because we are so completely used to giving these little commands all the time, we don’t even notice it anymore.īut think about it. In essence, the design of the device or program is training you to use it in a frictionless way. They have distilled statistics-fueled intuition into an amazingly useful product, and everything in the design is focused on communicating exactly what the user is supposed to do. The reason this does not feel constraining is that they have really done their homework: they have completely figured out what most people want to do at every step. They aim to give you only those options that you need at any specific time. The trick these designers have done to minimize the amount of buttons - controls - is, in essence, to remove the amount of control or freedom you as a user have. Most radios had way more than two buttons. The paradigm has not changed.)Īnyone that uses their designs has experienced the way in which this reduction in ‘controls’ has made using them seem much more frictionless (or, in some instances, completely excruciating. (Still, note that even when touch screens made physical buttons vanish, they only did so by bringing them back as their virtual incarnations, on screens. Designers like Jony Ive (Apple) and before him Dieter Rams (Braun) did something extraordinary: they removed all (or most) buttons. The last half century, the button overload has helped propel designers that go for minimalism to the forefront. Computer programming means stringing commands together in excruciating detail, adding commands for every possible situation. In effect, the beeping noise is triggering a command for me to come push the button.Ĭomputer programming has taken this ‘control by command’ attitude even further. In some cases, devices have even started to close the loop: my dishwasher beeps when it is done, and continues to do so until I press a button. If you want something to happen, you need to push a button. We have started to think about our world and the machines and devices in it as something that has to be controlled, that needs minute by minute input. Every time you press a button, you give a tiny command. In fact, because the electric revolution made it so easy, the button has become deeply entangled with our idea of control. It’s very hard to think about going a day without pressing a button. Today, the light switch is just one of the countless buttons we use to control our daily life. For most of the people that installed electric lights, the moment they used the light switch for the first time was their first introduction to the button.īefore that moment, they had never had to push a button in their life ever. The electric revolution was just beginning. Just a century ago, many houses in the city of Amsterdam, where I live, did not yet have electric lighting.
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