Toilet User Interface Design
Ok, so you probably don’t read too many blog posts about toilets but stick with me!
Last weekend I was lucky enough to stay in the Park Hyatt Shanghai hotel (free on someones reward points again) and while everything was amazing, one thing stood out in particular: the toilet. As long as it’s western style I’m not to fussy about loos but what I found in my bathroom went beyond anything imaginable. First of all the toilet lid automatically raised itself when you entered (see video below), had a heated seat and automatic flush but way beyond this was the remote control which was hung on the wall (see photo above). Yes you heard me right – the toilet had a remote control. For the life of me I can’t work out the use case of this apart from for playing practical jokes.
I’m used to toilets with only 1 button/lever but this thing had 27 of them including a LCD display to customise every aspect of the experience. While the technology may be advanced the functionality was scary – with labels like “Wand Cleaning” and “Pulsating” it took on a terminator like menace which was constantly a button press away. I decided to say way well clear.
I’m guessing this probably comes from Japan who have a long history of high-tech toilets with even more crazy features such as: automatic air deodorizing and conditioning, music to relax the user’s sphincter, germ-resistant surfaces which glow in the dark, a power saving mode that warms the toilet seat based on historic usage patterns, a talking voice that greet the user, and even inbuilt wi-fi! The mind boggles.
Frankly I think this all a bit much. If you get to the point where your toilet has 27 buttons then evolution has probably reached its limit and it’s all downhill from here. This company badly needs Apple to consult it about simplification of the UI but I’m not sure the world is ready for a multi-touch toilet yet!
10 Things You Couldn’t Do 25 Years Ago
Photo by gothopotam
A couple of weeks ago I turned 25 which was a fairly unremarkable event but did get me thinking about how technology and the internet in particular has changed our lives over the past quarter of a century. Many things we take for granted today were unthinkable 25 years ago and have fundamentally changed the way we live our lives. I put together a quick list of 10 things I couldn’t do 25 years ago but now rely on daily…
- Communicate with people on the other side of the world in real time from virtually anywhere
- Write something and make it available to billions of people for free without any technical knowledge
- Search billions of pages of information and find almost anything in less than a second
- Watch world events unfold in real time independent of traditional media organisations
- Stream & download music, tv, and films over the internet from anywhere free of schedule limitations
- View products, compare prices, make purchases and buy tickets without leaving your chair
- Surf the web, make calls, send emails, listen to music, watch movies, record photos & videos, know where you are and a million more functions all using a single devise which can fit in your pocket
- Start a business without relying on the traditional costly overheads of office space and infrastructure
- Translate text between languages at a touch of a button with passable results
- Store massive amounts of information in a very small space (remember encyclopedias?!)
Illustration by Luiza P
Doing similar things 25 years ago (or even 5 in some cases) was slow, laborious and labor intensive. Today information moves at the speed of light and as the masses gained access to simple tools for dissemination we’re producing more than ever before in our history. With over 1 trillion pages and 1.6 billion users we are living in an age of hyper-connectivity where people are only as far apart as the devices with which they connect to the internet. If the industrial revolution brought us cars and bridges then the information revolution has brought the democratization of knowledge to the masses (arguably at the expense of privacy). How far we have come in such a short space of time…
What would be on your list?
10 Future Trends
On the 10th anniversary of its founding Google has recently been asking 10 of its “experts” to give their predictions of what’s going to happen in the next 10 years as the internet evolves. I’m no expert but as a curious partaker in this brave new world I thought I’d give a shot at coming up with my own list of future predictions -
- Computation moves into the cloud – obvious but important. This is the key to the future which will provoke massive social change. No longer will we be tied to our desks or fortified corporate networks. Work anywhere on any device with the same access to all the same resources.
- Technology is humanised – forget “plug and pray”, it just works. Long promised, rarely delivered. This is when technology is liberated from the geeks into the hands of the masses. Compatibility will be a thing of the past once computers all speak a common set of standard languages.
- Interfaces are revolutionised – keyboards and mice will seem quaint. Touch, eye, voice and possibly even brain controllers will be commonplace. If you think the iPhone is cool you haven’t seen anything yet. Understanding semantic context will make manipulating complex data childs play.
- Connectivity is ubiquitous – the internet is everywhere. Not just on your computer or mobile ~ it will be woven into the very fabric of everyday life as an essential additional layer connecting everything to everyone and visa versa. Blanket high-speed wireless connections will exist across all major cities.
- Personalisation gets personal – whether you are in the real world or the virtual world your social connections, interests and history (etc) will follow you everywhere you go. The flow of information will be automatically targeted and fine tuned around this. You control who sees what/where/when.
- Language barriers are broken – English is only the 4th most spoken language in the world. Through real-time machine translation you now speak and understand the rest. The volume of information you have at available will drastically increase through this. Small businesses can now operate globally.
- Information overload & dependency – faced with more information that you could possibly imagine people will face new challenges of how to cope. Some will thrive in this new sea of unlimited potential while other will face serious mental collapse. There will be those who choose to disconnect entirely.
- Viruses are no more – with the majority of software provided as a service (SaaS) viruses which plagued Windows users will be a thing of the past. However, new even more dangerous and sophisticated threats will emerge with personal data stored in the cloud a prime target.
- Social homogenisation – spurred on by technology, globalisation take an every stronger hold on social norms. It becomes a cognitive and social culture, not a geographic one, which relies heavily on the notion of information and knowledge exchange in a complex web of relationships.
- Man-machine distinction blurs – the line between humans and machines begins to lessen. Old concepts of pre-net existence will seem foreign to our children who will liken the change to the Age of Enlightenment when mankind made a seismic shift in the way we live and ultimately exist.
This wont all happen in the next 10 years but we are already seeing a steady progression towards it and, unless climate change or a natural disaster wipes us all out, I strongly believe this will be a reality well within our lifetime. What would be on your list?
Street View Comes to London
Google Street View, the system that provides interactive panoramic pictures of streets in Google Maps, has recently been causing a stir in the UK with privacy groups fearing it might breach data protection laws. After assurances from Google that it would blur peoples faces and numberplates they have been allowed to proceed and there have been multiple sightings of its high-tech cars roaming the streets in and around London.
Some relatives of mine spotted one of the cars while they were having a walk in Surrey (just south of London) and had a chat with the driver as well as taking some pics of the gear he was driving around with.
Apparently the array has 7 cameras at the top with laser range finders just below (to record geospatial 3D information) and an extremely accurate GPS receiver to record the position. All the data is saved to a computer in the boot with 1Tb storage discs which he said he used several of each day!! It’s controlled by a simple touch screen interface which sits in the passenger seat.
Not the most fun job in the world but the technology is pretty cool!
The amount of data they must be archiving alone defies belief and strongly reminds me of the philosophical issues raised by Jean Baudrillard in his book ‘Simulacra and Simulation‘ whereby he questions how can you tell the difference between what is real and what is a copy when the copy is as detailed as the original?
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA – it is the map that engenders the territory, and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
There’s a warning in there somewhere for Google!
The Future Awaits
I was mulling over the technological progress which has been made over my lifetime so far and contemplating where it will take us in the future when it hit me that most of the “sci-fi” type developments predicted will only start to appear around the time that our generation are turning out the lights (taking into account that we live a bit longer than our parents). Will we see a person walk on Mars or have a brain transplant in our lifetime? Unlikely, but will our children? Probably. The next 60 odd years will no doubt see some amazing advances though so I wouldn’t get too depressed about it just yet – that’s assuming climate change doesn’t get us first!
I predict that much of what is to come will be driven by the deconstruction of our own physiology that we will mirror in machines/software which closely integrate with our own bodies as physical and virtual extensions of ourselves. This will redefine the notion and perception of consciousness and ultimately reality itself (is a virtual experience any less real than a physical one?). The process will not happen overnight and will be fraught with ethical issues as to how such technology should be used/controlled.
“It can also be argued that DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species, relies upon genes to be its memory system. So, man is an individual only because of his intangible memory… and memory cannot be defined, but it defines mankind. The advent of computers, and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought parallel to your own. Humanity has underestimated the consequences of computerization.”
While this may seem rather far-fetched we are already only one degree of separation away from realising a physical connection between man & machine. Already devices like iPhones and Blackberries give us a constant connection to an endless sea of information wherever we may happen to be, albeit currently limited by bandwidth. In a world where being offline has become synonymous with being out-of-touch dependence has crept upon us without us even noticing. Social networks are the precursor, or virtual toe-in-the-water, to forging our digital identities and relationships between others in a world no longer constrained by boundaries or borders. Exciting but somewhat daunting at the same time.
“If a technological feat is possible, man will do it. Almost as if it’s wired into the core of our being.”
Those who yearn after “the good life” will no doubt not be particularly enamoured by this vision of the future but I would seek to put it in perspective: humans have long pushed back the boundaries of exploration, be it mapping the worlds continents or landing on the moon, and to my mind this is the next logical step in our evolution as the world homogenises and our understanding of it increases. Added to this with the inevitable increase in population and growing scarcity of resources technology becomes even more important in providing solutions.
“All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.”
- all quotes Motoko Kusanagi & Puppet Master