The WISE Future of Home Technology

This book started with the more-than-two-thousand year old ideas of Aristotle, describing the benefits of tools that could act on their own. In the following centuries many other essays can be found where this idea is repeated. Even in poetry, Goethe confronts his sorcerer’s apprentice with such self-acting tools in the form of ghosts, however with the result that control over them is lost. It is not in our wishful thinking that tools act this way. The desirable alternative would be Mark Weiser’s (Sci Am 265(3):94–104, 1991) technologies that interweave into our lives in such a way that using them would be: “as refreshing as a walk in the woods”. It was illustrated throughout this book that today’s technology has, fortunately, more or less overcome the level of the uncontrollable ghosts, but is, generally, still far from the status of interweaving itself into the environment. There are a few exceptions, such as the digital pen and paper combination that I mentioned in chapter “The Proof of the WISE Concept”. It is one of the technologies that, in my opinion, point in the right direction. It shows how technology should be designed to enhance our lives without completely turning it upside down. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case with other technologies that can be assumed to have a higher relevance in our future, such as smart home technologies. The walk in the woods example from Weiser illustrates how an ecosystem should work and how interaction should take place. Everybody who has ever enjoyed such a walk would agree that the woods are full of information, and that they offer some means of interaction addressing all of our senses. Although the civilized human has unlearned several skills, most of us are able to enjoy the experience without becoming so distracted by the variety of stimuli that we are in danger of falling over a rock. The actions of the human are supported by diverse forms of feedback from the environment. For example, feedback that has been deliberately put in place by other humans: Consider feedback such as signposts or fences showing the correct direction and to preventing a walker from entering dangerous areas. But also more subtle information, such as trails that have obviously already been used by others, where the signs of their passage serve as signifiers to help us avoid unexpected problems (Norman, Living with complexity, MIT, Cambridge, 2010). The characteristics of the woods, the possibility to peripherally experience the situation while also being able to focus on important tasks in parallel can be considered as a form of flow experience (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, The concept of flow. In: Handbook of positive psychology. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, pp. 89–105, 2002).