Phil Gilbert
General Manager, Design
IBM Corporation
March 22, 2017
INTRODUCTION
Thanks for picking this book up to give it a read. But, seriously—how do you have the time?
I look at my should-read book stack and at the precious minutes of free-choice time I have, and I’m dismayed. With a little research, I find that there are around 1,500 books published in my mother tongue around the world every day. That’s one every 57.6 seconds. Even if only one in 10,000 of them is truly amazing, that means there’s a new one to add to the stack each week. There’s just no way to keep up.
It’s not just reading. We’re all under pressure to do more and more with the time we have. If it’s not an existential bony finger reminding us to carpe every diem, it’s just the nature of the world to tell you that you should be doing more. You should be flossing more, bonding with your sweetheart and children more, and taking longer to eat your meal that you should have homegrown and cooked yourself. You should be looking at your finances more, meditating more, getting outside and exercising more. Sleeping more.
If you look at actual studies like the annual American Time Use Survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there’s not a lot of wiggle room in our schedules. If you’re one of their mythical average Americans, you dedicate all of 16—count-em—16 minutes of time to relax and think each day.1 Even if you try to carve time away from the optional activities like television and movies, it’s quite likely some of the non-optional activities like sleeping and household chores could easily expand to consume the excess.
External time pressures aren’t going away, and I doubt we’re going to lose the internal desire to maximize the precious little time we have.
Enter technology.
For decades, technology has helped us move faster. It used to take hours to get furniture off a carpet and then take the carpet outside, drape it over something, and beat it clean. The vacuum cleaner shrank that to minutes. It’s part of the point of this book to show that lately, some technological innovations are shrinking that time to nearly zero. Consider the Roomba and what it means to get back those minutes of time you used to spend beating your rugs clean. These technologies aren’t just helping you do things. They’ve begun to do things for you. And as you’ll see, faster isn’t the only benefit that these agentive technologies provide.
That’s an exciting development, but to the best of my knowledge, it’s happening in a haphazard way—product strategists, owners, designers, and developers doing smart work in their own organizational silos. But could we do it better if we got clear on what we’re talking about? Say if we took a big, broad look at what makes these things special and unique and saw what patterns and problems emerged? That’s what this book is about.
So thanks for making the time. I think what you invest here, and the technology that results with this new thinking, is going to make the future a brighter place.
PART I
Seeing
In the first part of this book, I hope to do something that is not only arrogant but also damned difficult. I hope to change the way you look at technology. First, I want you to stop seeing it as a collection of tools or gadgets and instead see it as an evolutionary flow around human problems, whose parts ultimately integrate to become a new category of thing.
To help you see it this way, we’ll start by looking at the rich example of the thermostat and how it evolved from the past to the present. Then I’ll show you that this example isn’t some special, isolated case. Rather, once you know to look for it, you can tell that it’s just on the verge of happening pretty much everywhere else. Then we’ll move our focus from the present into the speculative future to see how this new category of technology will change the world.
We’ll finish Part I by looking at lines of thought that have in the past intersected with this concept. In Part II, “Doing,” we’ll start to make use of this new approach to design smarter products. But for now, let’s jump in and talk about dinosaurs.
CHAPTER 1
The Thermostat That Evolved
Then the Nest Learning Thermostat
Let’s begin with an evolutionary fable. About 275 million years ago, a tiny, lizard-like creature broke free from its egg with a trait that was very unusual for its kind. Unlike the rest of her cold-blooded family, whose body temperature matched the ambient temperature, this little mutant produced her own heat. On the positive side, her mutation meant she could move around just fine in winter while her kin slowed down. On the negative side, it meant that she was ravenous all the time, and could feel cold and heat as direct threats to her weird new metabolism. To compensate, she had to develop some adaptive behaviors—that is, she had to find ways to stay cool in summers and warm in winters.
Fast-forward the video of this tale, and despite her being a world-class weirdo, she thrives and has kids. Her kids have kids. Two hundred million years pass and what was like a thick lizard now looks more like early platypuses, kangaroos, and mice. Cold-blooded types eyeball them suspiciously over mouthfuls of weird Cretaceous insects. Then, out of nowhere, a cataclysmic asteroid drops. Cold-blooded creatures cannot handle the global climate change like the mutant ones do. Goodbye dinosaurs, hello vacant ecological niche. After the dust clears: more kids, who dutifully evolve and speciate. Tree climbers. Grass eaters. Sea swimmers. Primates. Homo Sapiens. “Hello world!” Then ultimately, you, wherever you are, reading this book. Most of which can be traced back to that tiny therapsid’s weird mutation.
This is an oversimplified (seriously, don’t base your paleontology degree on this) introduction to the mammalian branch of the tree of life. We’re a small part of that branch, and it means we’re stuck with those same positives and negatives of being homeothermic, notably that we have to work to keep ourselves comfortable—neither too cold nor too warm. There are behaviors, of course, like huddling together or staying in shadow, but this book is about the evolution of tools. So what tools have we used to help us with the warm-blooded problem of temperature regulation?
Tools for Temperature
Grab a broad leaf with a sturdy stem, and you’ll have a simple fan to move air around. Wrap yourself in fur, blanket, or cloth and you can keep more of your body heat on you. Find a branch struck by lightning and you can carry that flame around, set the flammable stuff alight (whee!), and put the fire inside spaces, which can contain that heat.
Fireplaces, furnaces, and furnace doors allow some manual control of warm air. Even architectural features like curtains,