Everytime I wait for my luggage at an airport, I wonder about the ubiquitous Smarte Cartes. What makes them so smart? The carte itself is just a modified dolly - there's nothing smarte about it. The smarts here are actually all contextual - they only exist because the carte rack is in the right place, at the right price. Me, I think the smarte parte is the creators' business plan.
If even these profoundly dumb pieces of metal are a little smart, then what about the "smart furniture" in Mike's new manifesto (complete PDF here) It jibes with much of the ubicomp discussions (cf: context-awareness, augmented artifacts, etc) just using the mindset and vocabulary of design, not scientific research.
Mike thinks smart furniture is "better." Unfortunately, "better" can be a slippery concept. For Mike, "better" means: "reduce(s) complexity." Or it can mean, "more comfortable." Or also: "more powerful and more easy." Or: acting "more elegantly and efficiently." Those statements, now that I think of it, articulate a set of values common to most designers: simplicity, comfort, power, ease. And speaking as one kind of designer, I tend to agree with him.
Of course, speaking as a longtime smart-ass, I want to bring up all sorts of potential discomforts and complications. I always do.
I was talking for awhile about designing smart-ass furniture - chairs that groan when you sit down, closets that say your favorite shirt is totally tacky, etc. Affective furniture that, in articulating the anxieties we often feel around mirrors, closets, and very fast cars we can't afford, helps us get over our weenie insecurities already. (Or, potentially, exacerbates them.)
The joke about smart-ass furniture is that it already exists. You're sitting on it. Furniture doesn't require circuitry to outwit humans, because humans are so good at using artifacts in the world around them as props for their own internal dramas. I'm tempted to say that no matter how dumb the furniture is, we will always be dumber - simply because we think too much.
Returning to the smarte carte, there's just way too many assumptions about knowledge, understanding, and intelligence hidden in the word "smart". Computer scientists like the word "smart." So do interaction designers. I suspect "smart" makes us feel like little Dr. Frankensteins, imbuing previously inert artifacts with acuity and agency. We - through the magic of the design process - get to be the origins of simplicity, power, comfort and ease. Godlike, no?
But computer systems - even though they're built and maintained by humans - aren't "smart" in the conventional sense of the word. They're not clever, not witty, and they don't imitate human intelligence all that well. I'm smart. You're smart. My dog is (in her own woofy way) smart. Intelligence - smarts - is the product of data filtered through the body, and lived experience. Smart furniture just has some embedded chips. This is very important. danah just published a crib of her talk at supernova that has some good reminders about the perils of imagining that the value of a system is in its "smartness," when really it's created by the users. (Please substitute "the bean bag chair" for "Friendster"):
The simplicity of Friendster allowed it to be repurposed over and over again. Its popularity did not validate its underlying model, articulated social networks or the values embedded in the technology. Its success validated that people love flexible artifacts that allow them to reflect on themselves and their social situation. Friendster's popularity was viral because of its flexibility, not because people bought into the values set forth by the company.
Don't get me wrong - I think furniture and circuitry can be very happy together. I'm with Mike on that one. But I worry about the rhetoric of "smartness" as a prompt to design. Indeed, I think the best "smart" furniture is often a little...slow. So let's all make dumb furniture. Inarticulate furniture. Humble furniture. Furniture that may have some chips, but doesn't pretend to do the thinking for us.
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