Designing for the Internet of Things

(^316) | dEsiGninG for EMErGinG tECHnoLoGiEs
This might seem daunting, but no more so than the nature of mass
manufacturing and new materials seemed to the early industrial
designers and architects of the twentieth century. We must look to new
media art practice, design history, and new research in order to apply
our craft to our current context. Designers make things that reflect
their environment, but also shape that same environment through the
objects that they create, laying the foundation for the future.
We have strong foundations stretching back over a century of art, archi-
tecture, and industrial design. We don’t need to begin again, but we do
need to continue to evolve our practice to incorporate new techniques,
tools, and capabilities that help us understand the potential of today’s
technolog y.
What are the aesthetics of feedback, immersion, and communication?
How can we apply foundations of interaction, such as time and meta-
phor, to the exchange of data between machines that facilitates an ath-
lete learning how to perform better? What is a beautiful network and
how do we recognize and critique it? These are the questions we now
face, ones that we will continue to explore through our work and try to
answer with objects, systems, places, and conversations.
New Environment, New Materials
[W]e have witnessed a paradigm shift from cyberspace to pervasive
computing. Instead of pulling us through the looking glass into some
sterile, luminous world, digital technology now pours out beyond the
screen, into our messy places, under our laws of physics; it is built
into our rooms, embedded in our props and devices—everywhere.
—MALCOLM MCCOLLOUGH, DIGITAL GROUND (MIT PRESS), P 9
Over the past couple of decades, our environment has changed
significantly.
Screens are everywhere all the time. This means that the complex inter-
actions afforded by screens are even more important to understand and
design properly.
Physical objects are now imbued with “smart” features using sensors,
networks, and physical interactions that are often invisible, having no
screen whatsoever. This makes physical object design more and more
important for designing modern products, shifting focus back toward
industrial design and architecture and away from the myopic attention
to screens that interaction design has had recently.