Circling the Nest Thermostat

Last week, Nest Labs launched a new programmable thermostat. It got a lot of press, not just because it’s expensive and innovative and beautiful, but because Nest Labs was founded by Tony Faddell, who led the iPod team for years, and senior leadership includes other key iPod team members and a MacArthur fellow.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year and a half thinking about programmable thermostats, and how to help homeowners save money by managing their energy use. Some of those thoughts I’m going to have to keep to myself, even though I’m no longer at EnergyHub, but there are a few things not directly related to my work there that I haven’t seen discussed in all of the hullaballoo, and I think one in particular is worth spending some time on. 

Which is to say, I was really struck by the physical form of the thermostat itself. The company’s video tour highlights one of the cleverest touches - the stainless-steel outer case that allows it to blend more cleaning into the surrounding wall. After all, the whole reason most thermostats are beige is that it’s the lowest common denominator—Nest is solving the same problem more elegantly (though I do wonder about finger smudges…). But I really liked most of all that it’s a circle.

Image copyright Nest Labs

I grew up with a boxy beige thermostat with little lever-ish setpoint markers on the top. So to me personally, there’s nothing particularly resonant about the circular form factor. But after spending a lot of time talking to people about home HVAC systems, I know that l’m in the minority on that. The circular thermostat from Honeywell, designed by the great Henry Dreyfuss, is a minor icon of mid-century modernism: it’s just what a lot of people think of when you ask them to visualize a thermostat. The digital thermostat moved away from that shape to mark itself as something new (and also, to be frank, because it needed more space for its components). In time, the rectangular form factor became a marker of technological advance: you had something digital, programmable, and new.

The Nest Learning Thermostat takes another technological leap forward: it’s billed as a thermostat that learns its program from your behavior. It’s a thermostat with actual intelligence - possibly a scary thought on a cold night! How do they make it seem friendly and familiar regardless? Return to the circle. After the age of the impossible-to-program digital thermostat, the circle not only says “thermostat,” it says “simple and familiar.” From the manufacturer’s side, having the primary control be the stainless steel ring around the outside cut out the cost of a custom touchscreen component, and gave the design team the opportunity to design controls that (at least in the video) feel almost analog and yet highly precise at the same time.

The original iPod’s physical design, on launch, was constantly compared to a deck of cards. It needed to be small, to travel well, and it needed to be iconic, to stand out among the crappy existing options. The white earbuds were a brilliant touch, letting you display to everyone else at the gym or on the train how ahead of the curve you were. At home, though, it’s at least as much about comfort as display. A familiar form, an organic shape, something that’s beautiful up close but blends in at a distance, that’s what makes the Nest thermostat look premium in the home, and it’s almost the exact opposite of what made the iPod look premium in 2001. I still have a lot of questions about the Nest Learning Thermostat, but I’m beyond impressed by how much the people who made it know about making highly desirable consumer objects, and how much they were willing to learn from a classic. 

What does a chatbot need to know?

I got a new iPhone 4S last week, and after having had my last iPhone (the 3G) since January 2009, I was blown away by how much faster the new phone is. Not to mention the value of voice activation - to be able to ask my phone “where am I?” and get an answer almost immediately feels nearly magical.

After seeing all of the various Siri Easter eggs people have been posting, I figured I’d come up with one that would be a softball. But Siri whiffed it: 

Well, I thought, maybe it’s my upbringing, with my Greatest Generation grandparents, that makes me think you’d want to teach Siri that the correct answer to “say goodnight, Siri” is “Goodnight, Siri.” And so I went about my day.

The next day, however, I tried again, and I succeeded:

Once I got past my delight that it worked, and the associated delight in hearing the line delivered in Siri’s flat mechanical voice, I started thinking about why the Abbott & Costello routine would have made it into the programmers’ basket of Easter eggs, and Burns & Allen’s closing “say goodnight, Gracie” bit would not have.

AIs, even a fake-AI like Siri, needs a certain amount of cultural savvy to interact with its users, and to project for us what we insist on calling a personality even when it’s not attached to a person. A smart journalist I know thinks that “software personality designer” will be a separate career path within the next decade; I tried convincing him that that was what interaction designers already do, bring personality to their products, but the more time I spend with Siri, the more I start to think that such specialization may actually be necessary, because there is so much to consider and know.

In Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2, there comes a point when they have to teach the AI at the center of the book about all the things its human trainers know that aren’t captured in the literary works they’ve been teaching the AI to read. The catalogue of items goes on for dizzying pages, because, as Powers’s narrator remarks, “worldiness was massive.” It will be interesting to see how and in which ways Siri becomes more worldly, and how that changes the experience of using it.

Until then, though, if anyone from the Siri team reads this: next iteration, the appropriate response to “say goodnight, Siri,” is “Goodnight, Siri.” Thank you, and remember to tip your waitress. 

Never trust a computer you can’t lift

Last night, in her reporting on Steve Jobs’s death, Rachel Maddow played a clip from the introduction of the very first Macintosh. If you’ve never seen it before (and I don’t think I had) it’s worth a watch:

At around 3:22, the voice synthesizer on the Mac reads this phrase:

I’d like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: NEVER TRUST A COMPUTER YOU CAN’T LIFT!

The crowd at the demo goes nuts at this, as they should - it’s a well-phrased snark at the then industry standard. But watching it now, with my iPhone, iPad, iPod, and MacBook all close at hand, it’s a promise of the future.

What “never trust a computer you can’t lift” really means is that your computer should fit into your life, not the other way around. The first Mac didn’t just have the infamous handle, it had a carrying case  so you could take it to class with you.  It had a graphical user interface and a mouse, so you didn’t have to spend years in school, or keep a cheat sheet of key commands on your desk, to get it to add 2+2. It made it easy to make things look good, because people appreciate beauty, and it had an engaging personality. One of my friends kept his Mac Classic alive and running well into the 90s; when another friend walked into his apartment and saw it, she ran up to it and gave it a hug. 

Steve Jobs didn’t come up with the idea of making the way people think and act the center of the computing experience. But just like he did with the mouse and the graphical user interface, he took an under-appreciated vision and he built the team that made it a standard. There would almost certainly still be a profession like interaction design if there had never been an Apple. But it would have fewer tools, fewer resources, fewer success stories, and it would almost certainly be a lot smaller. I owe Steve Jobs for frog design, and the six years I spent there, but I also owe him so many of my friends who never worked there at all. 

Particularly as someone who spends a lot of time designing for mobile UIs, I owe Steve Jobs a huge thanks. I love to tell the story of the way the frogNY studio reacted to the original iPhone keynote: there was honest-to-God jumping up and down and screaming. And that wasn’t because we were all giant Apple nerds, although we were - it was because we’d all worked on mobile projects that had gone nowhere. You’d come up with something innovative for a telco, but they couldn’t get the handset manufacturers on board, and vice-versa. None of the ideas behind the iPhone were things I hadn’t seen in concept pieces — what made it extraordinary was that it was finally real. Apple was one of the few companies that could have come in and broken the mobile industry’s logjam, and probably the only one of that handful that would do so thoughtfully and usably. Everything that has happened since to make our telephones into our mobile assistants, smart extensions of our homes and lives, comes in some way from that moment. No wonder people were jumping up and down. 

Last month I sat with my nephew at his first birthday party and showed him how to scroll through the pictures on my iPhone. He sat transfixed, watching pictures of himself and his sisters go back and forth on the screen. It must have seemed to him, like it still seems to me, like magic. Steve Jobs was no magician, but he gave the designers and engineers he hired a vision, a goal, and a standard to meet. All of us who make things for other people to use are in his debt, and we’ll continue to carry his computers — now even easier to lift.

Design Worth Doing

Jon Kolko would tell you himself that he’s a disruptor and an instigator. He likes to come into a conversation with an incendiary position and then fan the flames. When we worked together at frog, I once brought a knitting project to a talk he gave so I wouldn’t be tempted to live-tweet snark about it. I give him a lot of slack because his heart is usually in the right place, but his latest piece for Johnny Holland is way too problematic to let pass. Jon’s selling people on a model of interaction design as calling that’s not only wrong, it is, I think, potentially harmful both to the profession and to the people who we want to have enter it.

Talking about what he wants to inspire the designers who come through the Austin Center For Design (AC4D) to do, Jon writes:

If we recognize the power of design, and also recognize the finite length of our careers, we arrive at an interesting place – a place that demands we focus only on the most pressing, demanding, important, and critical work.

Consider that, in your career, you have about forty or fifty good, productive years to work.

 Should you really be focused on creating a new UI for a thermostat? A new façade for a banking website? A new operating system for a mobile phone? Or are there other things – things that are more financially, culturally, or spiritually more valuable – that you could, and should, be doing?

I’ll let other people talk about the value of mobile OSes, and the disruptive potential of mobile technology for the developing world. And I’ll only note in passing that as of today we have a United States Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, dedicated to promoting “fairness and transparency for mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer financial products and services,” so clearly someone thinks that better interactions with your financial service providers are important to the nation’s well-being.  But because I’m the creative director at a startup developing systems to manage and monitor your home energy consumption, including new web and device interfaces to manage your thermostat, I will take a moment to talk about thermostat UIs - and I promise I’ll tie it in to a larger argument.

The best estimates are that about 10% of all energy use in the United States goes into heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). The average American family’s share of that number is roughly half of their total energy use, at a cost of about a thousand dollars a year. To put that number into perspective, the median American family income in 2010 was about $50,000 before taxes. 

The EPA estimates that the average family could save $180 a year with a properly programmed thermostat, and programmable thermostats are now standard in new home construction. However, the EPA revoked the ENERGY STAR certification from all programmable thermostats in 2009 because they were too hard to use, citing “the potential for user interface issues to reduce energy savings.” Credible research suggests that 90% of current programmable thermostats aren’t being used as they were intended. 

Now let’s say you could build a thermostat UI that passes rigorous usability testing with flying colors, that educates people about energy-efficient choices, and makes it easy for them to program and manage their thermostats. A thermostat that could actually help people save money during a recession, and reduce consumption of the fossil fuels behind climate change. Is that “pressing, demanding, important, and critical work” yet?

I walked you through this not just because I like my job, but because I think the examples Jon chose show a basic flaw in his case for AC4D, which doesn’t even need him to make that particular case for it.

Jon is the Executive Director of Design Strategy at a “venture acceleration firm,” where he helps his clients make “substantial leaps in their equity value.” The work he highlights in his Johnny Holland piece from AC4D, the design program he founded, is all targeted at high-risk populations like the chronically homeless, longterm healthcare patients, and their caregivers. What he misses out on between these two poles is all the stuff in between: the ordinary needs of ordinary people. The family for whom $180 a year, year over year, is worth the investment in a new, easy to use programmable thermostat — and the thousands of tons of fossil fuels that can be saved when that choice gets made over and over again in households across America. 

Design that helps everyday people better understand and act on their environments in their day to day lives is important work, maybe the most important work. I’ve always argued that interaction design can have an ethical component, because it gives people greater control and agency over the technology that’s more and more central to their lives. Sometimes that’s not easy to remember, if you’re making something that helps a telco maximize the amount of data their customers will use, or creating upsell tools for advertising, but it’s part of - I think, the best of - what we can do.

But more than that: don’t listen to me, or to Jon, or to anyone else, who tries to tell you what you should or shouldn’t make as a designer.

No one gets to judge the reasons why you do the work you do. Maybe you need a guaranteed steady income to support your family. Maybe you need to be home every night at a predictable time, or you’re a devotee of the “medium chill.” Maybe you like making mobile phone operating systems, or HR tools, or POS terminals. Don’t let people make you feel like if you haven’t been out making applications to combat malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, your career is a waste. Believe me, there are plenty of people doing that kind of work who feel burnt out and ground down too.

If you’re staying where you are because you’re afraid, or because you don’t want to lose your sweet vacation package, or something like that, then yeah, maybe you need to take a good long hard look at yourself and what you’re doing. But if you can find pleasure in the work, and you’re adding to the store of good design in the world, then ignore all this useless advice and follow your own heart. Fight for user-centered design wherever you are. Make things that people like using, that can help them do the things they want or have to do. Do the work. Let the community judge you on that, not anything else. 

Many thanks to my colleagues Stephan von Muehlen and Sarah “no relation” Bieber for help with statistics.

New to the gallery

My father’s side of the family is full of artists.

In my apartment, I have photos by my father (portraits and otherwise), paintings and illustrations by my cousins, a watercolor by my paternal grandfather, and a vase that a cousin and my aunt made me as a birthday present. I also have drawings by my nieces, one of whom has remarkable drawing skills for a six-year-old, suggesting that the family trait continues. 

(My mother’s side of the family is less visual, but I have an afghan my grandmother knit, which gets used by favored guests. My grandfather did woodworking in his later years - my sister has the elaborate dollhouse he made us, and I have a simple wooden box I can’t bring myself to get rid of.)

Now I have this: 

The EnergyHub Home Base, aka the device I spent most of 2010 working on. 

I’ve had websites I worked on that I could call up from home, of course, but this is the first physical/digital hybrid project that I’ve worked on that is a consumer product - not designed for use in the office or in a commercial environment, but for the home. And now it’s at my home - I’m one of the guinea pigs to whom new releases get pushed out before we spring them on paying customers. 

The difference between using the device at home and testing it in the office is useful, and humbling - I’ve already caught several things I think we can quickly make better in the setup process.  Living with the Home Base, like with every other new smart device I add to my collection, enriches my understanding of what makes something a device you want in your home, and what’s annoying. But I have to also admit that I like having it there because I like having something I can point to, something I’ve added to the family gallery. That it will not last as long as the portrait my cousin did of me aged 18 that still hangs in my living room today is a topic for another time.