Whenever designer and artist Brendan Dawes develops technologies, function is just the beginning. As with his app Kennedy, which captures moments you want to remember in poetic and playful ways, Dawes' work explores how technology can augment our offline lives while also making our online lives more human. In trekking through those questions, Dawes arrives at surprising places. In an age of social saturation, for instance, Kennedy is private and introspective.
But what about email? Especially for younger users, it seems Gmail and Yahoo Mail are as much chore as tool. Is it even possible to say anything interesting about what was once so liberating and can now be so burdensome? Dawes answers that question in his latest project called Six Monkeys, created for MailChimp, six physical household items that are connected directly to email. Each invention, created through Electric Imp, is named after "a famous Chimpanzee used in linguistic research." More of a thought experiment at the moment, they are not available for sale yet, but as Dawes puts it, "never say never!"
Almost an intergenerational project--good old email meets young and handsome Internet of Things--its real service is asking important questions. A light switch, for example, was once a technological paradigm shift but one that easily integrated into our homes. Why has email never done that? Why have Internet technologies, in general, remained so encased in our towers, laptops and now in our pockets? Consider a product Dawes named "Nim." [Video here.]
Dawes writes:
"Why can't we turn email off and on as easy as other appliances in our house? Nim places such a switch for your email next to a regular light switch so when you feel like switching off for the weekend, just flick the switch and email will be prevented from coming through the network across all your devices."
In this, ahem, email interview with Dawes, we talk about why email will be with us for the long haul, how products such as Six Monkeys can provide physical affordances once again and what the Internet of Things might really mean for our lives.
Looking these over, I started to think of them as art as much as I did solutions. How do you envision the purpose(s) of these machines?
Well email seems to have such a bad reputation; all we hear about is how our inboxes are full, we get bombarded with spam and there seems to be new strategies for dealing with this stuff of nightmares everyday. Whilst I of course get my fair share of spam et al, I’ve always seen email as this amazing thing - a system that is now getting on a bit, that still works, across whatever device, new or old, and can deliver wonderful things as well as bad things. So I wanted people to take another look at email and maybe even make them love it again. To do that I thought about what would happen if email was actually physical, part of the spaces we live and work in, rather than sat behind a screen. I wanted to create a series of connected objects that would start a conversation about how we can use this most ubiquitous of technologies in new and interesting ways.
I find myself pining for physical objects in ways I didn't five years ago. (I've been buying note pads lately, for instance. And it's sort of enjoyable to buy stamps.) I wonder if some of your machines, Sarah in particular, reflect burnout with screens.
Right now we seem to be surrounded by more and more glowing rectangles, all of them with the same texture - cold hard glass. I still carry a Smythson Panama notebook with me everywhere I go. Yeah sure I can tap notes into my phone which are then synced across all my digital things but I get so much more from jotting things down in that beautifully crafted little book, replete with all its scratches, mistakes and scars. Were are these scars on digital interfaces? Were are these marks that are evidence of use. Have you ever said to yourself why can't I scribble on the back of an app? I like to ask myself these questions all the time when it comes to interaction design.
I'm probably skipping the most obvious first question -- will email continue to be part of our lives 10 years from now and how will we use it then?
Yes I think it will as it’s so ingrained in our world now. Yes there probably is something better. Like the QWERTY keyboard we all know there are better ways to type but it would take a radical paradigm shift to ever change the way people type. With Six Monkeys I’ve hopefully tried to show that email is a fabulously flexible system, agnostic to whatever technologies may come and go, ready for people to twist it into new forms and functions.
I’m not advocating becoming a luddite though – I love the digital devices I use on a daily basis but there are subtleties amongst analog objects, like the tactile nature of them together with these little scratches that I think really matters. My fear is that we’re heading to a future where everything we interact with and every object we touch is trapped behind glass. I think there’s a space in-between were we can inject these often illogical, seemingly trivial traits of these analog objects into our digital things.
Your machines are quiet and subtle, but they are also visible and personal. That is just like your app, which is subtle but very present, which makes me wonder how you perceive the human-machine relationship as it is and how it will evolve.
I’m an old romantic at heart so the things I design can’t help be born out of that ethos. I think not every IoT object should be a thing to make us more efficient or more productive - that’s actually a horrible vision of the future to me. I think we should be more human rather than be more like machines and so I like to celebrate the quirks and idiosyncrasies of what being human is in the things I make, even though they are digital things. A piece of paper that pops up silently when you get an email might seem a little bit weird, but you watch that object do its thing and you can’t help but smile in the polite way it goes about it. It feels very non-digital and more like an analog thing. I think when we communicate from machine to human-being there needs to be this digital to analog conversion process taking place. Of course the bigger question is will the human race evolve to have more machine like traits because of all this technology? Google Glass to me seems to be making us more like Cyborgs rather than making us more human. Some people I’m sure would relish that idea.
The Internet of Things so often is conceptualized as devices that take information from us, and perhaps return it as lifestyle enhancements. These machines tend to be about communicating to us as the first order and I wonder what you ultimately see being the case in our lives.
I think right now it’s a very early time for The Internet of Things and quite rightly there’s a lot of “button pressing” going on to see what does and doesn’t work. I always ask myself “does this deserve to exist in the world?” What I’m fascinated by is how does an object change its form so to speak when you add a “network” to it. It’s hard to remember a time when the computers we used we’re not part of a network, maybe in years to come we’ll find it hard to remember what it was like when objects weren’t connected. That said I don’t believe that everything needs or should be connected; a paper clip works perfectly well without it being connected to anything. Plus it never needs charging! When you add the ability of connectivity to an object we have to ask why and ultimately what value we are now getting from it that we didn’t before. There’s of course the idea of creating completely new kinds of objects because of this connectivity, that didn’t previously exist. I think the Six Monkeys work mostly fits in that category. They do however augment as it where already exiting “grammars” that are familiar to us. The action of a card popping up to notify us of something emulates the little flag you get on a postbox; the action of unlocking a box with a key to gain access to secret things is something that has been passed down through generations. When you introduce new objects into the world it helps to leverage some of of these familiarities so we can can understand them easier.
Speaking of familiarities, do you see machines like those you made being customized into very personal needs. It seems that is possible with Oliver, for example.
Absolutely. I like to think the objects I make are a starting point, not an finished end point. They’re essentially “frameworks” in which to play within, allowing people to twist or mutate that object into something that I never imagined. Software and hardware working together allows that to happen in a way that wasn’t possible before. With Lucy for example, I gave it to my brother-in-law Philip to beta test for six months. Because it was a framework rather than a fixed thing he used the lighting system to flash red when the wind got over a certain speed so he could make a decision as to go Stand Up Paddle Boarding or not. All done because he hooked it up to ifttt.com which sent an email directly to Lucy. He’s not a programmer but he could still do that because he uses ifttt.com and one of things it can do can get the weather report and send emails. The point is I never thought about that scenario when I was originally making it, yet here he was taking this thing I made and making it his very own.
