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As in armchair quarterback, criticizing from the sidelines. The Armchair Designer is a new occasional post with observations on object design in general but also with an eye to the future. I’m not a trained designer, but I have been in product management for years and most of the objects you see on MoCo Loco are “products” - products that are usually at the beginning of an arc called a product life cycle. I love the aesthetics, which is the reason I created MoCo Loco, but I’m also keenly aware of the product and marketing aspects of design. Today’s post is about opportunity in the form of Chumby. Chumby is a compact device that uses the wireless internet to fetch information from the web: music, the latest news, box scores, animations, etc. It can also exchange photos and messages and it’s always on. Chumby isn’t a product per se, it’s a feature enabler. It’s a blank canvas that you fill with whatever you want. It’s made to be hacked, modded, and what I find especially interesting - integrated into other objects. Object design is evolving at a rapid pace with new materials, rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing. The next frontier is embedded intelligence (see how RFID is evolving here) and interactivity. Chumby is a very open platform for interactivity that in my opinion object designers should look at and start to play with. The best part - it’s free if you can convince them (see FREE SAMPLE on page left). Information and objects are converging; my favorite example is the SMS message mirror, a practical and beautiful message board. I’m looking forward to the smart objects that Chumby will spawn. Are you an "armchair designer" too? Do you have products you'd like to see? leave a comment.
I'm stuck between feeling like all of these interface advances and customizable all-in-one devices are incredible and feeling as if they're just spinning wheels. Chumby is super-appealing on many levels: aesthetic, functional, adaptable... yet it seems like in a matter of a decade, every item I own will be telling me everything I need to know all of the time.
The computer, the television, the Nintendo Wii and PS3 gaming consoles, the PDA, all of these things will give me news, weather, entertainment, and allow me to surf the Internet and communicate with others. All of them run on different platforms (hence no syncing), and have primary functions separate from the add-ons that connect them functionally. I've recently seen ads on the train selling a coffee maker that can tell you the weather.
It's a bit overwhelming, but there's really no way around this- people seem to want everything to do everything.
Maybe things like Chumby will help to solve this problem. If people could either design or choose an interface that can give them exactly what they want as a sort of blank-slate device, maybe that could solve the device redundancy issue.
No matter what, the issue of quality is key. If a company made an affordable phone that had all of the functions of a digital camera and a 20GB hard-drive for playing music and storing files AND WiFi connectivity for web-browsing and GPS, well, we'd be set! But we all know that won't happen- one of those elements will suffer.
I think the idea behind the Chumby is that it will be like a standalone version of apple's 'dashboard' application. Hopefully it will be that simple to use and I can see myself wanting one if they can get it to less than $200. I can't see myself making a macramé enclosure for it; I'm not sure where they are coming from with the crafting angle.
Objects like were speculated for a long time.
Sun Microsystem's initial reason to make Java was to get into programming for embedded devices but soon caught onto the internet when they realized the true potential at the time. Now, with Java ME (renamed from J2ME), they're back to their initial purpose of Java. I wouldn't be surprised if that coffee cup telling the weather was built on Java !
eXcellent blog btw.