A transcript of Episode 269 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Amber Case to discuss how we are all cyborgs now and the notion of “calm technology”.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Tristen Schaaf.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 269.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
You’re listening to UX podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden,
Per Axbom
helping the UX community explore ideas and share knowledge since 2011.
James Royal-Lawson
We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson,
Per Axbom
And Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
We have listeners in 199 countries and territories all around the world from Egypt to Croatia.
From time to time, we bring you a repeat show. This is an episode from our extensive back catalogue resurfacing some of the ideas and thoughts from the past that we believe are still relevant and well worth revisiting.
Per Axbom
And today, we are bringing you our conversation with Amber’s case from the UX LX conference in 2016. Amber is a cyborg anthropologist and UX designer, we chat about the ideas expressed in ambras. Popular TED Talk, we are all cyborgs. Now, before turning our attention to the notion of calm technology.
[Music]
Started off by telling us a bit about Cyborg anthropology, I mean, is that even something you can study? Or did you make it up or where it was coming from?
Amber Case
Sure. Cyborg anthropology is the study of human and computer interactions, more like how technology affects culture, and how culture affects technology. So if you look back in time, you have tools as an extension of the fist or extension of your arm or a knife as an extension of your teeth. And those are real physical extensions of the self. And then we get started to get into cave painting and writing. And those became more mental extensions of the self. And the thing that I study is the kind of transitory stage that we’re in where the extension of our physical self is pretty stable, right, you have, you know, a knife that pretty much stays the same size and shape, depending on the use, you have.
A hammer is an extension of a fist, it’s really the same shape the same tool for millions of years. But when you look at a phone, or you look at a computer, it’s it’s inherently unstable, like the large computers in the past that were the size of a gymnasium, and now we have the same computing power in our hand. And now we can go mobile anywhere with it. So it’s really about how these things change, and how they’ve changed so quickly, that they’ve become absorbed into our culture. And we can’t notice them as much, because a traditional anthropologist goes out into another country and says, How interesting all these different people are, you know, look at their tools, look at their kinship relations, look at how their culture works, how strange they are, we usually go to another country or, you know, to a to a “first world country” and say, oh, wow, we’re so different from them. And these are the people we study.
And with Cyborg anthropology, I really just wanted to say. No, you know, we’re just as strange as anybody else. Why don’t we turn the anthropological lens on ourselves and technology, and start to understand how the technology is affecting us. And this is a subsection of the anthropology of science that came out in 1993. And the whole idea was that we should treat the objects in our lives, like a traditional anthropologists would, but we should treat these kind of techno social devices that we have, as interactions with our culture in the same way. So we kind of have this actor network theory from anthropologist Bruno Latour, which talks about, you know, it’s human computer interaction. But those computers are actually actors in our life, in some ways, just as much as humans. And at this point, we wake up and we look at our phones sometimes before we do our partners, right? And so what does that mean? When we’ve evolved to have our stomachs be full when we eat too much food, but our brains don’t get too full when we use a computer, we don’t have those cutoff points. And what does it mean to be addicted to technology?
You know, technology itself is neutral unless acted upon by humans, where the technology come from the there’s all sorts of interesting things to think about. And what I usually tell people is that we’re all cyborgs, because we all have some sort of thing that we attach to ourselves in order to either adapt to a new environment, or to get a new sense. In this case, you connect to the internet, and you have a sense of all over the world, and you can meet people on the inside instead of just the outside. And that’s really interesting. But I think there’s this big idea that, you know, cyborgs are, you know, Robocop or Terminator, when in reality, the word Cyborg came from a 1960 paper on space travel in which humans would attach exogamous components to themselves to adapt to new environments.
Basically, humans aren’t supposed to go anywhere we’re these ways weird fleshy creatures. And we attach exoskeletons to ourselves to one day go under sea diving, where we can breathe underwater. And the next day, maybe we go to space, or the next day, we go to the Alps. And, you know, unlike other creatures, you know, many creatures attached things to themselves, the rate at which we attach external appendages is ridiculous, we have so many created objects and, and so the idea is that technology evolves us and we evolve technology. And we’ve been symbiotic, since we first use things outside of ourselves. And so a lot of us are kind of low tech cyborgs, and that we have things attached to ourselves sometimes, and sometimes we don’t.
But in reality, when people say, Oh, I’m not good at technology, though, I say, Well, you know, the new technology that you’re not good at, it’s really not good at you, you know, we haven’t made things that are great for humans yet, in terms of the newest technology, but if you look at old technology, you know, you see these, these hand axes that are perfectly shaped to somebody’s hand, you know, you see lawn mowers, and you see dishwashers. And someone says, Well, I’m really not into technology. And I go through and I list every single thing they’ve used during the day, and I say, yes, you are, these are just accustomed to, they’re like the air you breathe, you no longer use them. And so when technology absorbs into our society, in a way that we don’t notice it like electricity, in a way that we only notice it when it doesn’t exist anymore, when it when it fails. You know, that’s that’s kind of this mature state of that technology becomes invisible. And that’s why I was really interested in writing this book on calm technology, to kind of calm our modern technology that people are annoyed with the beeps and buzzes at us all the time into something that’s as similarly reliable electricity. and reliable as some of the things that that we use every day that we don’t notice anymore. Yeah,
James Royal-Lawson
I was thinking. So, as a cyborgs now. And if the screen, you could say that was maybe the like a first iteration of a cybernetic interface for us, then
Amber Case
it’s actually a much later stage cybernetic interface. If you think about cyborgs or just something, you attach things to adapt to new environments, then, you know, fire is kind of a cyborg and attachment. And, you know, well really like a hammer and a knife are the cyborg attachments, because you attach them to yourself for a bit of time in order to get a task done. And then you switch it out for another thing. And unlike a Sabre toothed tiger, who has the knife in their mouth, that they’ve evolved with, you know, we can just fit a new one onto our hand, until it breaks, and so we have this kind of external evolution that we can do outside of ourselves, I think the screens are nicely evolved version of a cave wall, or a scroll, because we’re still scrolling, like we did with the original scrolls. But we just have a faster rate that we can see data. You know, there were old networks of letters in the 16, and 1700s, for all the scientists that would write and I just kind of call that and here’s an early internet, right? The transfer rates, like two bytes a week, right, it’s really slow. But the information is transferred.
So what we’ve seen is, yeah, we develop these communication tools and written language, and you know, all these cave wall paintings and these letters in the scrolls, but the rate in which we could exchange them was very slow. You know, you can kind of think of like early communication, like smoke signals. That’s, that’s a pretty fast, low resolution internet, right, and you can see a smoke signal that gives you a message. And now you know what to do based on that message. It’s this kind of early, early, early Morse code. And so now we have a higher resolution of communication that’s much faster, that spans the entire world.
And so we can kind of have these micro singularity moments where, say, Michael Jackson dies, everybody knows that around the same time, everybody listens to the music, or we have an earthquake, that whose communication happens faster than the earthquake takes to get to other sections of the city that it’s affecting, we get this kind of, we get this this very fast communication that’s much, much higher resolution, we have images and photos, we can see what somebody else has seen on the other side of the world. But in reality, it’s all an extension of how we’ve existed as early humans and calling attention to it and saying, Hey, this is a thing and let’s study it as cyborgs is kind of a transitory phase in in terms of anthropology, you know, eventually that will just become all anthropology as well. But because we’ve absorbed these technologies into our daily life so much that we don’t notice them anymore. And we wake up with our phones, we use our computers every day. And we don’t really think necessarily about how it’s affecting us because we’re in the flow, I think it’s important to kind of separate that and say, hey, let’s look at this. And instead of doing traditional anthropology, we turn the lens on ourselves and, and do anthropology on our own everyday lives.
Per Axbom
You’ve described it as, because, you know, you’re talking about exoskeletons and extending ourselves with tools. But you’ve called this phenomenon of cyborgs also, that we’re extending our mental self and not just the physical self. Is that something that is different now in the information age? Or is that also something that’s been going on?
Amber Case
That’s also something that’s been going on the minute we took our communication, and then we put it onto a cave wall, or we took a stick and, and drew it in the sand or we say something to somebody else? Yeah. Early communication, right? And I think so.
James Royal-Lawson
And I was just thinking about what you said about the network of scientists showing letters. And also, you’ve got shared knowledge, then that by sending a letter, someone else then you’ve made a backup of your knowledge. So you’ve increased redundancy. So back then the redundancy was kind of really slowly two bytes, or was it, a week or something, then it would take a long time to make your backup, right. So if you’ve got kind of killed in the meantime, your knowledge would vanish. So now we’ve increased the bandwidth. But also, we’ve increased our redundancy, shared experiences, shared knowledge,
Amber Case
So you have the knowledge that was formerly available to the upper class starting to spread to everybody that you can get it at any moment in time. And by the time we saw the Canterbury Tales, which was one of the early books, just this guy, who wrote it said, Hey, I have this inn. And if you give me a story, you can stay for free at the inn. You know, have a place to stay. And so he gets all these amazing, you know, you have all these amazing stories that come from for random people, you know, Chaucer was this this brilliant person, you know, kind of talking about this advertising format to get these stories, but you get them from, you know, the the general public, which at that time was very rare, because before that, it was always nobles, who were communicating with each other, and people who had an education, their ways of communicating, you know, early on other than that was either you have a Latin mass, but no one can understand it.
So you have these giant stained glass windows that tell the story. So now that every, you know, many people can read or write, many people have access to information, we become these kind of our brains become these information, network cells, that can easily get information from other generations into them, I always think of the best way of backing yourself up is to write a best selling book. Because as long as that’s the best selling classic book that can span generations, there’s your brain, you know, there, there’s part of your consciousness that can come a zip file and get downloaded into people’s brains if they read the book.
Per Axbom
So speaking of books, call them technology. And that’s the book you wrote. And it’s also the subject of the workshop you’ll be giving at UX LX. So what is the concept of calm technology,
Amber Case
the concept of calm technology was developed by John Seely Brown and Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC in the 80s and 90s. And Xerox PARC was this curious research lab, it was a division of that big copy print company that everybody uses or everybody used to use. And they had this r&d lab that didn’t necessarily have to make money. But a lot of things were developed there. People who worked there created Interpress and then they created Adobe Systems out of that. You had people who invented lots of different languages out of there, like you had Alan Kay, who was part of it, who did small talk, you had the graphic user interface come out of there that was improved upon by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. You had so many amazing things come out of this place. And it was this space where you didn’t have to think the same as everybody else.
They had anthropologists and technologists and their ideas were flowing so quickly, that as an engineer, you go up to the whiteboard, and you try to write something, and then somebody else would interrupt you immediately and say, Oh, I also have an idea. extend that. And so the idea was, Oh, no, we need to slow down the rate of information here. So they put beanbag chairs and a lot of these spaces, so that if you had an idea and somebody tried to interrupt you, it would take them a long time to get out of the beanbag chair. And by the time they got out, you actually have the information done on the board, and then they could add their piece.
So there were all these ideas about information just the way that they thought about friction and flow and time and communication was very clever and very unique. So what I was doing my thesis on cell phones And their techno social sites of engagement. When I was in college, I found them. And I actually found them around 2006 I found this paper called The world is not a desktop, by Mark Weiser, and Mark Weiser passed away from cancer. And I was really upset at the time, because here’s somebody who said, one day, we’re going to have all of these little tiny things he called the future world of pads, tabs and boards before any of this stuff existed. And he said, once we have these things, in our world, the scarcest resource in the 21st century is not going to be technology, it’s going to be attention. How do we manage that? How do we make sure that we’re not run over by all this technology and get to live our lives as humans and really amplify the human experience with our technology. He said that we need smarter people, not machines, and that the idea of intelligent technology is a misnomer.
Technology should inform us so that we can make our best decisions, but it shouldn’t do all the decision making for us. And he’s also known as the father of ubiquitous computing, which some of us now know is the Internet of Things, if they’re not an exact one to one correlation. But it’s close enough that you could say that, hey, this person predicted and also with with a lot of other scientists and anthropologists in this lab, they created a future of mobile devices, they had the PARC tab, they had this thing that you were around your neck, that would sense that you got into Xerox PARC and when turn on your computer in the background, which could take up to 15 minutes in the past. So while you walked in and got your coffee, by the time you got to your computer, everything was on, you had shared desktop environments, you had live streaming Mark Weisers’ band ‘Severe Tire Damage’ was the first band to ever live stream on the internet. They got a really popular band, whose name I always forget, they got this popular band signed up to be the first band to live stream on the internet. And then they said yes. And then why is I said what can we open for you guys, and then that.
So Mark Weiser was, was a really cool character. And so it was John Seely Brown. And what they did is they came up with all these different papers, the idea of the world is not a desktop is that we can’t interact with our environment like you would a desktop computer, a desktop computer can demand all of your attention, you can have lots of information on the screen, you’re sitting there. Ideally, nothing else is distracting you. You can write an essay, you can surf the internet. But if you’re on your mobile phone, chances are you’re waiting for a bus, you’re in line for a checkout counter in a supermarket, you have to get the thing done very quickly, you’re trying to get a direction and your car and you’re trying to use it when you’re on the road, which is horrible. And what happens is a lot of this technology is designed to take all of our attention, when in reality it only needs take the least amount of attension possible to get the information through.
So Mark Weiser talks about the the idea of attention in your direct focus in front of you, which is super high resolution, like on a desktop environment. And then as you go further and further away from that initial focus, you have less resolution that you can pay attention to. And if you load all that complex information into your peripheral attension, you can get a lot more done without taking somebody out of that environment without taking them out of their initial focus. And this becomes really interesting because you can think of some of the calm technologies, like a tea kettle, like a tea kettle is really a bland piece of technology, but it’s very innovative and that you set it, you forget it, you go somewhere else in your home, and it calls to you when it’s done. It doesn’t draw attention to itself until it needs it. And you can be in a different environment do something completely different. And it will tell you when it’s done. There are not that many calm technologies out there. Because a lot of computer technologies, you know, you sit there and you watch it and you wait, or it gives you a buzz when it’s done. But then when you open up your phone, you get all these other notifications too.
Mark Weieser and John Seely Brown created these these ideas, these kind of principles that technology should take the least amount of attention. And should it should be in your life only when necessary and not without so it should be invisible until you need it. Or it should be invisible till you need it. And then you know disappear after its its use is filled and go back and then you know you can have these low resolution beeps and alerts and lights that tell you what’s going on that you can just glance at. So if you’re having a whole conversation with somebody and you notice something out of your peripheral attention, and it’s a soft tone, not a large beep or you know, here’s a light, you know that something’s happened and you can go back to the conversation, you haven’t stopped your conversation and picked up your phone, unlocked it and then looked at the message, respond to the message and gone back. But if one of those tones is more urgent, then you can stop what you’re doing and attend to it.
So there’s this different way of communicating with reality where there’s this kind of low level language signalling to you. And you learn this kind of small language, which we’re already kind of learning, you know, when when the clothing is done, it goes ‘Errr’, you know, a lot of the clothing, a lot of the washing machines in the states are made for giant houses. So you want an incredibly loud signal to tell you that the laundry is done, so you can hear it in other parts of the house. And it assumes that you aren’t living in a place next to people. So now that a lot of Americans are living in condos and apartments, you need a very quiet washing machine. Now it needs to be in some cases, it needs to be slow and energy efficient. And it should have a nice fun tone, you know, when you open it, if you go to ‘tatada’, you know, Hurray! You’re doing laundry, because they don’t want their devices to be depressive. On the devices to be exciting. You know, and then I have a washing machine that sings when it’s done. It goes down to ta da da da da da. It’s from South Korea. So I got really excited. What country do I want to buy my machine from? How what personality do I want with my machine? So I tried them all out. And I looked at the reviews online and instead of the ‘errr’, you know, I got ‘ta da da da da’ and here’s all the options. And really what
Per Axbom
they should list that and specifications. So the washing machine
James Royal-Lawson
It’s like the energy rating, they should be happiness, cheerfulness, of your machine.
Amber Case
your machine a Roomba vacuum cleaner does the same thing, right? If it gets stuck, it goes ‘ta dum’, and it kind of asks for your help. It doesn’t just eat everything in sight, you know, like a regular vacuum cleaner. And then if it’s clean, and it finds the way back to its dock and goes ‘ti di di dee’ you know ‘I did the thing’, which really helps you know, you kind of have this, this character that’s uplifting. And because it’s not doing your task for you, you can help the robot I think what people find endearing about the Roomba robot is that it asks for your help. And sometimes you need to clean it, but it shows you with either a phone or a light at the same time and it changes colour. So you can kind of tell what you need to do. Without it saying something with a regular human voice like Excuse me, I need cleaning right now. You know, absolutely obnoxious.
Per Axbom
Yeah. I understood you’re not so impressed by Digital’s beach, are you. But also you’ve touched upon something now is that well, all of these devices now if they’re all signalling something to me, how am I supposed to make sure that they don’t talk on top of each other?
James Royal-Lawson
I’m just thinking the same thing that kind of
Per Axbom
all these devices talking to me all the time to stop
James Royal-Lawson
stop you from drowning. Because think about it works on individual basis, like when you got ‘a’ kettle or ‘a’ vacuum cleaner. But when you’re in this home, where you know, everything is singing to you, or-
Per Axbom
and the Roomba is more cocky than the kettle and wants to say more than the kettle does.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So how, how do all these things have? How do you cope with the challenge of context for these things that they all? They all understand when there’s just too much going on? Then you need to be calmer. They all need to calm down?
Amber Case
Well, that’s a great question. I mean, one of the principles of calm technology is that technology can communicate but doesn’t need to speak. So whenever necessary. Don’t make it speak in a human language, make it speak in status indicators like lights or buzzes. I always think of birds, right? You have all these different birds. And no matter what, over a really noisy environment, they have different frequencies like a radio would have frequencies. One Finch bird has, I’m listening to the birds outside my window right now, there’s some finches out there. And sometimes there’s hummingbirds and sometimes there’s black birds. And sometimes there’s, there’s all these different types of creatures out there, and they have their frequencies. And if you record some bird noises and play it back to the birds, you know, they will get they’ll feel like what are you doing?
You know, it’s like playing back a human voice to humans. And I think it’s really important to notice when you’re outside all the different signals and sounds that are going on these birds still can communicate with each other no matter what. And they can communicate across long distances you have the same with with whales and dolphins, you have echolocation you have that you have all these different methods of communication that aren’t necessarily You know, there’s they’re not on the same frequency.
And I think it’s the same thing you know, there should be kind of frequencies and unique tones for each device, that are sonically tuned so that they can be heard above other information source ones that aren’t the same. And I think of a lot of device manufacturers, for a lot of device manufacturers sound is often an afterthought or something that’s tacked on at the end, you either get the default circuit board sound, which is jarring and horrible. Or you get some really tacky human voice design sounds that, especially if you do it in American English, you’re going to have to translate it to like all these different languages to make it work around the world, which I find really stupid, you know, you don’t need to do all those things. So setting some unique tone to your device, having a sound engineer, sound designer come in and do this thing is incredibly important. And, you know, I’m thinking of writing an entire new book about just the sound design, because it’s the thing that it’s really going to help you know, if it’s if it’s personal device, like an insulin pump, you don’t want to sound on it, you want a buzz because it’s close to you.
I had an employee who got an insulin pump. And I was sitting across from him one day, and I heard a beep. And I said, your insulin pump is beeping? And he said, Yes, it’s incredibly embarrassing, because it’s this. I mean, it was a small tone. But in a quiet room, you can hear it. And of course, he can hear it, but he’s not going to be able to hear it in a loud club. And if he’s in a movie theatre, it’s going to beep and embarras him, right, like, no one wants to be beeping, you know, he isn’t able to turn that off. So instead of having an insulin pump that that buzzes to let you know, you’re always going to be able to feel that, because it’s a personal tone. So it’s all about adjusting the tone and the notification to the context. A bzz is going to work, you know, a tone might not work in all situations, a tone might work in your house, you know, but what happens if you’re playing really loud music? Well, then the lights going to work right like that. Like, if you look at some of this modern technology, the the heat light on a stove, is really straightforward. It says the surface is hot. Now you don’t have a gas burning stove. And you you know, you have a coil stove, you need to know whether the surface is hot, even though you know the nichrome wire that whatever that wire is, is no longer lit up. It’s still hot. And so that little light, you can be blasting any sort of metal music you want, but you can still understand it.
So it’s really contextual. I think one of the best examples is the smoke detectors. Smoke detectors should have different sensors based on what room they’re in. If you have one for your bedroom, it should be incredibly sensitive, because you want to be able to wake up in the middle of the night, you know, but in a kitchen, it should be turned down quite a bit. Because chances are you’re going to make something accidentally that that smokes things up. And what people are more embarrassed about when they’re cooking is not if they fail, but if the fire alarm goes off, because everybody can hear it, especially in an apartment building. And one of the things that that was done for for fire detectors is people, they found that people were just taking the batteries out and leaving them out because it was so hard to actually reach the fire detector and turn off the button. So they made a new type of fire detector that just had this giant buttons that you could hit with a broomstick.
James Royal-Lawson
“Shut up, shut up!”
Amber Case
Save yourself the embarrassment.
Per Axbom
I’m assuming these are all examples of things that people will learn in your workshop.
Amber Case
Absolutely. I’ll take people through the the principles, I’ll take people through the status indicators, a bunch of examples, and then I have exercises in the back that I’m going to take people through which you know, one of the exercises will be you have designed the most complicated, infuriating piece of technology you can
Per Axbom
Oh, I like that. Okay. Yeah.
Amber Case
At a workshop in Costa Rica, we had like just horrifying technology like smart underwear that connects to Twitter and tweets out every time you and then send you notifications about gastro intestinal issues. Yeah. Okay. So there was that there was also a smart fridge that put you on a diet plan. And once you had increased the amount of food, or once, once you had used the amount of food that you could for that week, then the fridge would kind of lock down.
So you got these these big issues. Where if you wanted to add another person to your fridge plan, you’d have to call somebody up within two weeks that might show up? No, of course, it’s impossible because if you have like diabetes, or you have an emergency, you need to get into the fridge. So the next exercise after that, as I said, you have to stick with your horribly complicated device and now you have to calm the device down. Yeah.
And so it was it was a design example of, hey, most people in this room are not going to have the privilege of designing something from scratch and even if you do, you need to understand how it exists in the environment and be annoyed with something first and be sensitive to that. And then once you’re designing something in a calm way, you’re usually designing, redesigning something that exists and just doing the minimum amount of design work to, to get something useful again, because all the usefulness is there.
And so people would just like hem and haw and get upset. They’d be like, Oh, no, we have to deal with this. And I was like, yeah, this is just like, what it’s going to be like in the world of, you know, Samsung design smart fridge, and it fails horribly. And then you come in, and you’re trying to help out with design, you know, what are you going to do? What can you turn in the status indicators for the smart underwear, you take that into the little coal industry and put that in, in hospitals, you know, and alert people, you know? And how would you alert people you know, you don’t want to send the nurse a text on her phone, you want to just have a light that turns on, you know, that only some people can understand so that if their friends and family come in, they’re not freaking out about whatever it is. And it’s not embarrassing. There’s plenty of ways to do these things. So that’s, that’s the fun part, you get all the creativity of the people in the workshop, designing horrible things, and then having to deal with the horrible thing that they designed.
Per Axbom
I love that.
James Royal-Lawson
I think this flash of an image of a hospital where the machine is kind of shouting out death, imminent, death, imminent, and like people start running in, they’d be awful and terrible, now, much more calmer and subtler solutions.
Per Axbom
We have like 20 – 30 more questions lined up for you, but we won’t have time for them. So we’ll definitely bring you on the show again, and we will meet you in Portugal as well. We want to finish off with something I’ve just dubbed. I haven’t told you.
James Royal-Lawson
I’ve just seen this in the notes. Now.
Per Axbom
I’ve dubbed it the hepta scale challenge
Okay, I’m not gonna explain this. It’s not something to worry about. We will post for questions, two questions each, and you will grade them on a scale of one to seven, in accordance with how much you agree or concur with that statement.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, sevens are lots of ones not very much. Yeah.
Per Axbom
So understanding the questions will not be hard. But you may not comment or explain your answer until all the four questions have been asked. And after that, you may if you want pick one of the questions to further explain your answer.
James Royal-Lawson
There we go. You go first.
Per Axbom
I can go first. Yeah. On a scale of one to seven. How good are you at backing up your online data?
Amber Case
Seven.
James Royal-Lawson
Okay. So on a scale of one to seven, how good he was nobody?
Amber Case
Four
Per Axbom
On a scale of one to seven, how happy are you with your second self, also known as your digital self?
Amber Case
Six.
James Royal-Lawson
And my second one, on a scale of one to seven? how calm are the notifications that you receive?
Amber Case
Four
Per Axbom
excellent.
James Royal-Lawson
Any one of those four you’d like to quickly elaborate on?
Amber Case
Sure. I’m the one where I answered seven, which is how good are you at backing up your data?
Per Axbom
Yeah. Good. That’s the one I want to know more about. Yeah,
James Royal-Lawson
That was a very confident answer.
Amber Case
And I was always obsessed with backing things up. Starting when I was little. So I I’ve had journals and notebooks since the age of four. I started doing analogue recording on tape recorder at age six, as a way of making a time machine for my future self to go back in time and experience what it was like to be a kid again. I did that from age six to 12. Now I’ve got a recorder, a video recorder. So then I recorded video. And I still recorded audio. And I had journals every day. And I always stored them in the lowest resolution formats like text files that aren’t going to corrupt across spaces. Then I had floppy disk drives and all sorts of things that I kept backing things up. I’ve sent them online, I have an old Hotmail account with backups of everything too. And I just thought I was being really messy. But it turns out that I have never lost a hard drive. Except once and I backed everything up. And I had printed versions of all the stories that I was reading, and I just found all the files stored somewhere else. Even the one spindle of CDs that I lost. Somebody found it and they said Hi, I have a bunch of CDs. Can I send them to you, in Boston. But how did they get to Boston?
James Royal-Lawson
There is a whole invisible story there. Fantastic.
Amber Case
So I’ve got multiple backups of everything online. And I have all backups and video backups. And the idea is to take so many backups that if you know two or three of them fail, I’ve still got some redundancy. I was raised by engineers. So my dad always told me about redundancy and how you how do you back things up, and I never stored things in raid arrays. They’re always on regular hard drives, and I have all I call them trilobite. So I have all these like little external hard drives floating around. And, you know, they just kind of exist. And I forget what I backup so much that when I look at it, it turns out I backedup everything multiple times, because I don’t remember what I backed up. So I’m the messiest person ever digitally. But that ends up being really, really useful because I don’t backup things once I back them up, like 20 times and all these different places.
Per Axbom
That’s amazing. I think a lot of listeners are panicking now, because that’s the most confident answer I’ve ever heard
James Royal-Lawson
Without question. Yeah, I didn’t expect a seven there. It must be said. Thank you very, very much for joining us.
Per Axbom
Yeah. Excellent.
James Royal-Lawson
Really good fun.
Amber Case
Yeah, this was fun. I like the questions at the end.
James Royal-Lawson
And we’ll see you Well, in a few months.
Amber Case
Yeah. See you soon. All right. All right.
Per Axbom
Great.
James Royal-Lawson
Thanks a lot. Bye, bye,
Per Axbom
Bye.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, And now I’m thinking, it’s just gonna get so messy. What is already messy. But it’s gonna get even more messy, isn’t it? With the Internet of Things, and all these devices? I was thinking, reflecting now about how we deal with the population density of Internet of Things.
Per Axbom
Exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
What can we do to make it all smarter than that? You know one of the future challenges will be how do all these connected devices? Can they be aware of how dense the population is in their environment? It was the bird example.
Per Axbom
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking as well. Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
When I was talking about the birds, one of the things that birds do when they’re singing, they’re actually announcing to other birds that they’re there. And birds spread themselves out, they have breeding the other like a zone of theirs. And they don’t stay, they don’t live off forage too close together. Because it’s not enough food. There’s not enough, there’s too many, they won’t have less competition for the food and wonderful visual partners. So they automatically spread themselves out. We can’t really do that. And same way with our Internet of Things and all our device and everything. We’ve got them all crammed into our homes. So what do we do when that when the kettles making noises, the dishwasher, the phone, the the TV, my wristwatch, the Ms. What…? My insulin pump and everything, singing to me and beeping at me?
Per Axbom
Well, you choose the sound you want for each device,
James Royal-Lawson
But that would me like half a year.
Per Axbom
I know.
James Royal-Lawson
I mean I’m a bit of a freak in that, as you know, my telephone has different notification sounds for different services. So I can tell what’s making a noise at me. So I can judge the importance.
Per Axbom
And I also set up mine. I’ve spent hours setting up my Apple Watch to make it work the way I want it to. And for others, it doesn’t, because the default settings suck, really. So the default settings is what’s going to make or break the future device. I think
James Royal-Lawson
So attention. I mean, it still comes down to time. How much time can you ensure… Would you need to invest? To make your technology calm? And and, and bearable
Per Axbom
and pay attention to other technology?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, and give you the return on investment needed it should? Because there’s a lot of great stuff we can do we have all this data out there and connectivity. But at times I feel like I’m drowning. Already. Yeah.
So a few years have passed since that episode, though. That was from when was that? 2016? Yeah, may 2016. And I know that when it comes to calming our technology, both me and you have calmed our technology much more in subsequent years.
Per Axbom
Yeah, I have since deleted my facebook account completely, which, for me has been fantastic at least. And I’ve also use the setting on my iOS devices that actually reminds me to turn off start turning off my devices and actually locks me out from using, well, most of the apps automatically, and I have to actually use some effort to this friction for getting back in. Which helps me a lot in the evenings, I have to say, you know,
James Royal-Lawson
I say I don’t have Facebook, on any mobile, any device anymore. I don’t use Facebook much at all now. And then I’ve removed notifications from almost everything. There’s a couple of apps that still have notifications, but by and large, I need to take an active decision to go in to check things now on my mobile phone. Which means I’ve got full control over when I get told about something when I find out something’s happened. Okay, I’m still gonna manage the kind of addiction side of things that maybe I checked something far too often still, but
Per Axbom
especially when I’ve published something I know I go back and see : have there been any reactions and stuff like that? I need to get better at that still. I know Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
So for me by and large, the biggest problem is still the non so not my phone or tablet, my wristwatch whatever. My biggest problem now is still the other stuff, you know the microwaves or the [notification sound in the background] Yeah, my phone actually just made a noise. And that’s what
Per Axbom
I heard that Yeah
James Royal-Lawson
So I think that’s still on is actually the smart locks on the house. So when someone unlocks our front door, I get an doorbell dingdong on my phone. But as is microwaves, dishwashers, those kind of things. Those are still the worst things for me that there’s so little control over what they do and how they do it. It’s just, they’re just brutal.
Per Axbom
I even went as far as to go get go watch a YouTube video to understand how I could take the device out that made a beep in our water heater, which actually use the screwdriver to get things out.
James Royal-Lawson
There’s a YouTube video for everything.
Per Axbom
This podcast has been a repeat show from our archives. Let us know which of your favourite episodes over the years you think should be repeated for more people to listen to.
James Royal-Lawson
Can I email in as well?
Per Axbom
You may
James Royal-Lawson
God that’s my somer sorted.
So links on notes. And the full transcript for this classic episode of UX podcast can be found at uxpodcast.com. Don’t forget to press follow or subscribe, or whatever call to action button. The thing you’re listening to us in has presented to you. If you haven’t done it already.
Per Axbom
It seems like the listening thing part. A podcast is kind of broken still. We don’t know we don’t know where people are listening. Remember, you can contribute to funding the show by visiting uxpodcast.com/support.
Remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
Per, what do you get when you teach an Android grammar?
Per Axbom
I don’t know James, what do you get when you teach an Android grammar?
James Royal-Lawson
A droid
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Amber Case recorded in March 2016 and July 2021 and published as episodes 112 and 269 of UX Podcast.