roomthily

the internet with things

The problem, though, with the Internet Of Things is that it falls apart when it starts to think about people. When big company Internet Of Things thinkers get involved they tend to spawn creepy videos about sleek people in sleek homes living optimised lives full of smart objects. These videos seem to radiate the belief that the purpose of a well-lived life is efficiency. There’s no magic or joy or silliness in it. Just an optimised, efficient existance. Perhaps that’s why the industry persists in inventing the Internet Fridge. It’s top-down design, not based on what people might fancy, but on what technologies companies are already selling.

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The Arduino is a little, cheapish device that allows you to easily connect some electronic thing you’ve made to your computer and to the internet. And it brings all sorts of madcap invention to the Internet Of Things. It does for making connected hardware what blogging did for publishing. Makes it easy and liberates ideas. Hardware Hackers are the kind of people who strap ordinary cameras to weather balloons to photograph space, give them things like the Arduino and they make machines which blow bubbles when they see their own names on twitter. Or they make pairs of lamps for lovers separated by distance - connected lamps, so if you switch one of them off, the other goes off too - a little reminder of what your love in another timezone is up to.

These are the same curious, hybrid, inventive sort of people who built the web and pioneered social media. They’re turning from mucking about with the web to mucking about with the real world because there seems to be a whole new set of interesting things to invent, unoccupied, uncolonised space.

I always think the big difference between the Makers and the corporate Internet Of Things lot is that the IoT people are trying to make the world more efficient and controlled and the Makers are trying to make it more personal and magic. They’re imagining objects that come to life like they do in Harry Potter.

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This makes me feel like we’re on the edge of something interesting; something Andy Huntington has called ‘the GeoCities of Things’ - the moment when it’s as easy to make personal technology objects as it was to make a GeoCities page.

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So I wonder whether the ‘Internet With Things’ is a more useful term than the ‘Internet Of Things’. As Matt Jones has said “The network is as important to think about as the things” and the network has people in it. We’re in there with the things. And people are looking for more than just sleek efficiency, they’re after something else, something unexpected.

via russell davies