Reconnecting to Nature with a Connected Device
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” — Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand Country Almanac
Aldo Leopold would probably not own a Nest thermostat. Nest — the seminal example of connected devices — does many things incredibly well, but spiritually connect you to the source of your heat is not one of them.
Whether you own a connected device or not, it’s undeniable that the dawn of the programmable world is upon us. From wearable technology to smart furniture, cars and appliances, our relationship with things will never be the same.
This begs some thought on the part of the consumer. Some leaders in the maker movement, like littleBits’ Ayah Bdeir, argue that we can’t allow the Internet of Things to take hold without fully understanding how it works. It’s one thing to trust my toaster with my toast —but what about my personal data, home activity, or credit card information? Bdeir fears “these closed devices will prescribe behavior, and box us in even further.”
On the other hand, Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, argued in the 1950s that concealment (or “enframing,” as was the name of his theory) is simply a part of new technology coming into being.
Albert Borgmann, a tech philosopher, saw a distinct difference between ‘devices’ and ‘things.’ In his view, the Internet of Things might contain no ‘things’ at all. In The Internet of Things and the Work of the Hands, UX Designer, Thomas Wendt, explains that to Borgmann, “devices are defined by their ability to conceal the work involved in their outputs and the consumptive enjoyment they provide. Subsequently, the device erodes the user’s bodily engagement with an activity.”
In Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Borgmann used the same example of the stove to lay out his argument that concealing the inner workings of a thing makes it a ‘device,’ disconnected from the human experience:
“[The stove is] a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house a center. Its coldness marked the morning, and the spreading of its warmth the beginning of the day. It assigned to the different family members tasks that defined their place in the household. The mother built the fire, the children kept the firebox filled, and the father cut the firewood. It provided for the entire family a regular and bodily engagement with the rhythm of the seasons that was woven together of the threat of cold and the solace of warmth, the smell of wood smoke, the exertion of sawing and of carrying, the teaching of skills, and the fidelity to daily tasks. These features of physical engagement and of family relations are only first indications of the full dimensions of a thing’s world.”
In Wendt’s words, “the thing becomes a catalyst for surrounding relations: familial structures emerge around it, roles and responsibilities are laid out, pain and pleasure are experienced as a group, and teaching skills becomes an everyday practice.”
Let’s get back to Aldo’s warning about your breakfast.
Here at Grove, we’re constantly thinking about how to give our users the full experience of the ‘thing,’ while designing an intelligent, easy to use product. There’s little precedent for the kind of interactions we hope you’ll have with your Grove.
As a thing and not a device, your Grove will not shield you from the organic origins of its ultimate purpose: growing and eating food. That concealment, unfortunately, has already been done for us. If Aldo Leopold saw a danger in leaning too much on our grocer, he’d be shocked to find us ordering our food on Instacart!
As a thing and not a device, your Grove will not shield you from the organic origins of its ultimate purpose: growing and eating food. That concealment, unfortunately, has already been done for us.
A Grove is an Ecosystem — within the high-tech framework is the same vibrant natural process that sustains life in a forest near your house. It’s hard at work growing your food at a scale the human eye can empathize with instantly, in a space that fits in the busy metropolitan areas the human population is flooding at increasingly large numbers. In 2014, the total number of people living in cities surpassed 50%.
At Grove I find myself constantly torn between two ideals. I believe products should anticipate a user’s needs, and act accordingly. Increasingly, products will. But can we create an experience that builds an emotional connection between you and your food, instead of concealing it?
We can’t digitize eating for you. We can’t conceal the beauty of smelling fresh tomatoes or inhaling oxygen-rich air, we can’t automate the growth of an arugula leaf as it reaches upwards toward the light. We can’t automate the harvest. You should probably put your phone down while you cut arugula, kale, and parsley.
Ironically, this digitally connected thing will strip back the layers of anonymity, convenience and packaging that currently stand between you and your food. A bamboo exterior will conceal some of the inner workings of your Grove — but pull down the front panel, and you’ll see water swirling around an ever-growing network of intrepid roots.
I believe products should anticipate a user’s needs, and act accordingly. But can we create an experience that builds an emotional connection between you and your food, instead of concealing it?
You’ll explore the inner workings of your Grove. You’ll understand what’s happening in every inch of your new ecosystem, from the bio filter to the sensor board. The complexity of these new paradigms may be hidden, but not concealed.
As Borgmann (our favorite stove-loving tech philosopher) continued to explore technology’s impact on human life, his focus inherently turned towards the assumed antithesis to technology — the natural environment. Nature, as he put it, “in its pristine state… has, as it were, escaped the rules of technology.”
He concluded, in 1984, that nature can “teach us both to accept and to limit technology… allow us to be more fully human in offering us engagement.”
The core of the experience — growing and eating your food — is now yours more than ever before. If Aldo Leopold were alive today, I hope he’d own a Grove.
“One assumption the industry seems to be making is that pleasure comes from the reduction of work, an increase in leisure time, and automation. But sometimes pleasure comes from work.” — Thomas Wednt.
How do you ‘reconnect?’ What considerations do you have as the number of automated devices grows?
