Why people are the most important part of a world of smart things…
A couple of weeks ago we announced what we’d been working on for the last couple of years: Thington, a concierge to help you get the most out of smart connected devices in your home or office. In this piece I’m going to try and explain why we think people are the most important part of the Internet of Things and the design decisions we’ve made, but first a couple of stories:
In 1990, a full year before Tim Berners-Lee made the first webpage, the world’s first ‘Internet of Things’ domestic appliance was created: a toaster.
The particular device — originally a Sunbeam Deluxe Automatic Radiant Control toaster—had not been originally designed to be accessible over the network, but that didn’t stop John Romkey and Simon Hackett hacking up a connection. They were responding to a challenge to demonstrate that a common household toaster could be part of the Internet. If they managed it, the device would get pride of place at the INTEROP conference in San Jose.
And so it was, on the day, the toaster — bulging with wires and communicating with a nearby computer via TCP/IP — was successfully turned on and off over the internet.
It still needed a human being to insert the bread.
The following year, another device came online. This time it was a coffee pot in the Trojan Room at ATM Networks. This device was the work of Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, and while it couldn’t be controlled over the Internet it did report its status through the world’s first ever webcam. Says Stafford-Fraser:
“Being poor, impoverished academics, we only had one coffee filter machine between us, which lived in the corridor just outside the Trojan Room. However, being highly dedicated and hard-working academics, we got through a lot of coffee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often didn’t last long.
“Paul Jardetzky … wrote a ‘server’ program, which ran on that machine and captured images of the pot every few seconds at various resolutions, and I wrote a ‘client’ program which everybody could run, which connected to the server and displayed an icon-sized image of the pot in the corner of the screen.
“The image was only updated about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee.
“This system only took us a day or so to construct but was rather more useful than anything else I wrote while working on networks.”
In a way, these two devices—Romkey’s toaster and the Trojan Room Coffee Machine—are the founding examples, the Adam and Eve, of the Internet of Things.
One is controllable over the Internet, one reports to the Internet. Between them they show off the area in all its mundane ridiculousness—who really needs an internet toaster—and also in some of its brilliance. They gesture towards a world of tomorrow where every device in the world could be part of one connected network, billions of tiny nodes on the edge of a greater whole that bring pleasure and utility to the people who use them.
And much like the first webpages (that had little to link to and no one to read them), these early experiments were mostly exploratory fun, but somehow they also contained the seeds of a much more powerful and exciting world to come.
But there is a really significant difference between the two projects and it’s one that is profoundly important to how we’re going about connecting the physical world to the network today. And it’s to do with how they understand their relationship to the people around them.
Romkey’s toaster was clever, a technical triumph that took something analogue and made it digital and widely connected. But the Trojan Room Coffee Pot was useful. It was useful because it understood that all physical spaces and almost all appliances and devices in the world are social, are shared and that fundamentally, above everything else, they have to operate in a world full of humans.
Think for a moment about where you live. I would guess for the vast majority of you that you either live with other people or other people visit on occasion. Maybe you have kids, a partner or maybe your parents come to stay. You get a visit from a friend from college every few months, or have some friends around to watch TV with you.
The world is a thing through which people move; almost every space is a shared space. The same goes for offices, public transit, shops, airports and city streets. Every object in those places is shared too at one time or other — the sofas are used by multiple people, the kitchen equipment, the lights in your home, the cars we drive. One way or another, almost every thing in the world is used by more than one person at one time at another.
And yet almost no current Internet of Things devices really think about what it means for a device to be shared, or to exist in a social context, and this causes all kinds of weird problems.
One problem is that most of these devices treat the first person to set them up as the ‘owner’ of the device and no one else. Only the initial person who purchased the thing gets to control it, set it up, make it work for everyone else. In technology circles, we call these people the SysAdmin — the person responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems. No one really wants to be the SysAdmin of their own home.
What if you generally want some lights to turn on when you arrive home, but not when one of you is in the living room watching TV with the lights off? How do you do that when you can’t tell the difference between people?
What happens when you have a visitor coming to stay? You want to give them control over the temperature and lights and stuff but not let them screw up your complicated rules or get access to all of your account information. For most devices today this is simply impossible.
When someone comes to your house if you want to give them control over things, you again have to login on their phones, giving them full access and control over everything. In fact, sometimes just them being in your home gives them that level of control! And it’s control they keep having way after they leave.
Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s Coffee Pot knew about its context, and understood that the value came from how it was shared. Unfortunately this is not true of many of the devices we buy today.
I believe that understanding this social context is crucial to building an Internet of Things that actually works for people. And it’s something we’re trying really hard to fix with Thington.
We’ve baked sharing right into the heart of Thington. You login with your Twitter account so we have some sense of who you are, and once you’ve set up your home you can invite anyone else you like to be a co-owner with you. That person immediately gets control over all the things in your home, can set up new rules and can add new things.
When one of you changes something in the home, Thington posts a little message explaining what happened. “Tom just turned on the Sitting Room Lights” for example.
We’re building Thington’s Concierge specifically with an understanding that multiple people share places. So when you arrive home, the lights only come on when you’re the first back. If there’s someone else there, they don’t get disrupted.
And because we know who is who, we can build systems to let you know when there’s motion only when none of the owners are at home. Because that’s what you actually want — something that’s aware of the context and understands people are individuals but spaces are shared.
We spent a lot of time thinking about guests and how Thington should work for them. After much deliberation we decided on a system called a Guestlist which we think makes it easy to handle visitors. We want to give visitors the same kinds of controls on their phone that they’d have simply by being physically present. If they could stand up and turn on a light or adjust the thermostat by hand, then they should be able to do it from the phone. And again, it’s all accountable.
You can add someone to your Guestlist at any time. They can control your things when they’re physically present at your home and nothing else. They don’t get to see the activity in your home, they can’t control things from a distance, they can’t change your rules or delete things or futz around with how you like stuff. And it only takes a couple of taps to add them and a couple more to remove them again if you change your mind.
We think these things are just the basics, and we’re still working on ways to improve Thington to make it even more aware of your social context. One thing we’re keen to do is to make it really easy for you to mark some things as off-limits or sensitive to guests without having to manage complicated permissions. We want to make it as easy for you to get all the new super-powers the Internet of Things provides without having to sacrifice the normal and obvious social nature of shared places.
So that’s our approach, and we’re pretty proud of it. But whether or not you agree with every feature we’ve built so far, we hope you will agree that an Internet of Things that doesn’t think about the social context of its use is a non-starter.
A lot of amazing work has been done on fancy new devices since the first internet-connected toaster and coffee pot, but the fundamental lesson they teach us remains. The toaster was connected to show the technical possibilities of an exciting new generation of devices, and the coffee pot was there for sharing. We think this distinction is just as important today as it was in the nineties: it’s not enough to create a device with novel capabilities. We need to think about how the things will serve their people.
If you’re interested in trying out Thington, go to https://thington.com to find out more and download the app. If you have any questions or comments, ping us on our Twitter account @thingtonhq or e-mail us at hi@thington.com and we’ll do everything we can to help you out. There’s a list of Frequently-Asked Questions on the Thington website too: Frequently Asked Questions.
If you’re a manufacturer or potential partner and you’re interested in Thington integration or want to find out more about what we’re doing, then e-mail us at hi@thington.com.
If you’re a member of the press and would like to talk to us then e-mail us at press@thington.com — there are also some resources for you available at https://thington.com/press
