Designing the connected everyday
Elisa Giaccardi · interactions · 2015
How often have you found yourself interacting online at the dinner table?Our daily routines often incorporate tweeting, facebooking, and the use of other online platforms while in the company of friends.Yet from Silicon Valley to Amsterdam, friends sometimes stack their phones on the table to stop this behavior while dining out.This example of "social norming" speaks of the gap between interactions online and interactions in everyday life.It also speaks of our inability as designers to imagine less intrusive ways in which digital technologies can be integrated into our lives.Digital technologies have opened up unprecedented opportunities for communication and interaction, but how can we make them fit more neatly around our lives?Many companies realize this need and are exploring solutions such as glasses, watches, and a menagerie of smart devices.These devices will allow Facebook or Twitter notifications (or whatever other notifications we will receive in the future) to appear "discreetly" as an icon in the corner of our eyesight, or on our wrist, rather than on our phones.This is not what I am concerned with.Instead, my question of how digital technologies can fit more neatly around our lives is a question of how we can Designing the Connected Everyday Elisa Giaccardi, Delft University of Technology Insights → The next generation of digital networks must be arranged around practices in the physical world, not just layered on top of them.→ Designing the connected everyday is fundamentally about making things commensurate as much as it is about making them smart.