Calm down dear, it's only a wearable device!
Mobile World Congress 2015 is happening this week, and that means that a slew of shiny new slabs of technology will be touted with much gusto and hyperbole by their proud makers, and you can also rest assured (with a certain grim inevitably) that there will be a mountain of new accessories and companion products doing the rounds too, many of which will fall under the current buzzword du jour, "wearable".
"Wearable" technology and personal "smart" devices are seemingly ever-expanding categories of product that we are assured will fill all of the hitherto un-noticed empty niches in our lives - from health tracking to... more health tracking, but for my money very few of them are particularly compelling.
There are a number of reasons for this:
- As a reasonably healthy non-Californian male, I'm not that interested in tracking my health / sleep / posture / whatever, because I am fundamentally complacent and lazy
- I'm not interested in devices that try to tie me in to a specific technology / ecosystem / provider e.g. Apple watch, Samsung anything, Android wear (even though I have several Android devices)
- PUT SCREENS ON ALL THE THINGS!
There's a bit of an escalating scale at work there, and while points one and two are certainly valid, I think that from a personal perspective it's the screenification™ of every possible surface that grates the most.
I have no issue with making devices smart(er), nor do I have an issue with connecting them up to the Internet (although I still cringe at the term "Internet of Things"), but what most of these devices fail to achieve is any sense of elegantly crafted non-intrusiveness.
Do I want details of incoming calls flashing up on my wrist? Not really? Tweets or Facebook messages? Nope. Responding to any of those via my wrist? Nopety-nope!
What I would really like to see is glanceability - low-intrusion interfaces that alert me subtly and intuitively to whatever it is I'm supposed to care about - the Nike fuelband does this quite nicely, generally staying out of your way unless you want it to do stuff, but a lot of "wearables" seem to assume that a (touch)screen is absolutely what we want to have strapped to our extremities.
This is by no means a new idea - the New York Times Magazine announced ambient devices as one of the Ideas of the Year in 2002, but they never seem to have quite hit the big time.
This is perhaps because it's hard to sell something that doesn't reall seem to actually do much - ambient devices generally capitalise on the ability for the brain to perceive information without any apparent cognitive load or deliberate, focussed interaction.