Northern Colorado Business Report
“A consumer’s guide to adoption of technology, part 3”
By Kai Staats
3 June 2011

This is the third in a series in what is unfolding as a guide to the adoption of technology into one’s personal life. This is not the typical guide which compares the speed of wifi networks or the quality of LCD screens. Rather, this is a guide for you, a window to your own consumer behavior when considering new technology.

In the previous column we explored three of ten questions concerning the adoption of technology and how we, as the consumer and owner are affected by our purchase and use decisions: Does it save time? Does it provide a foundation for education, entertainment, or improved safety? How do I feel when I use this product?

Having just returned from three weeks travel and volunteer work in northern Peru, I find the next three questions invigorating:

4. Does it help me to better understand or improve myself?
5. Does it help me to better understand or to help others?
6. Does it improve my communication with others?

Because I am not fluent in Spanish, I sometimes struggled to convey to those with whom I worked more than a basic concept of the projects with which I was engaged: electrical wiring, solar PV array design, and the architectural design of an open air sanctuary and meditation center.

Sarah and I intentionally traveled without electronics save a camera and old cell phone for emergency calls. Where a 3D sketch program or electronic translator could have assisted me, when communicating with the electrician and construction engineer I was reminded of the simplicity and ease of using pen and paper, even a stick for drawing in the sand.

Not long after our return to the States, I found myself in Best Buy, my mind pondering the next three questions concerning technology products:

Does it help me to better understand or improve myself? Very few consumer electronic products satisfy this question, except possibly a digital camera and computer. Through a camera, we can see the world in a new way and express ourselves artistically. Through the use of a computer, we can expand our knowledge.

Does it help me to better understand or help others? [This question has been slightly modified from the original, as published at NCBR.] When used with discretion, televisions and computers both provide a window to a greater world, a means of virtual travel to other places and opportunity to learn about people who are different than ourselves and those around us. In this respect, yes, our understanding of one another may be improved, if that is how we use these devices. To help? It is my experience that computers do play a significant role in organizing and managing projects, in sharing information.

Does it improve my communication with others? Does a mobile phone or laptop allow us to coordinate events, stay in touch, and move through our world with relative ease? Sometimes, yes. But both have a way of causing us to be distracted when we would benefit from being focused.

I often find a state of relief, nearly bliss when I leave my phone at home or in the car for I am free of the potential of an interruption and the people I am with benefit from my full attention. I experienced this several times during our journey, both with Sarah and with those whom we met along the way—educators from Holland, climbers from Colorado, and the staff of a church and clinic in Piura.

We engaged until the embers of the fire were too low to keep us warm, until the tea in our cups ran dry, and until the conversations were simply … done. It is in my experience that only a lack of technology does enable this kind of human interaction, when face-to-face encounters unfold.

The most memorable of our journey in Peru was in a stone cabin located in a high, green valley of the Cordillera Negra. At 14,200 feet elevation nine rock climbers wore multiple layers to find warmth against the sleet outside. The fog pressing against the windows was countered only by the single kerosene lantern and shimmer of the wood burning stove.

Not for one moment did I desire a cell phone, laptop, or television. The conversations carried us into the night for no digital device could fully capture or enhance the aroma of home cooked meals over a gas stove, the mixing of four languages spoken in whispers, and the sharing of that space by people who before that day had never met. We shared what humans have experienced for tens of thousands of years—our stories.

I offer that when next you find yourself reaching for your smart phone to record the moment for Facebook, stop and consider whether you will experience that time more vividly from behind the camera, or by being fully engaged in the moment, you yourself the best recording and playback medium.

Northern Colorado Business Report
“A consumer’s guide to adoption of technology, part 2”
By Kai Staats
6 May 2011

This is the second of a multi-part series in what I hope will unfold as a guide to the adoption of technology into one’s personal life. This is not the typical guide which compares the speed of wifi networks or the quality of LCD screens. Rather, this is a guide for you, the consumer, as a window into your own behavior when considering the technology you wish to adopt.

As mentioned in the prior column, Henry Dreyfuss in “Designing for People” (1955) offered five points by which products could be designed and developed: 1) Utility and Safety, 2) Maintenance, 3) Cost, 4) Sales and Appeal, and 5) Appearance.

What Dreyfuss may not have known is that Appeal would fifty years later gain a momentum so strong that consumers find themselves compelled to replace perfectly functional products every 18-24 months due to the allure of Utility and Appearance. Maintenance becomes irrelevant as nearly all consumer electronics are disposable, designed to be neither repaired nor upgraded.

What concerns me most is not the speed at which we purchase goods, but how we are affected by the use of these products. I have prepared 10 questions to get the gears turning:

1. Does it save time?
2. Does it provide a foundation for education, entertainment, or improved safety?
3. How do I feel when I use this product? (or does it cause me to reduce or increase my stress?)
4. Does it help me to better understand or improve myself?
5. Does it help me to better understand or help others to improve themselves?
6. Does it improve my communication with others?
7. How did I perform this function without this device?
8. Does it improve upon a former means of doing so?
9. What is the worst thing that would happen if I don’t purchase it?
10. If I wait three weeks, will I still have a need or desire to purchase it?

Despite the fact that all phone models are moving toward smart phone capabilities, let’s look at the upgrade from an older model to a smart phone as an example of how to apply the first three questions.

Does it save time? Hard to say. One could argue that you can do more in less time with so many functions at your fingertips, but as I offered last fall in “The Myth of Free Time,” we tend to just fill that space with doing more things. There are seldom, if ever, inventions which truly save time. In part because they only add complexity to our lives; in part because we just fill that void with doing more. If smart phones actually saved time, people would be using them less, not more.

Education? Entertainment? Safety? Yes. Yes. And maybe. A smart phone can provide a weather update for mountain travel, but you are likely to use it while driving which is both dangerous and increasingly illegal. Again, the potential is there, but the consumer gets in the mix and the value-ad is undermined by human behavior.

Number 3 is complex. This is one that we talk about in the form of complaint, but seem to be helpless to do anything about. Let’s ask the same question applied to other devices, and see how we respond. “How does my car make me feel?” Safe, comfortable, content, even at home, if it is in good condition and runs well. Frustrated, angry, scared, even embarrassed if it is in need of repair and often fails to perform its basic functions.

You may not believe you have a relationship with your microwave oven, but when it warms a cup of coffee or fills the kitchen with the aroma of a hot bowl of soup, chances are you have a smile on your face when the oven door opens wide. But if the buttons on your oven are temperamental, or the insides nasty due to lack of cleaning, then perhaps you cringe at the very thought of the noontime meal.

Concerning your mobile phone: Does it feel good in your hand, or is it awkward to hold? Do you find it to be intuitive and seemingly designed just for you? Or do you get lost in the interface, often wondering why your friend’s number is missing, again!? Does it always work, no matter where you go? Or does it lock-up, hang-up, and get beat-up (as you slam it against the wall)? Do you carry it with pride? Or does your body tense every time it rings because you have not, after six months, determined how to change the ring tone?

Let’s return to How does the upgrade to a smart phone benefit you? Will you immediately use text messaging, email, news feeds, calendar, camera, and video conferencing? Or will you determine that simply because these functions are available, you may choose not to use them? Most important, do you feel compelled to check email just one more time, because it is right there, in the palm of your hand? Do you often interrupt face-to-face conversations to answer a quick email? Or are you comforted and relaxed knowing that your entire digital world is within reach, at all times?

I recommend paying more attention to how you feel, in the moment, when using your phone than whether or not it has a larger memory capacity or higher resolution camera. Remember, Responsibility begins with designers and ends with consumers. Be responsible to you.

Northern Colorado Business Report
“A consumer’s guide to adoption of technology”
By Kai Staats
8 April 2011

As I walked out of the Miramont North gym this afternoon, I felt the warmth of the sun against the cool, crisp spring air. As I approached my car, however, the roar of gasoline powered hedge trimmers and leaf blowers filled the air. The foul stench of poorly combusted two-stroke engine pollution was unavoidable.

I was overwhelmed by the contrast, having just left the relative calm of yoga class and rock climbing to witness the rapid, noxious reduction of the budding greenery. It just didn’t feel right, that the tools and methods used in an attempt to create beauty were themselves not beautiful.

When I arrived home and prepared to write this column, I struggled between two topics: the sorry state of downloaded digital movies versus hi-definition home theater appliances, or a larger, more engaging, even risky introduction to the concept of appropriate application of technology and how it affects our functional intelligence as individuals and as a species.

The former would have been too simple to compose, easily summarized as The quality of Netflix sucks. Better to rent Blu-ray Disc.

The latter, however, is a return to my Sr. year Industrial Design thesis “Confused Vanity and the Mad Dog TV” written eighteen years ago. The three chapters “Down the Tube,” “Forced Obsolescence,” and “The Power Blower Wars” take the reader into a mindset beyond form follows function, calling upon my experience as a design student and consumer, and that of several profound, world-renowned designers and technology writers.
In review of my thesis (which was great fun to read again) I was pleased to rediscover a completely relevant five-point formula for product design written by Henry Dreyfuss in “Designing for People” (1955):

1. Utility and Safety
2. Maintenance
3. Cost
4. Sales and Appeal
5. Appearance

In the same vein, Buckminster Fuller concluded, “You have to make up your mind either to make sense or to make money, if you want to be a designer.” (Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1969) How many products on the market today follow this type of formula? Of equal importance, how many of us as consumers challenge the true value of a new product before we make our purchase?

I will for the next several columns engage you in a conversation around appropriate technology, consumer products comprised of software or hardware, and how they affect us as consumers. In particular, I will explore the categories of entertainment, communication, and transportation, leaving medical, military, and safety to another time and space.

For as much as I am an advocate of advances in technology when and where they assist us in finding greater personal health and satisfaction, understanding the world around us, and moving ourselves and our things from place to place, I am increasingly wary of technology which diminishes our individual creativity, self-awareness, ability to make decisions for ourselves, and functional, real-world intelligence.

I am concerned that Google’s Gmail search keeps us from invoking the cognitive function of organizing and managing the emails we create and receive, instead encouraging a mental clutter which spills over into our virtual and physical life. I believe GPS units keep us from visualizing our world in three dimensions, causing us instead to become reliant on technology and less capable of conducting the very basic act of navigating from point A to B. I am concerned that new model cars which automatically conduct parallel parking on our behalf are in fact reducing our motor skills and ability to problem solve in real-time. If we cannot organize, navigate, nor move through our world without assistance from computers, then what exactly are we able to do on our own?
I ask, “How many of our modern technology-based products are denying us the very functions our brain offers instead of encouraging dynamic improvement of our intelligence?”

While researchers discovered a half dozen years ago that the human brain does in fact grow new cells throughout our lives, SPECT imaging conducted by Dr. Daniel Amen (Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, 1999) has demonstrated time and again that exercising the brain improves cognitive abilities, even slowing or reversing the onset of mental disorders and disease, does it not stand to reason that not using our brain also reduces our cognitive capacity?

Calling upon the research I conducted at Arizona State, I find it refreshing to read again Langdon Miller’s words, “Through technological creation and many other ways as well, we make a world for each other to live in, much more than we have acknowledged in the past, we must admit our responsibility for what we are making.” (The Whale and the Reactor, 1986)

Responsibility begins with designers and ends with consumers.

In the coming months I will guide you, the intelligent consumer, through a thought process that may alter the way you look at the multitude of products you consider for purchase, even those which you already own.

Northern Colorado Business Report
“The Last Will & Testament of the Book”
By Kai Staats
11 March 2011

Attorney: I recognize this is hard for you, to have lost someone special, someone important to you. (pauses, looks down at the documents in his hands) In this time, we are honored by the giving of a few possessions. Of course, no amount of money, no gift could replace the time we did share with the living. However, in reading Edmond’s will, it is clear how much he did care for each of you (looks around the room).

Rebecca: Thank you. (pauses to control her tears) Our family has trusted you for as long as I can remember, to take care of our family’s (crying again) … our family’s financial security.

Tim: What did I get?

Rebecca: (angry, turning to face her son) Tim! Don’t be rude!

Attorney: (annoyed, forces a polite smile) Edmond has left each of you with something that was very important to him … as I will share with you now. (clears his throat) “To my only daughter, Rebecca, I grant you my favorite Blue ray disc, a compilation of all my favorite Lost and Friends episodes.”

Rebecca: Oh! Oh! (sobbing) Thank you. Thank you Dad (looking up and out the window).

Attorney: (nods, then continues) “To my only son, Samuel, I grant to you a USB jump drive with every photo I have ever taken,” (pauses to double check what he is reading) “of all my duck hunting trips.”

Samuel: (emotions under control) Thank you. Truly, thank you Dad. I don’t know what to say. (shakes his head, turns to give his sister Rebecca a hug, then holds her hand).

Attorney: “Finally, to Timothy, my favorite grand–”

Tim: Sooo, what’d I get?

Attorney: (ignores him) “To Tim, I leave ten million dollars, the full value of my estate.”

Tim: What?! (looks to his mother, back to the attorney) Are you sure? (tears well up in his eyes … looks down at the floor and then rises up from his chair) Are you kidding me?! What a rip-off! What about his iPod! Or his Sony PlayStation? What about all the games—he has hundreds of games! I can’t believe this! I knew he didn’t love me … he always hated me!

Just as we sort through our physical possessions every few years to determine what is needed and meaningful, and what is just junk, I believe in the end, we all will find the value of a single printed photo held behind a chipped piece of glass in a tattered wooden frame to be of greater value than the tens of thousands of digital photos accumulated over the years. For all the time spent organizing and preserving, it will be that one photo which we cherish most when the backup drives have long since spun down.

You may recall the above at the closing of my last column “The Inevitable Loss of Data & the Last Printed Photo.” It is a subject, it seems, which I am not yet prepared to relinquish.

In my Loveland home I have a ninety-nine year old piano, a couch, a chair, hand made rugs from Turkey, Namibia, and Kenya, several framed photos, some six hundred CDs, and a few hundred books. As I prepare to put my house on the market, I have become keenly aware of what is and what is not important to me. I have even asked myself, what would I secure in my will?

Today I worked for several hours from the City News cafe and book store in downtown Loveland. It’s quiet, but not still. On a cold winter day, every time the door is forced open the smell of book, magazine, and newsprint ink mixes with the aroma of fresh brewed coffee, tea, and pastries. Mmmm, I love that combination. I can’t imagine a world without dusty, ragged novels and high gloss, large format photo essays. They are for me more important than furniture, and far more important than a television (which I have never owned).

The opening scene may seem a bit over the top, yet its message is clear—what will the next generation give to their children if books and music are no longer tangible items? In my experience, when someone has spent a lifetime collecting books, the act of giving is made real by the effort required to move them, to care for them each passing year. Each generation adds their story to the one originally told. Electronic books, however, can tell only one story for there is no medium by which they may record another. Without scribbled notes in the boundaries of fading, folded pages, the eBook is but a perfect copy missing the imperfection of time.

Perhaps I am stuck, antiquated, a product of a prior generation, but it is my parent’s library as much as anything in their home which defines who they are. A few thousand books is demonstration of their lifetime of research, knowledge—my heritage awaiting rediscovery of what they learned. I want to hear the spine flex when each book is opened. I want to smell the ink mixed with the dust of their desert home, my fingers moving pages of books which they once read to me.

Northern Colorado Business Report
“The inevitable loss of data and the last printed photo”
By Kai Staats
11 February 2011

How many digital photos, music, and word processor documents do you store that you consider valuable? Do you have backups? What software was used to create them and when was the last time you attempted to open a five year old document?

An article in the back pages of December’s issue of Rolling Stone magazine makes clear the challenges and pitfalls of recording, preserving, and recovering information in the digital age. Major music labels such as Sony Music Entertainment are finding that some digital recordings less than a decade old cannot be recovered due to degradation of information or more often, the loss of the proprietary software used to edit the tracks.

In a world where software applications change nearly as often as the top bands, the music industry is reconsidering both analog and digital tape archives while paying closer attention to the evolution of editing software where backward compatibility is concerned. The data that recalls how the tracks were mixed is too easily lost through consecutive upgrades and in worse cases, data corruption results in the loss of songs, tracks, even entire recording sessions.

To maintain a fully functional, fully recoverable archive, every label world-wide must test every recording in their digital archive against each new editing suite version in order to make certain their valuable data remains in tact. To ignore this process, to cut corners results in the loss of data, time, and money.

You may think, “That doesn’t concern me because I use iTunes and iPhoto and … iEverything!”

Sorry. What applies to the big guys is only compounded for you. You also use software whose media formats will someday be abandoned, requiring that you also open and re-save every photo, song, and video you own. What’s more, your $15-$250 backup solutions (if you backup at all) are far less reliable than those which are used by recording and film studios. But truly, it’s less about the software and hardware you own, for the real concern is–you.

Consider that prior to the late 1970s with the introduction of personal computers, only in the memorization of story and song had our species managed data which we could not see or touch. In the ancient and medieval times, librarians and hooded monks transcribed, copied, and created archives by candlelight, using pen, ink, and parchment. But in this modern world of digital data, our minds must visualize, organize, and preserve thousands of assets, more files than all the original works estimated to have been in the ancient Library of Alexandria. While some people have an innate sense of the virtual and are able to effectively visualize and manage their computer’s storage, most cannot.

In the January 2010 TechSpot.com article titled “Amazon Kindle ebook sales surpass paperbacks”, Amazon states it now sells 115 Kindle books for every 100 paperbacks, more than 800,000 electronic titles in all. Yes, ebooks are typically stored on the vendor’s server, available to view anywhere, at any time. But what happens when Amazon.com is beaten at its own game by a competitor whose prices and services are more appealing?

You will of course open a new account. A year later, another. In a half dozen years from now, you will likely have engaged a half dozen ebook vendors in addition to your then more than fifty online accounts. Even if you do not find need to manage the ebooks themselves, or do not archive myriad songs and photos, you will need to track the usernames and passwords of all your online accounts. In this digital world, you do not have a choice but to learn to organize and preserve your virtual assets, just as Sony and the other big studios are doing right now.

My suggestion? Practice. Make backups and integrity tests a habit. As home burnt CDs and DVDs scratch easy and die fast, don’t use them. USB memory is designed as a transport medium, not an archival solution. Duplicate external drives are ideal for capacity and reliability. Remote backup services offer protection against local failure, loss, or theft, but also place your personal, often private affairs onto a system over which you have very little control. Keep at least three copies of all your files at all times, one of which is not stored with the others. Use automated backup software if you are not trained as a librarian or if you are not a natural at virtual management.

When is enough, enough? Just as we sort through our physical possessions every few years to determine what is needed and meaningful, and what is just junk, I believe in the end, we all will find the value of a single printed photo held behind a chipped piece of glass in a tattered wooden frame to be of greater value than the tens of thousands of digital photos accumulated over the years. For all the time spent organizing and preserving, it will be that one photo which we cherish most when the backup drives have long since spun down.

Northern Colorado Business Report
“In our own image: The pursuit of living machines”
By Kai Staats
14 January 2011

We are all aware of industrial robots, programmed armatures designed to do the dirty, dangerous, tedious tasks we’d rather avoid or cannot do to the same degree of accuracy, speed, and repetition. Nearly every product you purchase is created using a semi-intelligent, autonomous robotic system: from the stamping of aluminum cans to the assembly of injection molded parts for your mobile phone; from laser engraved beer mugs to order fulfillment and shipping of everything we take for granted. All accomplished by high-speed, highly efficient robotic systems.

In our homes commercially available, low-cost robot toys continue to perform, relatively speaking, little more than collision avoidance and basic interaction with the environment while robot vacuum cleaners keep up after our kids and pets.

However, what is happening in the field of robotics as a whole is astounding. Educational, research, and military robotics are making science fact from what was not long ago science fiction. Take a look at Dean Kamen’s (inventor of the Segway) “Luke Arm”, a highly advanced robotic arm funded by DARPA and inspired by Star Wars which is giving those who have lost a limb in military conflict a chance at a normal life.

What’s more, there is significant headway being made toward synthetic skin created of both biological and mechanical foundations. When these two research efforts merge, we will have a means of repairing our own skin and at the same time providing a naturally appearing shell more sensitive than our own living skin.

In particular, I encourage you to search YouTube for “Big Dog” by Boston Dynamics, the Honda Asimo, the Akiba android actress, robots that automatically reassemble themselves, human child robots (iCub), fish, spider, and snake robots that in one form or another mimic the real thing. Each is created in an effort to study means of locomotion and interaction with the real-world.

While I could prepare a column of this length every hour of every day and not keep up with the advances in synthetic eyes, ears, hands, finger tips and joints, balance, perception, and cognition, what interests me as much as the applied technology is the motivation which compels our species to create machines in our own image.

Consider the relatively recent examples in print and film: Pinocchio, Frankenstein’s monster, Metropolis, Westworld, Blade Runner, Artificial Intelligence, Bicentennial Man, iRobot, and many more. Look then at the ancient legends and texts which reference gods in human form and humans having been made in the likeness of God. While it is not my goal to give this column a religious overtone, I do call focus to what I believe is an intrinsic desire for humans to give life to the inanimate.

Close your eyes, for just a moment, and imagine yourself as a child again. Recall how easily you arrived to that magical world where dolls and stuffed animals spoke to you, their voices as removed from your vocal cords as were their actions from your fingers. It was real to you then, just as the creation of life-like robots are to those who animate them now.

Just a few days ago, hacker Taylor Veltrop was successful in combining the real-time feedback of a Microsoft Kinect controller with a small humanoid robot, granting an uncanny glimpse of near-future, remotely controlled robots. Every move he makes, his robot attempts to duplicate. Combine Veltrop’s hack with Emotiv’s EEG, Kamen’s prosthetic arm, bio-synthetic skin, and Boston Dynamic’s running humanoids, and we will, in only a few years, be walking alongside robot androids fully human in appearance and function—personal avatars far more 3D than the imagination of James Cameron.

Scary? Perhaps. Inevitable? No doubt. While mobile phones have slowly evolved into smart phones with highly interactive systems, the rate at which robotic devices will move into the mainstream of our commodity world will likely be far faster because we are, in many ways, prepared for the next leap. The next generation of our children will not know a world in which there was not a choice between a real dog or a synthetic pet nor will they necessarily understand what the world was like before bio-mechanical organisms catered to our needs.

Children caring for aging parents, who require daily living assistance, may soon find they are replaced (for better or for worse) by a care giver which is omnipresent, forever alert, and fully trained to prepare food, change bed sheets, and administer life preserving drugs. In fact, children and physicians alike will be able to log-in to their parents’ care giver to observe and to interact from afar, the care giver’s synthetic face automatically changing shape and voice to match that of the person who is temporarily channeled by the host.

By the time you purchase your fully electric, five hundred miles per charge Honda, a family home assistant will be bundled with the car, the transfer of your prior model’s persona and memories conducted in the sales manager’s office as easily as you swipe your smart card.

The boundary between biological and mechanical is fading. The division between natural and artificial is being merged. I believe we are fast becoming the creators of new life forms in the pursuit of living machines for there is something that drives this innovation beyond commercial gain or the desire to replace aging or disabled body parts. We are compelled to learn about our own bodies and behavior through duplication, even improving upon the very foundation of that which makes us human.

We are in the pursuit of living machines.