// Emoticomp
Give a smart object a personality and people stop being afraid of it. Get the personality wrong and it’s worse than having none.
An old post, brought in from my old journal. From January 2011, before anyone said Internet of Things out loud. About giving connected objects character, and everything that can go wrong when you try.
Also: a rabbit that couldn’t read the news, a MacBook that breathes, and fourteen rules for being polite if you’re a thing.
Personality
People were starting to say the same thing back then. Give the coming flood of smart products, connectables I called them, a personality, a backstory, some lifelike behaviour, and people would find them easier to live with. Less Skynet, more companion. Worth exploring. Carefully.
Reality Clippy
Do it badly and the ordinary failures of a device, a flat battery, a part that needs replacing, a crash, start reading as flaws in its character. Getting sick. Dying. I started calling the bad version of this Reality Clippy. Russell Davies used the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the cautionary example. Ubik has some good ones too.
Sherry Turkle was already worried about this. Devices were disrupting social situations before anyone had added personality to them. What happens when there are ten times as many?
Calm
So subtlety, or nothing. Something closer to calm technology than a chatbot with a face. I called the good version of this utopicomp. Sorry.
Apple’s sleep light on the MacBook Pro is the reference point. It pulses at roughly the rate of a sleeping breath. Just enough to suggest something alive, without ever asking for attention. Speed it up or slow it down slightly, once you’ve learned its normal rhythm, and you’d notice immediately. That’s the level of subtlety worth aiming for.
Dunne and Raby’s Technological Dream Series felt like a transmission from a future that hadn’t happened yet. It still does.
Borrowed craft
Nobody had worked out how to design this well. The obvious places to borrow from: game character design, playwriting, RPG game masters, animators, puppeteers. Two books worth reading. Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Oli and I once floated the idea of method acting classes over a pint.
Breakfast’s Precious project, a self-described bike with a brain, was doing some of this in public.
There’s a role waiting to exist here. Someone who understands interaction design and product design, and can add character to a thing through behaviour alone. Light touch. Believable, not ridiculous.
Object personas
Interaction designers already use personas to describe the people who’ll use a thing. Nobody was really using them to describe the thing itself. What does the object want. How does it feel about its situation. If it can sense where it is, how should that change what it does.
I’d used a system persona once, designing a site for young photographers. Focus groups told us who they trusted and turned to for guidance, and that became the personality behind the copy. It held the tone together. There’s a lot more in this than we’d tried yet.
You could give every touchpoint of a connected service its own persona, or one persona strong enough to feel omnipresent across all of them. Starts to sound like brand strategy. Probably is.
Idle mode is one expression of this. Arcade cabinets have attract mode, which draws you in and quietly teaches you how to play before you’ve put a coin in. An object’s idle behaviour could do the same for its own affordances, if it’s subtle enough.
Not human
The behaviour doesn’t have to come from humans at all. Fractional AI. Matt Jones’ BASAAP, be as smart as a puppy. Ethology, the study of animal behaviour, has more to offer here than most people designing this stuff have looked at.
Rafi Haladjian built Nabaztag, the connected rabbit. People loved it. But when it read RSS feeds aloud, people didn’t quite believe what it was telling them, which was a problem since reading feeds was one of its main jobs. A rabbit reading you the news doesn’t map to what a rabbit is. Whatever a thing’s form suggests, its behaviour has to earn it, and the other way round.
Politeness
David Rose’s line stuck with me. If you’re going to be in somebody’s life every day, you have to be polite. Alan Cooper wrote fourteen rules for a polite piece of software in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. A polite thing is interested in you. Deferential. Forthcoming. Has common sense. Anticipates your needs. Is responsive. Keeps its own problems to itself. Well informed. Perceptive. Self confident. Stays focused. Is fudgable. Gives instant gratification. Is trustworthy.
I’d add two. A polite thing doesn’t demand attention. A polite thing plays nicely with others.
Implicit
Character doesn’t need to be spelled out. It might work best when people fill the gaps in themselves. BERG’s video The Journey has a shot of a station display telling you it’s busier than normal. Nothing about it is trying to be funny or grab you. It still reads as the voice of the whole station. A bit tired, still doing its job.
Naming
Hardly anyone names their wifi network, or their computer, or anything else that could have a name. Maybe naming things is just a bit too hard right now. Maybe it should come pre-named instead, and let people change it if they want to.
It was exciting, uncharted territory then. Somebody, please, design the persona for an alarm clock with the personality of a drill instructor. I still want to see it.
I'd love to tell you more.