Smart Technology

It has been my tendency not to discuss products on my blog.  However, there have been some recent products that I believe are especially pertinent to other ideas on this blog.  So for this particular entry I have decided to discuss them.

Aside from all the iProducts (iPhone, iPod, iPad, etc) there has been an increase in talk about smart transportation options.  These include cars and bikes that drive themselves.  (For some reason the idea of a bike driving itself is a bit more strange to me than a car.)  There are a variety of potential problems that occur when things are taken out of user control.  For example, in the Doctor Who episode entitled "The Sontaran Stratagem," the cars can drive themselves using a system called Atmos and end up being programmed from an off-site location to drive individuals into the water, ensuing in their eventual death.    This is a similar problem that I have brought up repeatedly with architectural design.  When architectural design neglects to include the user a variety of problems arise, such as outlined with the University of Chicago's Mansuetto library addition.  There seems to be a thin line between creating products that allow for more simplicity in our lives, on the one hand, and taking control away from the user.  To give some other examples apparently when the garage door opener was first put into place there was no way to designate the opener to a specific garage.  Therefore when one pressed the opener while driving up to the driveway one might accidentally open the neighbor's garage door.  This causes issues with security.  Similar issues with security have been discussed more recently with the idea that one's smartphone can control medical devices.  As this article states

“[Increasingly,] a smartphone links patients’ bodies and doctors’ computers, which in turn are connected to the Internet, which in turn is connected to any smartphone anywhere. The new devices could put the management of an individual’s internal organs, in the hands of every hacker, online scammer, and digital vandal on Earth.” [...]"

The idea that some hacker could screw up my relative's next surgery is relatively petrifying to me.

In discussing the user once again I must pause this time to explain, as it was recently brought to my attention, that I do not believe all users are at fault for not having control over their environments.  I understand that most users interact with environments that they have no control over designing or developing.  I believe this to be a problem that architects should try to rectify.  Obviously in the current state of things not everyone has the means to hire an architect nor the means to have control over their environment.  I believe these things should change.

An additional point that this discussion brings up is the ever-growing definition of design.  Just from the examples given above design includes transportation, medicine, architecture, telecommunication, and music, just to name a few.  As discussed in Bruno Latour's article entitled "A Cautious Prometheus?  A Few Steps toward a Philosophy of Design," "design has been extended from the details of daily objects to cities, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, and, as I will argue, to nature itself –which is  in great need of being re-designed."  Design is clearly no longer limited to just product design.