The House of Today, Tomorrow
Designing domestic utopias is tempting. Some of the best minds of the 20th century did it, some more than once. Inventor-philosopher-mathematician R. Buckminster Fuller, grappling with the housing shortage in America after World War II, updated his earlier design for a Dymaxion House, a transportable, environmentally efficient aluminum dwelling that could be built for $6,500. A decade later, he pushed for the mass production of the geodesic dome, a “modern igloo” with a light yet strong tetrahedron skeleton. In 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright planned a mile-high skyscraper, potentially solving two of the era’s problems: A growing population could live perpendicularly on less real estate. The Monsanto House of the Future, which debuted at Disneyland in 1957, was made almost entirely of plastic and drew more than 5,000 visitors a day. “Imagine any other house having more than 20 million guests,” went the audio part of the tour, “and still being able to boast the showroom freshness and sparkle you see here.” And before his death in 1966, Walt Disney himself unveiled plans for EPCOT, an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow where 20,000 souls would ride monorails and hit golf balls in the Florida sunshine.
Sci-fi in appearance, rendered in mind-bending shapes and man-made materials, these early “smart houses” promised to make the average American’s life more organized, economical and fun. They also told us something about ourselves: We were ready to embrace the future!
Except that most of us were not willing to move into an igloo. The problem with selling utopia was getting people to buy. While the geodesic dome has enjoyed marginal success, no one ever lived in a completed Dymaxion House. (A sole prototype survives at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.) Wright’s tower was never built, the Monsanto House was razed in 1967 and EPCOT devolved into another Disney theme park.
Great minds are still designing dream houses. Karim Rashid’s 2002 Ideal House, with its rubber baths and bio-engineered pink trees, has the look of an Atomic Age bachelor pad. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology puts volunteers in its PlaceLab, a home/laboratory wired with hundreds of “sensing components” to monitor how people interact with the environment, with the aim of developing interfaces that improve one’s health and well-being. The Microsoft Home in Redmond, Wash., a showcase for the corporation’s ever-evolving technologies, is updated every two years.
These visions of the future are still telling us something about ourselves. A tour of the Microsoft Home, for example, suggests that we want the lives we have today, with a lot less effort, starting when we walk in the front door.
“The first Microsoft Home was built in 1994--that’s been torn down,” says Jonathan Cluts, who runs the home’s Consumer Prototyping and Strategy Team. Cluts and his group of 10--designers, physicists, engineers (audio, video and theoretical), writers and one former semipro soccer player--are less concerned with ones and zeros than with “thinking broadly about the future in the consumer space.”
“But we’re only looking five to 10 years in the future. There are no replicators here--it’s not ‘Star Trek,’ ” says Pam Heath, the team’s lead program manager. She and Cluts walk through the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center, past a group of black-suited Japanese businessmen and a delegation from Australia, both of which will later tour what Heath simply calls “the Home” to see what’s on the technological horizon.
Stopping before a set of standard white metal office doors, Cluts says, “There’s going to be way more technology [in here] than probably any single person would have in any single home. We like to give the broadest range for people to experience to ferret out those things that work for them.”
Sort of like a buffet? Cluts nods. “To see what things they put on their salad,” he says.
“Or even if they eat salad,” adds Heath. “If it’s not easy, if it’s not convenient, if it doesn’t solve a real problem for you or make the stuff a lot more fun or help you stay close to people, you’re not gonna have it in your life.”
For instance, keys. Forget fumbling for them--there aren’t even keyholes in the Home’s front door. There is a square of opaque glass, against which you press your hand. “The size of one’s hand and the length and connections between all the fingers is more unique than a single fingerprint,” Cluts says. Since the Home recognizes his hand, the door opens with a soft click.
With its high ceilings and furnishings several tics above Pottery Barn, the Home is not the Jetsons’ pad. But see that dimmer switch? Go ahead, talk to it. “Grace,” named for Grace Hopper, an early computer programmer, will answer. Like the Ur mainframe--mom--Grace knows what you might want to know when you get home: the security alarm status, where the kids are. She also knows that you like a little cocktail music at the end of the day. Say, “Grace, set scene, welcome home,” and the shades in the living room rise and Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time” starts to play.
All this without inputting, or no more than you already do. Because the technologies in the Home communicate wirelessly, you don’t need to program “I like Charlie Parker when I get home,” but simply subscribe, say, to MSN Music, which knows you like jazz. This adds an Escherean dimension to the Home: You choose the technologies, which in turn choose for you.
And if you don’t want some woman talking the minute you walk in? Simply tap the wall above the dimmer, and warm orange text containing pertinent information glows through the paint, a technology called Organic Light-Emitting Diodes. Such invisible, or “zero-footprint,” technologies were a mandate for this latest version of the Home, which was unveiled in September 2004, and the computing is so small as to be phantom.
Except when it’s not: In the living room, set before an oversized couch, is an oversized TV screen and myriad ways to interact with it--tablets, mice, touch-pads, keyboar+ds and, no doubt a relief to millions of men, a remote. Click it and images cascade across the screen, from media choices to games to a reminder to pay bills. This is so dazzling, there is so much to do, one imagines a future where children’s fingers have the dexterity of spiders, but their eyes cannot tolerate sunlight.
Chips--in the appliances, the counters, the refrigerator--take the haphazardness out of the kitchen. A smart microwave reads bar codes and automatically sets cooking times. The pantry knows what you’re out of and puts it on the shopping list. The refrigerator keeps track of how long that carton of sour cream has been sitting there. Not sure what to cook? Placing, say, a mixer and a bag of flour on the counter sets Grace riffling through her recipe box for dishes you’ve made before with these items. Onion bread? Sugar cookies? How about focaccia? Whereupon the recipe is projected on the counter--and, if you choose, a video of a famous chef preparing it can be viewed on a display screen. Will this technology lure us to the kitchen? Who knows? Is it fun to have Mario Batali show us how to roll out the dough? Sure.
More helpful is the bulletin board covered in “smart fabric.” Clip on an invitation, and the embedded Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) transfers information to your calendar and to-do lists, such as a reminder to hire a baby sitter for Saturday night, which prompts photos of local baby sitters to pop up on the kitchen monitor, along with their schedules, which are synced with yours.
And therein lies one of the paradoxes of our relationship with technologies: We want them in our lives, but how far? Who hasn’t sent an e-mail that he wished he hadn’t? Who hasn’t spent five hours on the phone with tech support, only to have them help erase the hard drive? Imagine your entire home wired thusly.
In the Microsoft Home, a child’s Web tablet connects across the oceans to a video-feed of a student in Argentina, who talks with the child about their school report on Mars in instantly translated Spanish, which the entire family can watch in the dining room as a model of the solar system and triangulated star patterns beam onto the walls. The mirror in the teen’s bedroom, which has gesture recognition, and the shirt she holds up, which contains RFID, swap information as to where the shirt was purchased, at what store, laundering instructions, what goes with it and what is at the dry cleaner. This might have the unintentional effect of turning screams of, “Mom, you don’t know anything!” to “Mom, the mirror is so stupid!”
Which, according to the Microsoft script, would be OK, another of the mandates for the latest Home being to bring the family closer. Nowhere is this idea more evident than in the Home’s last room, the entertainment room, with its massive monitor and online games you can play with your family, the neighbors and the similarly hooked-up from Dubuque to Dubai. You can just see a crush of teenage boys blasting on-screen aliens.
But then the light shifts, from pink to sea foam to lilac. These are LED lights, set into ceiling panels (like Lite Brites) and synced with sound, so that the first strains of a lullaby cause the lights to go indigo. Images from the children’s book “Goodnight Moon” appear on the screen, the text read aloud, presumably, by mother’s prerecorded voice, and the raucous entertainment room morphs into a gently interactive bedroom. Though this is supposed to strike a sweet note--and this technology has, in fact, survived since an early version of the Home--the unavoidable impression is that it allows the parent to be absent from the picture altogether.
If so, he or she is available across the room, atop a pedestal, on a plastic monitor curled into the shape of a wizard’s hat. This is a “memory sculpture.” When approached, it glows ultraviolet. Move closer, and images appear--a photograph of relatives who lived 100 years ago, a child running across a beach, a birthday party. Touch the image of a girl in a headdress in Istanbul, and there’s the girl again, and a map of Turkey, and the girl as a woman, and as an old woman. The Home is randomly choosing these images from the digital ephemera stored on the home’s network devices. The experience is not at all like looking through a family photo album--it’s like looking through a photo album you’ve never seen and will never see in exactly the same way again. And while this may be the antithesis of how we want our lives ordered in the future, it is the only thing in the Microsoft Home that seems like magic. You cede control to the machine, and you are given back something like real life.
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Not so smart idea #1: Iris scanner
“An iris may be about 1,000 times more unique than a fingerprint, but there were two things that made us remove it,” says Jonathan Cluts, who runs the Microsoft Home’s Consumer Prototyping and Strategy Team. “One, people just have a general ooginess factor about the eyes. There’s no danger in it and you don’t even notice that it’s happening, but people are just very scared about having their iris scanned. The second was, aesthetically, it was very unpleasing. You really felt you were walking up to an ATM machine.”
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Not so smart #2: Surveillance cameras
“We used to have camera views in every corner of the home,” says Flora Goldthwaite, a designer charged with bringing in new concepts and developing prototypes. “Then we started thinking, ‘Are we really going to want these cameras in physical spaces?’ As a baby cam, it seems like a reasonable thing, but what happens when the baby’s 16?” Goldthwaite says the team also discussed having the lights turn on and off automatically as one moves through the house, but that, ultimately, “we just felt that was very schizophrenic.”
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Not so smart #3: Touch-screen refrigerator
“We thought, ‘Hey! The refrigerator is the central communication point of everybody’s home, we should have a touch-screen on the front of it, to leave messages!’ ” Cluts says. “We built one. The reality we came to was, it’s really dumb to invent technology that gets outdated in about three years on something you own for 15. Think of how much computers have changed in the last three years. You keep this thing 15 years, you’d be going, ‘Why do we have this old terrible thing?’ ”
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Not so smart #4: Virtual pet
“I really wanted to have the family adopt a virtual pet online,” Goldthwaite says.
“I thought it was a way to teach a child responsibility. ‘If you’re going to have a real pet, you need to take care of this first.’ But there was a lot of, ‘Noooo, we think that’s really stupid,’ ” most of it from team members who had seen the guilt and enervation that Giga Pets caused their own children. Goldthwaite says the “huge snicker factor” has not dissuaded her--and adds that a prototype pet may still live in one of the house’s Web tablets.