Important Things

Renato Valdés Olmos

An Ordinary Day February 21, 2008

I wake up to the warmth and soft light emitted from my pillow. It gradually starts mimicking morning sunlight, gently caressing my face. I check the time and date: it’s the twenty-first of March, 2020 at 11:15 AM. Saturday! Weekend, it’s about time. I get up out of bed and as I walk away from the bedroom my pillow dims and calibrates itself to my Sunday morning setting.

As I move from the bedroom into the bathroom, the bathroom lighting emits a soothing light to improve my laid-back Saturday morning experience. I take a leak; what a relief. However, me taking a leak unchained an invisible process taking place right inside the urinal. Instant analysis of my urine is sent to the seamlessly integrated computing system running my home. As I move away from the toilet to the sink, an embedded User Interface in the mirror lights up: the visual items are styled according to my bathroom’s interior design, featuring soft light tones and chrome elements. This User Interface is the way I communicate with this particular part of the house; a graphical representation requiring point-and-select actions enable me to focus and wake my mind after my full night’s sleep. The bathroom floor measured my weight; I’m 0.7 kilograms above my optimal BMI. The system suggests a meal to get me back to that optimal weight, based on the content of my refrigerator. What I don’t see is that the system included info to select foods with a high sodium content; the awkward process of my urine analysis probably detected that my body needs a little salt. With a simple gesture, a swipe of my hand in the direction of the kitchen, I confirm the selection of the nutrition by the system and leave my bathroom. As I leave, the pressure-sensitive floor detects my absence, and turns off the ambient lighting as well as my health-reporting bathroom system.

The bathroom’s ambient lighting prepared my eyes for the sunlight coming through the slowly opening blinds, as my kitchen detects my presence and gave the blinds their command. My fridge received the nutritional suggestion from my bathroom’s health system. As I open it, the sections where the ingredients for my breakfast are placed light up. I grab the items, and start cooking. As I my hand reaches for a drawer, I notice my espresso machine. I grab some coffee beans from a cupboard. I do appreciate good ol’ fashioned high-cholesterol ristretto. My smart house optimised my flow imperceptibly, leaving time for me to make an actual cup of coffee. With all this time left, I decide to have my breakfast in my home’s greenhouse: Filled up with plants and flowers, powering my house alongside the solar panels on the roof of the apartment complex.

My greenhouse holds a communicative device, which connects to my workstation in my studio. I pick it up, it feels soft - yet sturdy - and its anthropomorphic form really invites me to interact with it. A gentle sweep through the air gestures the device to communicate my emotional state to my closest friends and family. I’m happy. I place the device back on the glass table and sit down. As I start munching away, accompanied by the moist heat and pure air emitted by my photosynthesising friends, a friend’s emotional state comes through: The device emits a blue light, while a customised icon lights up. Empathy kicks in: Its use of colour and sound really make me pity the little thing. My brain makes the connection between the icon and a friend. He had a job interview yesterday. The sad state of the device obviously states that it didn’t go well - I’ll make an appointment to go and meet him later on. But first I want to finish this fine mango - red chilli salad. And my ristretto.

Time to get in touch. I leave the greenhouse with the dirty dishes inside of them. I know my kitchen will notify me that there are missing plates when it is ready to do the dishes. Isn’t habituation a wonderful thing? I shut the greenhouse doors. Don’t want my whole house to go all ‘tropical rain-forest’ on me. I notice how my apartment is now complete lighted by the sun. Its rays reflect from the smooth surface of my workstation’s screen. It’s a small device: it’s no larger than one of those iPods they had when times were when. Only it features no buttons, as physical buttons are emulated by texture mimicking-touch screens nowadays. Its shape is designed to compliment its universal features. It is minimalism in its purest form: a candybar-shaped, flat device, currently quite colourless as it was unable to detect my outfit to select a matching colour. I pick it up from its charging spot and place it next to the large transparent display sitting on my desk. My workstation starts up the operating system, the display detects my workspace’s presence and loads up the user interface optimised for a high resolution multi-touch display. It provides me with a selection of applications I normally use as a designer. The user interface is in line with my environment. It gets out of the way and allows me to focus on what I want to do with my workstation, while aesthetically complimenting the exquisitely designed hardware it’s running on, and the interior design of my studio. I really want to contact my friend. I select communications intuitively, with gestural movements detected through every millimetre of my hand, and the user interface adapts to provide me my contact list. The user interface adapts to the patterns of my reaction speed to dialogues, the position and speed and size of my fingertips. The system adapts to me. A time/space continuum has replaced the desktop metaphor. Depth and virtuality decrease the system’s cognitive load, allowing me to concentrate optimally on the task I want to complete. This user interface adapts to mankind instead of vice versa.

My workstation received the data from the communications device in the greenhouse, so my particularly sad friend is listed a bit more obvious than the rest of my contacts. Let’s call him. The system asks me if I want to perform a video conference. No way. Don’t want to see him before provides himself with a clean bath and decides to meet me downtown, for a hot ristretto*.

The Computer for the 21st Century