Potential vs. Reality
There has been much talk about smart meters and intelligent use of resources lately, largely because when some users installed those devices their utility costs went up instead of down. (The power companies called it a glitch.)
Smart meters make lots of sense—at least on paper. In apartment buildings in many cities, for example, individual apartments have no idea how much water they are using. And there is something to be said for electric meters that tell you how much electricity you are using at peak hours so you can reduce the cooling in the hot part of the day when no one is home.
But however sophisticated these techniques are, the average person isn’t going to program them. Decades after digital clocks were introduced, so many VCRs were blinking on 12:00 that manufacturers removed the clocks. DVD players don’t have clocks. And no matter how obvious the gains of smart metering, the average person isn’t going to be programming them, either.
From an engineering-centric view of the world, this all makes sense. But if it were up to computer engineers, everyone would be using Unix commands on their PC and Microsoft would never have existed. (Yes, we all know people who run Unix commands even though Windows and Mac OSX are now basically Unix.) And if it were up to German car engineers, we still wouldn’t have decent cup-holders in our cars.
What’s needed alongside all of this technology we’re being bombarded with—and some of it is brilliant technology, indeed—is a way to make this technology easier to use. All the low-power engineering on the planet won’t make a dent if the average person either can’t install it or figure out how to use it once it is installed.
At least as much effort has to be put into an intuitive interface and programming as the ability to reduce power consumption, and that means more collaboration between the people writing the software, those developing the components and those dictating the functionality in the devices. Standardized hooks in the hardware would go a long way to making a dent in this problem.
Without that, the effectiveness of any technology—and the ability to sell more of it—will be greatly diminished. There are plenty of brilliant products that never got out the door because no one could explain what they did. There will likely be many more that do get out the door but fall flat because it’s just too hard to use them.
–Ed Sperling
