Human Changes

For me, its the year of change.  There have been so many changes that have occurred this year that I have embraced them and am planning for more.

Besides the changes in my life, I'm continously looking for changes that occur in the world around me and here are a couple of my observations.  Of course they are only my opinion but it's food for though never the less.

It's the human (or so we would like to think) touch.  Apple's release of Siri and the enabling of using ones voice for information and operations has met with praise and imitators.   People criticize it for not being perfect, for it's limitations and quickly released voice assistants of their own.  But the point of Siri has been lost on many.  Siri is not about just providing another method of interfacing with a computer, but instead Siri is about trying to bypass the computer and providing human qualities in interaction with the user.  It's not about executing commands, starting applications and returning search results, its about being social.

Being funny, asking questions back, not understanding and just acting like a human is what Siri is about.  It's what makes Siri different and what I think Apple is going for.  It's not about the computer it about bypassing the computer and making the user feel good.

This brings me to my second topic on being human.  Space, work space.  Just like the the assemble line where workers are basically part of the machine, (the human robots of old), todays office workers are likewise part of an information machine.   They (aka we) have cubes (because that's the most compact shape), we have computers in the cubes and may even have laptop computers to carry from cube to cube (meeting cubes).

Apple is working on changing part of this with the iPad.  It removes most of the computer required interfaces and replaces with more human interactions, touch.  Almost no weight, mostly no keyboard, no mouse and not being tied to a power cord.  What's the use of a laptop if you still have to plug it in?  With the freedom of the iPad should (I would hope) reduce the restriction of the cube.

While I'm sure that office cubes will be around for a long time, do we have to provide cubes in the shape of cubes?  Can't we have cubes in the shape of Tessellation's?  The space would not be used as efficiently as cubes but it could provide the feeling of not being just a part of a machine.  There are some companies that have taken a like minded approach to flexible work space but the norm for now is to "pack them in".  Not a very human approach to the most important resource a company can ever have.