What Would Your Toaster Say to Your TV?

The recent announcement of the Sprint / Clearwire WiMax venture generated a great deal of excitement in many quarters. In an Advertising Age article,  "WiMax Could Bring Dramatic Changes, Wherever You Are", Abbey Klaussen writes:

WiMax is essentially the network that will deliver data and voice
services to phones, but much faster than what consumers are used to
using. It would turn the country into a giant hot spot — in theory, at
least. It’s often referred to as a fourth-generation wireless service
— or 4G — as it will be able to deliver quicker mobile-internet
service than the 3G services offered by many carriers. (The first two
generations of cellular service were analog and digital.) The venture’s
WiMax service should cover 120 million to 140 million people by 2010,
said executives, who initially will concentrate deployment in the top
100 markets.

In a Chicago Tribune article (also distributed by the Seattle Times) earlier this week, "WiMax deal could lead to universal connectivity", Wallin Wong writes:

Sprint’s WiMax network is designed to transmit data at speeds
comparable to mid- and high-tier cable broadband — far faster than
what’s available for wireless Web surfing. This means using the
Internet on a WiMax-enabled mobile phone, for example, will be just as
speedy as home Internet connections.

It’s also a big leap over today’s Wi-Fi hot spots, which typically
provide laptop users with Internet access in a cafe or airport. Because
the coverage will stretch across metropolitan areas, a user would be
able to listen to Internet radio in a WiMax-equipped car while speeding
down the highway.

These all sound like promising new capabilities that will lead to useful applications – or extensions of existing applications – that may enrich our lives. However, these same articles also include some speculation that exhibit a perspective that I would call technology in search of a problem.

The Chicago Tribune article also includes the following:

By year’s end, it’s expected that the next generation of wireless
networks will be launched, blanketing initial service areas with a fast
Internet signal — accessible to subscribers from homes, streets and
traveling vehicles — and capable of giving mundane home appliances a
voice.

In this Jetsonian vision of life, which could take several years to
arrive fully, a washing machine embedded with a wireless chip would
detect a problem and contact the manufacturer even before the homeowner
knew something was wrong with the spin cycle.

And the Advertising Age article has similarly oriented prognostications:

WiMax sounds like something Neo would use to communicate back to
Morpheus in "The Matrix." In reality, it could bring a decidedly sci-fi
experience to everyday living. And thanks to a group of high-profile
backers, the fledgling technology is coming to life again.
…
And here comes the sci-fi-inspired part: the technology, said Mr.
Bader [Eric Bader, partner in Brand in Hand], won’t necessarily be confined to mobile phone devices, but could
infiltrate ordinary household items: "toasters, TVs and car keys. It’s
the beginning of truly connected appliances. … It gives us a canvas
on which to start to converge."

Sigh.

Leaving aside the question of whether WiMax is the right standard, I’m all for the general idea of universal connectivity, but only from a human-centered design perspective. I believe that the world will be a better place when people can all connect more effectively to the other people, places and things around us (indeed, this is one of the key pillars of the mini-manifesto for Strands Labs, Seattle).

All this talk about giving home appliances a voice, and imbuing toasters with connectivity may strike some people as sci-fi, but to me it smacks of technology-centered design. Maybe I’ve been blessed with reliable appliances, but I’ve never once
thought "I sure wish my washing machine could call out for parts
automatically". And if my toaster was "on the grid", well, what would it
want to say to my TV (or any of my other appliances)?

Although at times I feel a certain amount of frustration with this pervasive "technology for the technology’s sake" perspective, I do like to have fun with it from time to time. A few years ago, I drafted a proposal for 12 steps for technology-centered designers. And a few years earlier, as my research focus was shifting from Artificial Intelligence to Ubiquitous Computing, Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work Whatever, I first discovered the Internet Toaster.

At first, I thought the Internet Toaster was a hoax, but further research suggests that it was true. Here’s what they have to say about this at The Living Internet:

There really was an Internet toaster. Dan Lynch, President of the Interop Internet networking show, told John Romkey at the 1989 show that he would give him star billing the following year if he connected a toaster to the Internet. Who could have resisted a challenge
like that?

Working together with his friend Simon
Hackett,John Romkey rose to the occasion and connected a Sunbeam Deluxe Automatic Radiant
Control Toaster to the Internet, becoming the hit of the 1990 Interop. A pictureof
Hackett demonstrating the toaster is shown below.

http://www.internode.on.net/images/toaster2.jpg

The toaster was connected to the Internet with TCP/IP networking, and controlled with a Simple Networking Management Protocol Management Information Base (SNMP MIB). It had one control, to turn the power on, and the darkness of the toast was controlled by how long the power was kept on.

However, a human being still had to insert the bread. At the 1991 Interop a small robotic
crane was added to the system, also controlled from the Internet, which picked up a slice of bread and dropped it into the toaster, automating the system from end-to-end.

[I’m including a photo of what I believe is the 1991 version that I found a while back, but cannot remember the source – perhaps it’s from the broken "toaster2.jpg" link above.]

I thought this was fascinating, and so I did some more research, discovering an article in The Register on the Internet Weather Toaster, which was a senior project by industrial design student Robin Southgate, at Brune University:

According to a British Council Design Lab description:

How does it work? The innocuous kitchen staple
secretly houses some sleek, smart communications technology. A modem
inside the toaster dials to a server using a freephone number, which
then accesses the Met Office website, where it retrieves the
information it needs and translates it into a simple single number ‘ 1,
2 or 3. Each number corresponds to the weather symbols for cloud, sun
and rain.

The symbol is then branded onto the bread in the
toaster using a heat-resistant stencil which is interposed between the
bread and the heating element for the final 20-odd seconds of toasting
‘ so you can still have your toast the way you like it.

Joe Klinger took toasters to the next level, technologically speaking, in his creation of ToAsTOr, the Toaster PC:

I wanted to make a small quiet computer for use as an MP3 server, DVD player, surfing, and occasional gaming. I also wanted it to be small enough to fit in a bag so that I could take it to friend’s houses or to work. When I set out to build this bread and butter computer 😉 I found the Mini-ITX form factor motherboards. I wanted to build something unique. I thought I would go to the antique stores and find something cool to rebuild as a computer. I wanted something built out of metal for RFI and EMI shielding.

I thought that a toaster would be cool and have the DVD/CDRW open out of the toast slot. The problem is that all of the toasters were too small to use a full size hard drive, video card, LCD, etc… Then I found a large toaster (1960 General Electric) with a sizeable crumb tray/warmer. This monster toaster used 1200 watts! So, I had to open a business account to buy the EPIA motherboard at the only place in Atlanta that has them. I then took it to the antique store to determine if it would fit. It would fit but only if the mobo was about an inch off the crumb tray. When I went to purchase the toaster the salesman mentioned something about whether or not it worked. I told him that it did not matter I was going to toss the inner workings and make something crazy. I pulled out the motherboard and he said, "You are going to make it into a robot?" I snickered and said, "no, only a computer!" I have skills, but damn – a robot? 🙂 I never tried it to see if it still worked as a toaster.

These connected toasters are, indeed, interesting curiosities. Maybe WiMax will encourage more development – and perhaps even adoption – of appliances that can talk to each other. I hope, though, that increasing connectivity – provided by WiMax and/or other standards – will offer more substantial capabilities to enrich our lives in more meaningful ways.

We’ll certainly be doing our part to contribute to that effort.