Pixels and Place

by Kate O'Neill

  Of course, human medical treatments are happening, too, from models to implants to custom-made surgical tools. The cost has been one of the barriers to more widespread experimentation and adoption, but is rapidly decreasing to the point where it will begin to make sense in broader applications.

  Takeaways for Business

  The advent of additive (3-D) printing and manufacturing technology leaves a great deal of room for expansible ideas. Customizations are or will be possible on a scale that wasn’t possible before.

  Smart Homes and Ambient Tech

  More and more data is being collected by “smart” or “connected” devices about our physical beings and surroundings, and this data can be used to affect our surroundings. And if anything blurs the lines between what “online” and “offline” means anymore, it’s this kind of tech.

  Case in point: Is the Nest thermostat an online or offline device? It’s one of many “smart” thermostats. As a physical device, just like any thermostat, it regulates the temperature of a physical space. So it’s an offline device, right?

  But wait. It’s internet-connected, so you can adjust it from your phone or another online connection, so it’s an online device.

  It’s both. Okay, that part was easy.

  But here’s the blurrier part: The same algorithms that detect patterns in your home’s environment and your preferences are also in use in other homes, and over time, the intelligence from all those homes running the same algorithms can be used to fine-tune its performance.

  Which means, in other words, it’s indirectly connecting your physical environment, virtually, through data, to other people’s physical environments.

  That’s how blurry things are getting, and that blending and crossing over is only the beginning.

  ***

  Home was our starting point for this discussion, and it’s appropriate that we return to it here, mid-way, and recognize its own changing role in this landscape. The adoption of integrated digital experiences into the home is well underway. For evidence of this, check out the e-commerce websites of some of the major home improvement retailers. When you think of Home Depot, for example, you probably think of lumber and paint; but as the times change, their inventory has been changing, too. The “smart home” category on their website is loaded with products and subcategories.

  The star of the “smart home” category of products and devices is the smart thermostat—it seems to be the one connected home appliance most people can grasp the benefit of right away. But there are also connected locks, like Lockitron and August Smart Lock, which have been available for home use since the early 2010s. These allow the user to lock and unlock their doors from anywhere by using an app, and the locks, detecting the user’s proximity through the app using sensors, can unlock the door automatically as the user approaches the house.

  Even Amazon Dash belongs in this category. These are single-function re-ordering widgets that mount near a usage context in your home, such as near wherever you keep your paper towels, and allow you to re-order a previously-specified supply of, say, a two-pack of Bounty paper towels. The idea is to let you place an order for a staple product at the moment you realize you’re getting low—before you can leave that context, forget about it, and run out completely. Of course, the benefit to Amazon is transparent, but if the Dash buttons help a customer even once to avoid running out of a convenience product, the customer probably appreciates the utility, no matter how heavy-handed the consumerism may be.

  You can expect the range of options and uses for smart home devices to continue expanding. And it blurs over into ambient devices as a whole. They’re all part of a larger digital mesh, as it’s sometimes called. Ambient devices are a category of smart devices that can monitor baseline settings in the physical surroundings and use an internet connection to modify them. That includes sensors around us detecting our presence, as well as the accelerometer in the iPhone that gauges direction, rate, and other dimensions of motion.

  The integration of these devices into our surroundings is diverse, ranging from touchable interactive surfaces to biometric recognition, with many of the devices connected and controlled from multiple angles by multiple devices and interfaces.

  What’s more, this area integrates with 3-D printing and other just-in-time physical emergence from digital cues, because digital cues can be passively received and trigger a physical response. And all of this interacts with the devices and data around you, from autonomous cars and other devices, to algorithms and artificial intelligence.

  The duality of this is amazing: Our physical presence is increasingly affected by the technology around us, even as our digital presence is increasingly immersive. There is likely to be no modality of everyday life that will not be affected by a data layer of tracking or modulation.

  Your movement follows patterns throughout the day and week, and ambient systems tracking those movements are adapting to those patterns—sometimes through human intervention, such as when analysts review store data about foot paths and optimize the layout—but increasingly those adaptations are algorithmic and part of a machine-learning cycle.

  Takeaways for Business

  The implication for many businesses isn’t just to build smart or connected devices that can track data about physical surroundings and manipulate those surroundings. It’s more about being mindful of the nuanced ways that these devices and other platforms and products are blurring the lines between online and offline experiences. Users of these products are becoming increasingly expectant that they will have the opportunity to do things like controlling their home appliances from their phone, or getting usage reports about how their energy consumption compared to the average customer, or seeing their data from one device in context of another device, and so on.

  The Human-Centric Data Model: A Look at Airbnb’s “Don’t Go There; Live There” Campaign

  One validation of the idea that deixis and the language of relative place and movement resonates with people (see the section on “The Language of Relative Place and Movement” for more on this) is its use in advertising and marketing communications. Take, for example, the “Don’t Go There; Live There” campaign Airbnb introduced in April 201655. The ads argue that “going” somewhere like Paris inherently implies following a visitor’s mindset; and limiting your experience of the city to only the most popular attractions—which in many cases are exactly where the locals don’t go—means missing out on the essence of a place.

  Instead, the ads contend, we might set out to get to know the character of a city through its people, its culture, and—this being a promotion for Airbnb, of course—its homes. We might set out to live there, even if, as the voice-over intones, it’s only for one night.

  It’s a very good subtle realization on the part of the company. It twists the language we use to describe the experience of a place to make us more aware of our behavior and our choices.

  And for marketers and placemakers in general, it’s a good lesson to recognize the layers of context that make up experience.

  It’s also an interesting take on the meaning of place, and technology’s role in facilitating it.

  It’s the Data Model

  In the presentation Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky gave when he was introducing this “live there” idea at their “Open” event, he showed a side-by-side comparison of the top five recommendations of where to visit as they appear in TripAdvisor (mostly coming from tourists), versus the top five recommendations from Airbnb hosts (who live locally). With the exception of the Jardin du Luxembourg (Luxembourg Gardens—and as a side note, my personal favorite place in Paris), the two lists are different in both content and overall character. Tourists most often recommend the Eiffel Tower, of course, and world-famous museums: the icons of the city. Locals, who perhaps take the icons in stride and prefer to focus on the underlying culture of the city and its inhabitants, recommend a market, a park, a garden, and so on.

  The only difference here, in a sense,
is the data model. The same places exist in Paris regardless of whether you’re collecting the list through TripAdvisor or through Airbnb, but the difference isn’t fundamentally about the website that did the collecting or the people who submitted the recommendations: It’s what data you use to create the set and rank them. Neither of these lists of recommendations is wrong, but it’s about purpose and priority—and meaningfulness. If you want your list to emphasize the tourist perspective (or the “go there” mentality), you might sort for or give weight to the overall popularity of a recommendation; but if you want to emphasize the local’s perspective (or the “live there” mentality), you might sort for or give weight to expertise relative to the area.

  The key here is that building a service that will be of real value in enhancing a person’s experience of place isn’t only about marketing the service well; it’s about deeply understanding the layers of that experience and how that understanding will be populated out through every facet of the service.

  Digital Interactions with Place: The Starbucks App

  There are many noble and necessary implementations of the convergence of physical and digital experiences that have to do with public safety, emergency response, access to important resources, and so on. In that perspective, the ability to order a Starbucks soy latte from an iPhone while walking down a Midtown Manhattan street certainly doesn’t earn any kind of foundational standing in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it’s still pretty cool. It’s the little details in the Starbucks mobile app that make it such a delightful experience (and one that could easily be studied for fulfilling more humanitarian causes than coffee).

  How is the data model supporting human experience here?

  It provides unprecedented access to choice, control and visibility of location and timing, plus full integrated payment. All supporting the experience of walking in, skipping the line, and picking up your drink.

  Screen shots of Starbucks app

  Customizing orders through kiosks or displays or even apps is not new, but the whole experience design here was particularly well done.

  Sure, some of these are not complicated things to get right, but getting a lot of them right together is more rare. Some of them are just nicely executed, such as the juxtaposition of your walk or drive time and your drink prep time. That’s the kind of visibility and forethought that we want to provide in converged experiences. Additionally, the fully integrated payment system may not be anything truly groundbreaking, but it’s part of the seamlessness of the experience. You’re fully specifying your order, you get to see how long it may take you to get to the store to pick it up, you know how long it should take the drink to be prepared, and you’re closing out by paying for it, all in one easy process.

  The real thing that’s happening here that’s worth the consideration is that you’re walking into the store, bypassing any line at the registers, picking up your drink, and walking out of the store.

  That’s the real goal: alignment between what Starbucks wants and what customer wants.

  That is the goal, not the fact that I can throw three shots of espresso into my drink and customize it with vanilla syrup and caramel syrup and soy milk, though that’s all quite nice (if a little excessive, from a caffeine and sugar consumption standpoint). Starbucks benefitted and continues to benefit in a profit sense from its simplifying my ability to customize and order my drink.

  The fact that we’re both benefiting, that I get to walk in and easily pick up my drink, means I’m now coming back to Starbucks far more often than I otherwise would. It’s a more rich and fulfilling experience in my life in this very small way.

  So now when I do that, Starbucks is benefiting again and again and again from having been clever in their design of that app.

  Meaningful Strategies for Integrated Experiences Across Industries

  Most of this book so far has examined the human experience at the crossroads of digital data’s integration with the physical world. But our examination wouldn’t be complete without looking at how that integration will play out across industries—the industries we work in or the businesses we own. These changes aren’t only evolving the consumer experience; they’re also shaking up what’s possible in many areas of business: marketing, manufacturing, operations, and more.

  In manufacturing and other heavy industry, the integration of 3-D and additive printing has dramatically changed operations, not to mention the use of robotics and automation.

  “There are three big things in play,” said Vish Soaji, GE Digital’s head of engineering for industrial IOT application. “Machine learning . . . sensors collecting data, then you combine that data with other types of data to make changes. Second is big data and third is analytics.” . . . Meanwhile, Greg Kinsey, vice president of Hitachi Insight Group said Hitachi had identified three areas where IIoT can produce a major impact on the manufacturing sector: smart maintenance; improving quality in production; and dynamic scheduling.56

  How will automation affect meaning? Between advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, on-demand 3-D manufacturing, and so on, there are huge shifts happening and yet to come in industry, labor, economics, and society. The answer is still not clear.

  None of these, of course, have so much to do with connected experiences as they do with implications of connected devices. The experiences come after the fact, after the manufacture, down the supply chain, when the consumers come in contact with the manufactured good. Still, it’s helpful to remember that everything we interact with has a data trail, even if we can’t experience it; and there will be implications from even the upstream changes and efficiencies of the convergence of physical and digital.

  But humans are and will be still in the center of it all, developing the tech, specifying the product, consuming the goods, and ultimately trying to find fulfillment in a model that may obviate one source of their fulfillment: work.

  But of course, the more consumer-facing the industry, the more the changes connected experiences bring will be felt.

  Beacons, Micro-Location, and Proximity-Based Targeting

  The promise of beacons is the ability to engage meaningfully with customers, hotel guests, museum visitors, and people in a variety of other contexts based on: 1) the context of where they are and 2) what marketers and experience designers can infer they might be looking at and interested in because of that. Along with personalized information about, say, a customer’s preferences that the retailer might have access to because of purchase history, the aggregate ability to influence purchase behavior through suggestions and tailored displays is tremendous.

  There are quite a few companies now manufacturing beacons, including Estimote, Swirl, and GPShopper . . . and of course a little company known as Apple. Though Apple hasn’t yet manufactured a physical beacon, they built iBeacon technology into their smartphone and watch devices and integrated it into the iOS7 mobile operating system. As a result, there are an estimated 200 million iOS devices that can serve as transmitters and receivers.57

  In retail, beacons help retailers respond to behavioral cues from in-store shoppers, in a way parallel to how cookies and tracking data help e-commerce retailers respond to behavioral cues online. Optimizing the store experience around these cues can certainly increase the likelihood that people will buy, while it can also improve people’s enjoyment of a store.

  Beyond retail, location data and beacons can transform social experiences. For example, Facebook launched a program called Place Tips. According to Facebook, “Your location is determined using cellular networks, Wi-Fi, GPS and Facebook Bluetooth® beacons. Viewing place tips doesn’t post on Facebook or show people where you are.”

  Via Facebook’s press release:

  In certain places, we’re also testing place tips using Facebook Bluetooth® beacons, which send a signal to your phone that helps us show you the right tips for the right place. We’ll be testing these in a handful of businesses in New York such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dominiq
ue Ansel Bakery, Strand Book Store, the burger joint at Le Parker Meridien Hotel, Brooklyn Bowl, Pianos, the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop and Veselka.

  Businesses can partner with Facebook, exposing statuses posted at the location to people who are currently there. They can also help with navigation in larger stores, in some cases even offering turn-by-turn directions to a desired product, aisle, or section of the store.

  They can offer contextually relevant offers and information, based on data and cues that indicate where a customer is in their purchase journey and what previous purchases a customer may have made.

  They can help optimize merchandising, allowing for product to be displayed in areas that will see the most foot traffic and where in-store analytics indicate the highest likelihood of sale.

  Based on what a customer may have tried on, or how long they lingered in front of something in a store, or what aisle they frequently visit but never buy from, online marketing can continue to serve targeted messages and offers to try to close the deal.

  Does some of this get a little creepy? Yes. Most people seem to think so, when asked. A 2015 survey revealed that more than 75 percent of respondents said they would not shop at a store that used facial recognition technology for marketing purposes. However, discounts might be the key to turning consumer perception around, as the number dropped to 55 percent of respondents when they knew there would be a benefit associated with it.58