This article was taken from the December 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.

Back in the 50s, when small electric motors became inexpensive, there was a fairly sudden redefinition of products when can-openers, razors and even toothbrushes all became "motorised". A similar, and more likely profound, shift will happen with the plummeting cost of microprocessors.

What people don't realise is that although the microprocessor in your computer is indeed going down in price, powerful "system on a chip" devices, which contain everything you need to make a simple web-connected computer, are plummeting even faster.


We're already seeing examples of these types of smart products today with web-connected thermostats, Wi-Fi bathroom scales and prescription-medicine bottles that call when you forget to take your pills. But this wave is accelerating: there is a zombie apocalypse of smart devices coming our way. This melodramatic phrase fits because we are simply not ready. We are so entrenched in our old-school concept of "a computer" that we can't see just how profound this wave will be.

The problem is that nearly every smart product today has a mobile app for your phone (usually iPhone or Android, but rarely both). This works for today's market but it will eventually break down. As smart devices become plentiful, will we be responsible for installing, organising and launching every app we need for every device in our lives? This might work if we had only thermostats to worry about. But, as the cost plummets to pennies, we'll see almost everything becoming smart in some way: a smart parking-meter at the airport, the smart poster in the mall, even smart packaging in the supermarket. As more devices become smart, their demand for interaction through mobile apps will quickly become overwhelming and impractical. We need a new paradigm, something that breaks out of our long love affair with apps; a paradigm where smart devices can broadcast their name to the world around them and any phone, laptop, TV or even interactive eyeglasses can find and then interact with them. I call this "just-in-time" interaction: a nearly instantaneous user experience (UX) model, meant more for buildings, malls and museums than the office workstations of the 80s.

Just-in-time interaction allows for a "use it and lose it" approach to smart products that is impossible with mobile applications. Are you really going to stop in front of a smart movie poster and download its app before watching the trailer?


Fortunately, the technology to implement just-in-time interaction already exists. We only need to agree on a few ways for devices to broadcast their name wirelessly and be discovered by nearby smart displays. It's important to note this must be a user-requested interaction, as a beep-in-your-pocket approach would drive people crazy.

The actual interaction with the user would be done using simple web pages, either directly from a web server or from the device itself. These smart devices will likely be functionally modest so even today's web standards are more than adequate. For the last year I've been speaking about and exploring this topic, creating a series of prototypes to explore how this system could be built. The one fundamental learning so far is that this system must be open and free; it can't be proprietary and encourage lock-in to a single vendor. Just as web pages are discoverable and usable by all, so must smart devices be. Are we up to the challenge of creating a world where we can actually find and use them or are we willing to let one company lock us into its vision and restrictions of use?

Scott Jenson is a creative director at frog. He was the first member of the User Interface group at Apple in the late 80s, working on System 7, the Apple Human Interface guidelines and the Newton. He was later director of product design for Symbian, and managed the mobile UX group at Google for six years