Interview with Mike Kuniavsky, author of “Smart Things”
David Bevans of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers interviewed Mike Kuniavsky, writer, designer, researcher and entrepreneur and co-founder of both ThingM, an electronic hardware design, development and manufacturing company, and Adaptive Path, and author of “Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design (previously featured on Putting People First).
“Dave Bevans: You can look at how technology works and what tools can work best, but what drives you to make them easier?
Mike Kuniavsky: “Easier†is a difficult question. I like to think of it as using technology in appropriate places. And I can think of it as creating technologies that help people live their lives better. What tools can we build to help people have happier and more productive lives? Part of that is understanding the appropriate places for technological interventions based on the available technology, and part of that is understanding the way to make those technological interventions appropriate to people and to what they’re trying to do. I think the combination of those things is what combines to form the concept of easier. Because when technology is easy to use, it means that it’s appropriate to the task and it’s sufficiently understandable to be able to be used for that task.”
(via InfoDesign)
