So when a new technology hovers into view we need someone to roll out that map for us. Show us what's predestined, tell us what's going to happen. What behaviours will emerge? Who will be the winners? Will we finally get pills instead of food?
The big story, though, would be a lie. The future of a category such as "wearables" is so contingent and contested that it's bound to be a mess. Cultures and corporations will collide with beliefs. Overlapping aesthetics will trigger new concerns, technologies will rub up against laws, something will suddenly get really cheap and spawn an irritating Christmas phenomenon.
The only way to map this out is fractionally, in fragments. There are only little stories, bitty possibilities, tiny paragraphs with slightly amusing subheads.
So that's what we've got
And so you know what you're dealing with, let me tell you this. For years now I've worn one of those original iPod Nanos round my neck on a lanyard, with headphones. I live in dread of being stuck for five minutes with nothing to listen to so I always want music close at hand. The Nano slips inside my shirt and I secretly enjoy pressing the buttons through the fabric -- like I've got controls on my chest. The fact the screen lights up under my shirt like I'm Iron Man doesn't hurt either.
On the other hand, I'm 47. I've lived through several generations of false technological promise, waves of hype crashing on plastic beaches. I know we've seen remarkable progress but I also know that no one had any clue what they were doing. The winners we're looking at now are just the people, products and technologies that were lucky enough not to fail. That's me. Now you can calibrate your pinch of salt.
This will be essential because great new marketing beasts are stirring. A new technology category is spinning up. Tectonic plates of design, culture and opinion are being dragged into place, battle lines are being drawn, metaphors are being mixed and will soon be ready to deploy. You think there's been hype in the technology world? Wait until the fashion people get involved.
The Chinese army in your pyjamas
You can imagine this: get a bunch of tech executives and designers together for a brainstorm and ask them to come up with future projects. Perhaps throw in a presentation about trends for a bit of stimulus. They'll inevitably spot the potential for health-monitoring products for a rapidly ageing Western population. They'll think about wearable tech.
They'll invent intelligent nightwear that monitors your sleep patterns, wakes you when appropriate, nudges you if you're snoring, and sounds a gentle alarm if your elderly infirmity gets the better of your bladder. They'll call them Smart Pyjamas. Or Smartjammies. Or Psyjamas. They'll need power, of course, so I bet they'll come with a handy bedside charging station. And they'll have some sort of minimal operating system, so, sewn into the waistband alongside the washing instructions, there will be a handy guide to resetting the firmware. And, it'll need some sort of networking kit. We'll probably get that off that company owned by the Chinese military. They're very good, and, importantly, they're cheap.
Nymi wristband
Like your fingerprint, the pattern of your heartbeat is unique. Developed by Toronto-based startup Bionym, the Nymi wristband uses this fact to securely authenticate a user's identity: when you touch the device, it reads your ECG using electrodes. The band stays authenticated until it's removed, and automatically unlocks devices that are in close proximity (and have compatible apps). An integrated accelerometer and gyroscope also recognise simple gestures, so you can tailor commands/actions to tasks. getnymi.com
Technology has a long nose
You'll have heard about the Long Tail. (In a nutshell: markets have big blockbusters that sell loads of copies and a long tail of many, many products that sell just a few. There may be opportunity in the long tail.) Technologies have a long nose. Before the big break-out moment, before the hits arrive and everyone notices that it's happened, there's a long nose of precedent and people who got there first. Whatever you've just launched, or just heard of, someone has already done it. Someone was working on it at MIT or PARC and the Victorians did something very similar with telegrams and horses.
There were MP3 players before the iPod, there were digital music players before them, there were portable music systems before them and there's probably a recording of Boudicca's address to her troops made with a wooden stylus on a parchment cylinder. Don't let it worry you. The only pickings in the nose are for patent trolls.
Down the market
You can look at a new field of technology such as wearable computing and expect three things to emerge: the productive, the pointless and the perpendicular.
The productive is the stuff everyone expects. It's what most people are trying to build, especially with traditionally expensive technologies such as computing. These are the practical things -- firing tables, spreadsheets, routing algorithms, printers. The things you can sell to large organisations. Technologies start here and wend their way into the regular consumer landscape later on.
Then there's the pointless stuff, the technologies which seem, to most, to be a waste of time. They're the hacks that technologists do to amuse themselves, the ideas that always prove irresistible to every new intake of interaction-design students, the things that no one can imagine being popular: Tamagotchi, texting, Twitter.
And then there's the perpendicular -- the ideas that poke out from the other two, at completely strange angles. Lolcats, spambots, Google Ngram.
The first things to hit the mainstream will feel obliged to give us a show of "productivity theatre". Making a call is even easier on your handy smartwatch! Keep tabs on your kids with our Intelligent Wrist Bands! Ensure maximal knee health with our Always-On iTrousers!
But if wearable is going to get anywhere it'll need to embrace the pointless. It's the domain of the pointless, the terrain of the trivial. If we were all being practical, we'd wear identical nylon boiler suits and £4 watches -- but that's not the species we're in. We're the species that evolved a fashion industry and Global Hypercolor T-shirts. Efficiency is not a priority for wearables. What are the cheap fashion applications? What accessories can Claire's sell? What can you buy at the garden centre and down the market?
Because once your technology is there, it is cheap and ubiquitous enough for the perpendicular possibilities to emerge and that's when things get interesting.
NFC Ring
Using near-field-communication (NFC) technology, the NFC Ring can unlock smartphones and modified doors, and transfer information such as URLs to friends' devices -- all with a high five or fist bump. It has 144 bytes of user memory and contains two different NFC inlays to keep public and private data separate (so you don't accidentally share your key codes instead of your contact information). All of the tech is in a metal ring about seven millimetres wide and, because it uses passive NFC, never needs charging. Bradford-based developer John McLear raised more than £240,000 on Kickstarter for the project in August, smashing his £30,000 target. nfcring.com
The dream, of course, is to transition from wearable to invisible. The big, dumb tech-company wet dream is for all the technology to "go away" -- all the interfaces are in your brain, or your fingers, or in the air. They seem to think the intermediate step will be gloves. You'll be waving them around and doing gestural stuff to bring your wearables to life. It's just so dorky. Some things are just aesthetic dead ends. Bluetooth headsets. Drop shadows in PowerPoint. Cyber gloves.
Wearable, meet luggable
The name is never right. The internet of things is a bad name, social media is a bad name. Ubiquitous computing is just terrible. The names are always stuck somewhere between the old paradigm and an overly optimistic marketing spin. My favourite was the brief enthusiasm for "luggable" computers. The manufacturers couldn't credibly deliver "portable", so "luggable" popped up. I love the delicious implication -- you could lug it, but you probably wouldn't want to. Wearable feels the same.
Tattoo thermometers
Talk to the hand
I've been waiting for the smartwatch most of my life. I've bought many generations of failed and lumpen plastic from the long nose of wrist computing. There was the Casio MP3 player watch with barely enough battery to get through a Napalm Death song. The Fossil/Microsoft thing with the tiny stylus buried in the strap. The huge Swatch with its own version of metric time. They were all rubbish and I bought them all, because I grew up watching Knight Rider and I want a watch you can talk to. And, because it seems to me, there's a real product opportunity there. It's not just technology hype. The wrist has been a display area since before the watch and it's conveniently located right next to our most movable parts. It's the perfect place to put an outboard augment for the bigger slab of brain and battery we'll carry in our pockets or bags -- what we'll probably still call our phone, even though its operations are likely to be dispersed across our bodies and its services will be sprayed across the cloud.
Or maybe a bowler
Actually, just what is the domain of "wearable technology"? What are we talking about here? Let's leave out things such as nano fabrics for now. Let's say we mean putting computing (which these days should also include connectivity) in things people tend to have on their body. That list could include: shoes, hats, clothes, jewellery, tattoos, intestinal flora and fauna, wheelchairs, watches, perfume, piercings, prosthetics, wigs, backpacks, wristbands, bandages, plasters, spectacles and parrots (though that's mostly confined to pirates). Google Glass would be an example, as would a Nike+ FuelBand and a Fitbit and a Pebble. And so would those belt buckles you can get with LED displays on them so you can beam "amusing" messages across the dancefloor. And those light-up shoes that kids wear? Probably no computing in them yet -- but there will be pretty damn soon.
The wearable I'm looking for, personally, is a Smart Top Hat. It would be perfect. Lots of room in there for power, a processor, a camera. You can carry a decent weight on your head without too much trouble. It could be voice-controlled and voice-responsive without disturbing other people too much. Perhaps you could have some clever gestural stuff triggering a pleasant effect when you politely touch the brim of your hat. You can imagine perching it on a nice Victorian charging stand. And if you want to go offline, it's simple: just forget your hat.
Work wearable
Stop and think about it: who's doing wearable technology now? Firstly, obviously, traffic wardens. All those pouches -- a ticket machine, a camera, a phone. Then the police. Firefighters. Paramedics. Nurses. Then all the artificial-fibre enthusiasts -- cyclists, hikers, sailors, runners, people down the gym -- the world of technical apparel. If the technology companies had any sense they'd now be partnering with workwear makers -- the really practical, hardwearing stuff that's quite fashionable now. But, if there's one thing that consistently blindsides technology companies, it's finding their way into fashion. They all, as Steve Jobs famously said about Microsoft, "have no taste". Hence, will.i.am.
That's the part of the wearable revolution that I'm looking forward to most; the ungainly partnerships that'll bubble out of this mess. American Apparel and US Robotics, HP and H&M, Burberry and BlackBerry. Just think of the tech executives sweating on stage in sample-size smart garb. Or the panic backstage at their catwalk shows -- getting the lights, the models and the servers all up at the same time.
And there's a bunch of other aesthetics and concerns mixed in that pot too. Who's done wearables best in the past? Spies. A camera in a button? A mic in your lapel? Some of your more artisanal clothiers might appreciate the Stasi vibe, but most will find it a little off-putting. Here's a question: your dinner companion has a camera pointing at you, all the time. Would you rather that camera were big, obvious and blinking on their glasses, or would you prefer it to be tiny and discreet, nestling on a lanyard? Those are your choices. Unless you're un-British enough to actually say something about it. And how will paranoia evolve when everyone is always filming?
Machina MIDI Jacket
I want to ride my lifecycle
The lifetime of a fashionable T-shirt: a few weeks. A piece of technology: a few years. A great piece of jewellery: a few generations. These things don't align. You've been wearing in your fancy selvedge jeans for years, carefully not washing them, getting them just right. But then you have to dump them because the processor needs an upgrade. What a bummer.
Point of view
You're in a meeting. Some dreary person from HR. Tedious PowerPoint. This is not a productive use of your time. You have deadlines, assignments, to-dos that need to-doing. Fortunately you've just got some new peripherals for your phone. There's a motion controller in your watch and a display in the corner of your glasses. Subtle movements of your hand translate into cursor movements on a tiny screen. You check your email. Nothing. You suddenly notice you've been granted new lives in Candy Crush (wearable edition). You should play that now, then you can really get down to some work later. That's the greater productivity.
You're in a meeting. Presenting to the design group. Stuff they really need to know if they're going to stay employed. They're all looking at you, there are no laptops and they appear to be listening. But there's a weird vibe. Then you realise they've all got wearables. Some in their necklaces, some in their glasses. Some have had that weird augmentation, but they're all off somewhere else.
Actually, it's not so bad in these situations. You can normally get their attention back by hacking into one of their cameras and transmitting yourself back into their streams -- they love the novelty of that. It's a useful enough strategy that HR have built the shortcut into your top hat. It's in personal interviews that these things get unbearable. You're trying to talk to someone -- an ostensibly normal adult -- but they're coming on like an adolescent. A distant gaze and sullen mumbling. They're off in wearable space. Eventually, you have to drag them off to the Faraday cage every HR department has these days, just so you can force them to listen.
Will we wear screens on our clothes? Probably. It sounds stupid now, but so did Snapchat. I'm envisaging a sort-of flexible e-ink thing with a succession of amusing slogans like you get on T-shirts down the market.
Eye nailed shut
Think about drivable computing. Cars got computers before we really noticed. Engine-management systems, squirrelled away inside, reporting, adjusting, tweaking. Performance improved significantly but we could no longer fix our own cars. You needed the right interface to wire yourself up to the engine. So, gradually, we stopped doing it and the car makers stopped allowing it. These days they might as well nail the bonnets shut. Is that the endgame for your Fitbit or your Google Glass?
Muse headband
Bikes yes, meetings, no
If you're old enough you'll remember the minor publishing flurry that accompanied mass participation in what we used to call "online". We all had to read books about netiquette so we knew how to reply appropriately to emails (less formally than letters, apparently) and could answer a text without alienating our children. It seems quaint and silly now, but new technology puts us in uncomfortable new situations. Society needs a way to work out a response. I've noticed, for example, that when my smartwatch buzzes with the arrival of a text message -- I've got a Pebble, obviously (I told you I was a sucker for this stuff) -- I really can't help but glance at it.
When I'm on my bike this is an improvement on my previous behaviour -- risking life and limb by looking at my phone (I know, Mum, I'm sorry); but in a meeting it just looks like I'm bored. There's not a critical mass of people who understand what's going on. Hurry up please, people. I want to look at my watch.
You can't start with an ecosystem
The problem everyone has to face is that wearables will really work only when they're part of an "ecosystem" -- a mutually supportive network of hardware and software that means that things work together well and improve each other. Without that, each new wearable has to install and boot its own infrastructure every time it starts. That's why we'll creep towards a wearable world, edging out on beams of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Otherwise it will be like trying to sell someone a mouse before they've got a PC. But there will still be a complicated mess of protocols and standards. If I were a high-end furniture maker, I'd be working on a fancy dressing-table with all sorts of hidden drawers and compartments for all the docking and charging stations our future jewellery is going to require. Delicate, refined, with lots of power.
Wave 'em like you just don't care
We all have our little technology behaviours. Theories about where the Wi-Fi is strongest and clever ways to balance on a park bench and get a signal. We're going to look very odd when our devices are embedded, getting our shoes to talk to our watches, getting our backpacks to sync with our hats, waving our hands in the air.
Now I think about it
JD Wetherspoon will probably open a bar called The Faraday Cage and we'll all go there for a connectivity holiday and the last real pub quiz in town.Russell Davies is a creative director at GDS and a partner at Really Interesting Group. russelldavies.typepad.com/home
Kapture wristband
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