It seems to me that as technology drops in price and becomes ubiquitous that it tends to focus on the individual and neglect the family unit. I don’t see this as a deliberate attack on families, but I do see opportunities for innovation an effort in improving technology to make things easier for families.
A phone number used to be associated with a location–dialing a personal phone number would cause the phone to ring in a home. Today, more people are cutting the land line and only using cell phones and this sometimes makes effective communication more difficult because there is no way to contact anyone in the family, only a particular individual. This is particularly difficult for my kids who want to call friends–the younger ones don’t have cell phones yet, but when both parents work, calling cells simply doesn’t work.
Another example is the calendar. Traditionally there would be a calendar on the wall or refrigerator that would be used to track activities for the family as a whole as well as individual family members. Electronic calendaring systems have been around for quite some time now, but still paper calendars seem the norm for families.
It was the calendar that got me started making BakBoard, and it seems many other people have had similar ideas. Just today I learned about the wall mounted information display created by Tom Scott which has a calendar, weather information, and (my favorite) a countdown timer to help get the kids out the door to catch the bus. There’s also the Wall Mounted Calendar and Notification Center which doesn’t have the bus timer, but does have some buttons to change the calendar view and to refresh the web page. Additionally there is a simple Raspberry Pi Wall Mounted Google Calendar.
BakBoard is an attempt to try to make a gadget designed for consumption by the family rather than an individual. It remains in a known, central location and displays information for the entire household. However, I think the technology involved is primitive when compared to many services out there tailored to the individual.
I think the Amazon Echo is going in the right direction a device for a family rather than the individual and it is considerably more sophisticated than BakBoard. Boy #2 uses it to listen to music while washing the dishes. Boy #1 uses it to remind him when it’s time to go to school. Boy #3 likes the corny jokes it tells and also adds random items to the shopping list. The girl child can ask it how to spell words. The caveat is that everything happens on my account. It is possible to switch between accounts (both my wife and I have accounts but the kids don’t), but it seems cumbersome. Also, many of the integrations are user specific.
There is a lot of room for improvement in making technology look at the family rather than the individual. From what I’ve seen, the biggest complications are finding a good way to balance privacy and security. Other issues include treating the family as a unit while still recognizing that the family is made up of individuals. Since I don’t dislike my family, this is an area which I want to further explore.
One thought on “Less social networking, more familial interaction”