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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
A phone number used to be associated with a location–dialing a personal phone number would cause the phone to ring in a home.\u00a0 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<\/em> in the family, only a particular individual.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Another example is the calendar.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Electronic calendaring systems have been around for quite some time now, but still paper calendars seem the norm for families.<\/p>\n It was the calendar that got me started making BakBoard, and it seems many other people have had similar ideas.\u00a0 Just today I learned about the wall mounted information display created by Tom Scott<\/a> which has a calendar, weather information, and (my favorite) a countdown timer to help get the kids out the door to catch the bus.\u00a0 There’s also the Wall Mounted Calendar and Notification Center<\/a> which doesn’t have the bus timer, but does have some buttons to change the calendar view and to refresh the web page.\u00a0 Additionally there is a simple Raspberry Pi Wall Mounted Google Calendar<\/a>.<\/p>\n BakBoard<\/a> is an attempt to try to make a gadget designed for consumption by the family rather than an individual.\u00a0 It remains in a known, central location and displays information for the entire household.\u00a0 However, I think the technology involved is primitive when compared to many services out there tailored to the individual.<\/p>\n I think the Amazon Echo<\/a> is going in the right direction a device for a family rather than the individual and it is considerably more sophisticated than BakBoard.\u00a0 Boy #2 uses it to listen to music while washing the dishes.\u00a0 Boy #1 uses it to remind him when it’s time to go to school.\u00a0 Boy #3 likes the corny jokes it tells and also adds random items to the shopping list.\u00a0 The girl child can ask it how to spell words.\u00a0 The caveat is that everything happens on my account.\u00a0 It is possible to switch between accounts (both my wife and I have accounts but the kids don’t), but it seems cumbersome.\u00a0 Also, many of the integrations are user specific.<\/p>\n There is a lot of room for improvement in making technology look at the family rather than the individual.\u00a0 From what I’ve seen, the biggest complications are finding a good way to balance privacy and security.\u00a0 Other issues include treating the family as a unit while still recognizing that the family is made up of individuals.\u00a0 Since I don’t dislike my family, this is an area which I want to further explore.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 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. 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