Is Technology Becoming Too Personal?

A next-generation home phone is designed to make technology communal again. Is this a peek into how we will live with the Internet of Things?

Technology is becoming an increasingly personal experience. Most us have our own mobile phone, and lending it to someone else can feel curiously uncomfortable: it is private. Long gone are the days where there would be a “family computer” in the living room or office, as we often have personal laptops. The TV may still be sitting in a communal space, but even so every family member can have a personal Netflix profile which is tailored solely to their taste.
As technology moves away from being a communal family experience, are we losing something in the process?
Yes, say the creators of Ily. Designed to fill what they see as a hole created by the personalisation of tech, Ily is a next-generation home phone. “We feel there is a hunger for devices that are shared, that can be touched,” Jon Marshall, chief designer at MAP, which designed Ily, told ‘FastCoDesign’.
The idea behind Ily, which was invented by a company called Insensi, is to create a family gadget, something everyone can use to communicate with each other and share things like messages, photos, drawings, and exchange elements such as shopping lists and reminders. Families can also see a record of their day’s communications with Ily’s ‘Family Feed’ which records which family members have been interacting. This is sort of like a digital refrigerator door for hanging messages, invitations and reminders, except that this “door” also makes calls and won’t let notes slip down and get lost.
You can see the use for a device like this when considering how it includes kids too young to have their own mobile phones, as well as grandparents who may not be too savvy with a shared smartphone calendar. Ily hooks up to a regular phone jack or WiFi, and it’s simple to use as it has photos of each family member, and you merely tap the screen to call them. There’s even a handset for those who prefer it.
“It’s a challenge to design something that as parents you feel like your kids can just walk up to. In the past it was the landline phone,” Marshall told ‘Wired’. Now, 41% of US households don’t even have landlines anymore, as smartphones have become good enough, and calls on them cheap enough, to replace their function. Marshall called Ily a response to a call for simpler modes of communication, as iPhones and Android phones can be overwhelming: “Precisely because these devices are so successful and can do so many things, they’ve left open a human desire to create devices that have more singular functions, especially when they’re to do with strong emotional things, like in this case, communication and playfulness.”.
Whether Ily becomes the next generation “landline”, with one found in every home, remains to be seen. But the concept is interesting because the connected home may well need a command centre. So far, this has apps or remote controls, but if every fridge, radiator and coffee machine is to become intelligent, it would make sense to have all these control mechanisms on single device, and to keep it in the house. Following this logic, you could argue the Internet of Things stands to make technology more communal again, at least to an extent: we’ll all have our personal devices, but we’ll also have shared spaces where technology is accessible to everyone in the household.
The Internet of Things could also become the Internet of People.