Institute For The Future

Is That Your Wallet in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See me?

 

Via PSFK, I came across three concept designs for wallets from MIT's Media Lab that would offer real-time feedback on our spending habits. For example, the "Mother Bear" concept wallet would have a hinge on it "with a shorted motor in the hinge that resists opening" when the wallet's owner needs to start saving. My favorite of the three, the Peacock wallet, would "grow and shrink using a servo to reflect the balance in your accounts. Your assets will be on display to attract potential mates."

 

The wallets struck me as interesting in light of something I heard a couple weeks ago. I was speaking somewhere and showed a slide of a wearable patch that continuously monitors how many calories a person has consumed and how many he has burned. At the time, someone in the audience half-jokingly suggested that when the patch wearer hit his calorie limit, the patch could emit an electric shock that would seal his lips for the rest of the day to prevent him from eating.

 

The wallets also reminded me of something I've been thinking about since I interviewed science writer Gary Wolf about the future of self-tracking. At the time, he said:

 

 

 

I think [self-tracking] will become a mainstream, almost ubiquitous practice and at the same time will become invisible because it will be blend in with daily life. I think a good comparison is with the fate of computing. At one time, the people who used computers tended to be the kind of people who liked it. Over time, the process of computing has been incorporated into so many technologies and devices that many of the things we do that involve computing don’t seem like computing at all. Think of using a pedometer or step counter, or standing on a digital scale. The computing component is disappearing, and the self-tracking aspect will, too.

 

Self-tracking will disappear because it will be taken for granted. The quantitative tools in our lives will produce data that will be incorporated into some feedback mechanism; we will look at those mechanisms and they will influence us in some way. For instance, we will get biometric data in the form of feedback about how well we’re eating and sleeping, but we won’t have to peel back that information and do the analysis ourselves.

 

 

 

 

Put differently, I think what Gary was hinting at was a range of products and interfaces designed to give us, in effect, real-time, seamless feedback in a personalized, customized way--much like the Proverbial Wallets from MIT. It's one thing to see a high credit card bill; it's another thing entirely to have to physically force open a wallet, or to become suddenly unattractive due to an inability to balance a check book.

 

I doubt there's much demand for physical shocks that shut our mouths--and, for that matter, I'm not sure if the wallets-as-mating signals idea will ever find much of a market. But even if the wallet might not make sense, I could see other, social uses of these sorts of tools: A dieter, for example, might stick his calorie counting patch on his forehead to try to shame himself into eating less.

 

In other words, I do think these examples highlight the potential to begin thinking about design differently: Not simply as a way to make a device work intuitively, but as an adaptive tool to teach, coach, communicate with others, or otherwise connect parts of our lives to the world around us.