Interactions

Photo by Robert S. Donovan

Lately, I've been in the trenches: hip-deep in a home renovation project. As I've been swinging a hammer on evenings and weekends, I've been struck by the discord between the kinds of technologies we use at home and the kinds of technologies we use to make home. Today I spent most of the day perched on a ladder, arms stretched overhead, stapling PEX pipe to the ceiling. If you haven't had the pleasure of working with PEX pipe on a day where the temperature is below freezing inside your house, imagine a tightly wound coil of two hundred feet of extremely stiff garden hose that has been wound up so long it has taken on the physical properties of a snap bracelet and the temperament of a cast member from The Real Housewives. The stuff is not fun.

Why, I thought, as I threaded the recalcitrant PEX through seventeen holes, arms aching, dodging its attempts to hit me in the face, can't this be as easy as setting up my Apple TV, or hacking that netbook I bought a few years back? It's funny what we think of as ease of use when it comes to information technology, where the idea that things should be easy to use is gospel. Heck, I was annoyed that I had to use a three-button remote to move the cursor around the screen to enter my wifi password. In the world of technology, improving ease of use has measurable financial implications: move a button a few pixels, change some wording, or add an image, and sales go up. But who would know if I were having an easier time with the PEX pipe? It's not connected to the Internet.

Unlike the automated processes that create the circuit board building blocks for consumer electronics, American houses are largely built using technologies that would have been identifiable in the 1940s. Change has been incremental, but still transformational—just not in the way you might expect. Most of us don't live in dome houses or have pushbutton kitchens. For example, the introduction of circular saws allowed framers to cut more than one stud at once. Gypsum board replaced time- and skill-intensive lath and plaster with four foot by eight foot sheets. Both these technological innovations made it possible to build houses at a pace that enabled large-scale development. Plywood emerged from use during the war for airplane wings as a stronger replacement for solid wood; later on, oriented strand board was developed as a less resource-intensive replacement for plywood. Yet, even with these changes at the component level, one key thing has stayed the same. Those who took a stand in the debate over Apple's use of skeuomorphism should take note: Houses have remained remarkably recognizable; a Colonial built today looks much like one built in the 1920s.

This is despite much technological innovation. Window materials now encompass wood, aluminum, vinyl, and fiberglass, but most builders and homeowners still consider a wood window to be the mark of quality; never mind that fiberglass windows are more structurally stable and generally better insulating. The market for siding has exploded, but the technologically enhanced versions—fiber cement and vinyl—still ape good old wood. And most people, due to personal preference, considerations for resale, or both, choose a house that can be described as "traditional," with the edgier among us going for a slightly more recent tradition that goes by the name of "midcentury modern."

While those who see technology as the harbinger of a better and brighter future often point to the potential of newly emerging products, spending a day or two on a residential building site is a powerful way to understand the power and limitations of tradition. For example, many people, including fellow blogger Uday Gajendar, are excited about the potential of 3-D printing, but my framing crew could have built another house in the time they've been working on mine if they simply had a durable, affordable, and portable machine that could cut two by fours to length more accurately and quickly than a human carpenter. (One of the most tedious tasks in framing a house is cutting and installing fireblocking, horizontal pieces of wood that go between the vertical studs and which are supposed to stop a blaze from traveling up a hollow wall; because of normal variations in framing lumber and the hand-built nature of construction, each of the hundreds of pieces in an average house must be measured and cut to fit.) Or spend some time wiring together the controls for a radiant heating system—mine still needs to be completed, if you'd like to come over and help!—and marvel at how ludicrous it is that a $19 wristwatch has exponentially more computing power than a $49 thermostat, which has two modes, on or off, no memory or ability to sense what's going on outside, let alone one room over, and direct control over thousands of tons of carbon emissions over the life of the house. (Note for those up on the latest in HVAC buzz: I didn't buy a high-tech Nest thermostat because my system—for a 1800 square foot house—would have required seven of the iPod-like $249 devices.)

I question the idea that 3-D printing is going to transform all aspects of a world in which we are still measuring and cutting tree chunks to build houses, but I do agree with Uday that design thinking will become an expected skill in the marketplace. So here's my plea for technologists interested in design thinking: Start thinking more widely about technology. Look past the screen. Even the new influence of design seems to apply only to slick, modernist smartphone peripherals. Take a gander at all the stuff you need to do something as mundane and complex as build a house. And then make that technology—saws, drills, staple guns, measuring tapes, thermostats, and especially PEX pipe—easy to use. Or at least as easy to use as UNIX.

Jonathan Bean is a serial remodeler and a postdoctoral fellow in design studies at Parsons the New School for Design. He studies technology, taste, and domestic consumption.

Jonathan Bean