Curiously Creative

I worked in commercial lighting for seven years, and if it’s one thing it taught me it’s this: it takes a lot of work to supersede the humble lightswitch.

The lightswitch has two jobs

1. Turning the lights on when you want them on
2. Keeping the lights off when you want them off

In theory, a relay panel handles this task, while a connected smart system does the smart stuff. But, when it comes down to it, it’s the want part of the equation that’s difficult to replicate. A lightswitch offloads this part to the human. We flick a toggle or press a button and the lights match our preference. In a smart system, we must anticipate a user’s needs. We also need to add some sort of value. “I want to turn all of the lights off when my office closes” is an added value (anybody who has seen a building late with all of the lights blazing can recognize this). “The lights in a room with no windows should always turn on when I walk in the door” is an added value.

A well-done smart lighting system must anticipate a user’s needs for light and darkness. There’s no point in ripping out all the light switches if it doesn’t. Ask me about my husband’s skepticism when I first started replacing all of the switches in our house. It wasn’t until I’d grouped them together in scenes and added custom automations that he appreciated what I was doing. And if the lights had suddenly shut off while he was holding something sharp and/or heavy? All of that accumulated value would have gone right out the window.

Which brings me to this post about the worst products at CES, which I saw on a LinkedIn post by Jason Jacoby. Spoiler alert: their “Worst in Show” is a Samsung refrigerator with “smart” doors. And, I put smart in scare quotes for a reason. These doors are oh so very foolish.

Who looks at their refrigerator and says, “you know, it’s nice… but what I really wish is that I never had to touch the handles?” The refrigerator handle’s job requirements are eerily similar to those of a light switch:

1. Keep the door closed 99% of the time
2. Allow access to cold food when someone wants it

What is the value add of “smart” fridge doors? Sometimes we need to open doors when our hands are full. But isn’t that why we invented counters? “Impress my friends” is a value, but one with quickly diminishing returns. Is any of that worth the tradeoff in UX difficulties (the reviewers say your kitchen needs to be quiet for the doors to hear you), privacy and reliability?

When was the last time you heard someone say “my refrigerator is down until we can source a working handle?”

Never. The answer is never.

I recently made a tour around the world for work. I rode cars in Sweden, Belgium, Dubai, and Singapore, as well as in California and Las Vegas. And you know what happened in most of the fancy new electric cars? I had to ask the driver to point out where the handle was. Instead of a metal bar in a recognizable location, it was a tiny button in a random spot. This is embarrassing when I, an ostensible adult, have to ask the driver to tell me how to use a door. This is downright dangerous in an emergency.

If something is going wrong with a car, every second counts. Fumbling around to figure out how to exit is decidedly not in the job description of a handle. Even worse, electronic handles are less reliable than their mechanical counterparts. Just read this Car and Driver report about 15 deaths linked to problems with Tesla doors after crashes.

The second lesson I learned in commercial lighting? Life safety systems should always be mechanical.

This is the new hill that I will die on (hopefully not in a car fire). Let’s keep door handles boring, but simple.

Innovation for the sake of innovation is often mere enshittification.