“Does My Arse Look Big in This…?”

I’m regularly told that it’s not what I say, it’s the way that I say it. I’m usually told this by my partner, Karen, who means that my tone of voice or choice of words are, to use her words, “Not nice!”

That got me thinking about how we communicate with the world around us. And how we are designing the world to communicate with us.

These days most man-made consumer objects have some form of feedback when we interact. It can be as simple as a light switch – press switch, light comes on – or it can be a complex voice assistant able to give real-time information when we ask it a question. And as we make these objects more complex we are building in artificial intelligence to make them more human in their response.

But as humans we don’t always say what me mean. Or mean what we say. There are subtleties to what we say and how we say things. And, intentionally or not, we can sometimes be “Not nice” in our responses.

So as we make items interact with us in a more human way, perhaps we should pause and think just how far we want to go with that…?