People Over Megahertz

Arduino Technology
People Over Megahertz

M36-lectron

Excerpt from the article:

When I was a kid I got into electronics because I started reading specialized magazines on the topic. At the same time it was hard for me to learn electronics from them because the content was not really beginner friendly and the projects were not very exciting. They were conceived more for people who were already into the technology and loved circuits than for explaining to newbies what circuits do and what you can do with them.

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Massimo Banzi

Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of the Arduino project. He is an Interaction Designer, Educator and Open Source Hardware advocate.

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Arduino Technology
People Over Megahertz

make-the-future-with-arduino_mb

When I was a kid I got into electronics because I started reading specialized magazines on the topic. At the same time it was hard for me to learn electronics from them because the content was not really “beginner friendly” and the projects were not very exciting. They were conceived more for people who were already into the technology and loved circuits than for explaining to newbies what circuits do and what you can do with them.

The way I really started learning electronics was when I received a kit as a present. It was called the Lectron System and was made by the German company Braun. It was a composed of cubes you could snap together magnetically to build different circuits just by following some simple drawings and instructions. The cubes were transparent so you could look inside to learn about the electronic parts.

The kit was a complete experience because it also had a book with great illustrations and simple explanations designed to look very appealing and make technology less scary through hands-on experiments. The original ad said: “Hey look, I just built a radio in two minutes” and it was actually true! Here’s what the kit looked like.

Designing the User Experience

Dieter-Rams-and-his-designs
Dieter Rams.

The most interesting aspect of this kit was the ability to shorten the time between starting a project and the moment you get a positive result right “out-of-the-box.” Playing with it and learning from it got me into electronics and sparked my interest in design.

It turns out the kit was created by one of the most important designers of the period, Dieter Rams. He worked for Braun in the 1960s and 1970s and created many iconic objects and inspired a lot of contemporary Californian design as you can see from the pictures below:

Dieter-Rams_Apple_Design

Check out this video with Dieter discussing good design:

Dieter’s way of looking at design was expressed in a broader sense: He came up with a list of design principles and many of those principles reflected the relationship of people interacting with objects and space.

I think this point is very important when designing technology: we must care about the people who are using it more than the technology itself.

When I got my first computer in the 1980s, it was the moment when people could finally afford a computer without mortgaging their home. To use it I had to punch hexadecimal numbers on a keyboard and the result was that you could display numbers on the LCD display. It was an Amico2000 (Friend2000) and it was not, what I’d define “user friendly.”

My next computer, the Sinclair ZX81 Basic, was a great improvement. It had only 1kb of RAM, but I could do a lot of stuff with it and it was really simple and could offer a whole experience. Even when I took it apart, a habit I’ve had since I was a kid, the circuit gave me a feeling of simplicity from just a few components you could assemble yourself.

ZX81

The book that came with it—even if you happen to read it now—offers a good way to learn the basics of the programming language by moving forward progressively toward more complex concepts.

The Birth of Arduino

Fast forward to 2002. I was teaching at IDII Design School in Ivrea, Italy, the city where  Olivetti was born and a lot of the Arduino boards are still made. The school was focused on interactive design, a specific branch of design that looks at how people interact with technology. The idea is to not only design the shape of something, but also how people will interact with that object. This is very important because you can have a nice product with a terrible interface. The result is a less-than-beautiful user experience.

IDII_toolbox_map_TODO
Click to see the full size image.

The students usually don’t have a background in technology. They don’t know how to program or to do electronics and we only gave them two-to-four weeks to create physical computing projects. At that time, the tools you’d find in the market were mostly designed for engineers, with a lot of options, lots of jumpers, and lots of connectors. Students found them too complex and couldn’t figure them out properly. Looking at the way we worked with students taught us a lot, and Arduino came out of that work.

Optimizing the User Experience

If you look at it, you realize Arduino boards are a mashup of open technologies wrapped up in a unified user experience. From the out-of-the-box experience we want to know how long it takes to you to go from zero to something that works. This is very important because it creates a positive reinforcement that you are on the right path. The longer that time is, the more people you lose in the process.

I think we are all on the edge of a new step in the maker movement and some of you are surely working on the next big thing. Please keep at it, but keep in mind the overall experience. You can put a processor that is 100 Mhz more than another one, but the way you interact with it makes a huge difference to people because it’s more important to take care of the experience people have when they learn than to give them power they don’t know what to do with.

20 thoughts on “People Over Megahertz

  1. Mark Evans says:

    Well yes and no! If this was 100% true everyone would use iOS for there portable devices and nothing else. Sometimes depth is as important as width. Some of the best software I have used had a terrible interface. I’ll take the power of android over the instant gratification of iOS any day.

    1. Andrew Brannan says:

      It’s a design consideration. Yes, you can have products that are very powerful and obscure, but you are limiting your audience. Sometimes, that’s what you want. Yet all else being equal, powerful and intuitive beats powerful and obscure.

      1. Mark L Evans says:

        Agreed, if you can have/do it all great, my only point is that “out of box experience” is not the ONLY consideration, sometimes/often compromises have to be made.

  2. James says:

    Dieter Rams had absolutely nothing to do with the design of the Lecton kits. They were created (and patented) by Georg Greger and marketed by a model train company until their assets were acquired by Braun in 1967.

    1. Massimo Banzi says:

      He’s quoted by different sources as one of the designers of lectron. including the lectron.de website! http://www.lectron.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=48

  3. Tushar Jambhekar says:

    I completely agree with marks opinion. Depth and width both matters
    As far as arduino is concerned I learned it in 3 to 4 days. And though i like it for quick small prototypes lack of debugging tool stops me for using it for serious big projects ( I know arduino is not meant for that)
    I believe things depends on target audience and “everybody” can not be a target audience

    1. Mark L Evans says:

      “everybody” can not be a target audience …. so well put, I am so stealing that. As to the arduino, I am a newbie so it is being great to me but even from where I am at I can see where someone with ambitions for a complex project would want to “graduate” to the AVR IDE

      1. John Blakey says:

        Mark, I agree, currently I use Atmel Studio (avr studio) with the Arduino plugin to program my Arduino and like the fact that I have the option to move to pure avr in the future. But Arduino in Atmel is a great combination.

        1. partaik says:

          For more depth and width, try Wiring (the original idea behind Arduino). You can program atmel, wiring, arduino, BDmicro, RogueRobotics… wiring.org.co
          enjoy

          1. Mark L Evans says:

            thanx partaik, I’ll look into it…

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Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged
Massimo Banzi

Massimo Banzi is the co-founder of the Arduino project. He is an Interaction Designer, Educator and Open Source Hardware advocate.

View more articles by Massimo Banzi

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