Book Review: Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things, by David Rose

Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things. David Rose. New York, New York: Scribner, 2014. 304 pp. $20.50 hbk.Entrepreneur and MIT instructor David Rose has predicted the eventual emergence of four distinct technological layers of society: "Terminal World," prosthetics, animism, and "Enchanted Objects," for which his recent book-length advocacy has been subtitled Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things. Terminal World refers to our smartphone systems of today, expanded exponentially through cheaper, stronger, and more interconnected screens. Prosthetics, such as eyeglasses and hearing aids, will continue to be amplified, and animism (social robots) will interact with us in increasingly life-like and disorienting ways, as both kinds of developments raise questions about the essence of humanity. Enchanted objects, though, offer reprieve and the most promise of the lot, Rose argues, because they create more humane and less distracting interfaces for the activities we want to do.He provides a variety of examples, including an enchanted jacket that gives the wearer a hug when a friend likes a Facebook post, a medical bottle cap that glows when the patient needs to take a pill, and the book's cover image of an Internetconnected umbrella that reads the weather report and lights up its handle when rain is expected. These ideas, and others, reflect Rose's experiences in his dual professional role as an industry pioneer and an academic. As an entrepreneur, he serves as CEO of Ditto Labs. And his book mentions many of his previous business successes, including his leadership of Vitality, a health-focused company specializing in wireless products. As an educator, he teaches a remarkable course on tangible user interfaces at MIT Media Lab, which also provides plentiful book fodder. As an author, though, he leans heavily in this book toward the marketing and promotional perspective of a start-up CEO by explaining why more enchanted objects, like the kinds his companies build, could be so marvelous, without also applying the critical and reasoned perspective of a skeptical scholar. He persistently characterizes "iThings" as lame and stupid without also addressing why billions of people have bought them and consider them indispensible. This approach, in turn, appears overstated for rhetorical effect, especially when considering the global adoption rate of those other technologies, and the comparatively uncritical perspectives offered about "enchanted" objects.Rose instead romanticizes those objects, at first through stories about his grandfather, an architect and woodworker, and his basement workshop, filled with hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, clamps, and chisels. Yet he also inexplicably privileges some technological ideas, such as the magic of Dick Tracy's wrist communicator, over others, like the real functionalities of the glass-slabbed Apple Watch. Rose extolls the joys and value of the "ordinary pen," for example, without acknowledging the iterative advancements of the pen technology from a stick dipped in ash to a quill to a fountain model to the Livescribe device that he raves about, connecting analog and digital forms. …