Floorplan Light Switches
jnd.org
jnd.org
Essentially you are sacrificing a high efficiency, low cognitive load task (that happens to have a poor first time experience) for a complex glossy UI that is intuitive but high cognitive load. (Suddenly you have to engage your visual system and import your full object recognition library where previously it was a finger twitch task.)
We've struggled with this a lot at Lockitron. My personal belief is repetive actions (locking/unlocking) should be mechanically efficient while complex actions (inviting guests) should be more visually intuitive.
For another light switch concept see the Goldee.
Just think about how big shared spaces that would need such a light switch are typically used. Any one person will use the light switches only rarely (and frequently forget what the switches do between using them, so it’s not only about first time use). In such a situation an easily understandable light switch is preferable to a row of switches (especially since disturbing other people in that space by randomly switching on and off lights is not a pleasant experience for anyone).
Whenever a space is used by many different people such a design seems preferable to me. Also, these big shared spaces happen to be the ones that would require such a light switch in the first place.
Replacing every light switch with a floor plan switch? That would be a bad idea, sure, but there are applications that make a lot of sense.
Does the trial and error performed by a casual switch user cost us so much that spending the money on custom layout light panels makes sense? I think only in a very small set of applications.
To counterpoint your second paragraph: The existing wall switches are much more than a poor first time experience and require more cognition. When using the "efficient" vertical wall switch panel, you already have to import your full object recognition library without errors. You then have to call up your list of mappings between rooms and switch position on the panel so you can flip the correct one.
With the map, you only need to load your scheme of the office into active memory to select the appropriate switch. Further, the map provides error checking for your cognitive model, confirming / reinforcing the true layout (in a complex map, a user is bound to forget a room or take longer to recall it's location without the external map).
Anecdotally, I lived in my family's third house for a year and a half, and never completely memorized the functions of the 6 switch panel in our front hall.
Imagine an office, where different panels control different light banks depending on where they are in that large office space. The common user (average person in the office seldom turns on or off various things) will need to hunt for the right switch.
What I think is more likely are smarter motion/heat sensors combined with a scheduling system. During different times, certain banks of lights will turn on and off depending on the detection of people there. For conference rooms that may still need manual control lights for presentations, switches are fine because there's only one or two of them. No brainer.
How often do you need to control a single light that is in a different place than where you stand?
The problem is not with the light switch UI, it's with the whole concept of manually controlling every single light in the house. Why can't we have lighting that senses where we are and adapts accordingly? Why can't our lights go off when we lock the door?
Rather than get excited about a conceptually complex light switch, I'd like to see a home lighting system that doesn't require one in the first place.
Take for example, the clap-it lights; while yes it requires less effort than walking over and flicking the switch, it's also extremely annoying to do. Likewise, I would get really annoyed when lights go on and off according to where I walk.
Of course I don't have a Nest either and yet it does fill a need for some people.
More importantly, the floorplan lightswitch (at least from my reading of this short piece on it) doesn't have a nice way to handle multiple sets of lights interlaced with each-other on the same physical area. Experimentation with which switch on a boundary of two rooms that you need to flip is cheap.
Where experimentation takes longer is where the floorplan switch fails too. I immediately think to a gymnasium that had a huge bank of light-switches, for things like overhead fans, exhaust fans, lights that would take 15 minutes to warm up (don't want to accidentally shut those off!), secondary low lighting for when the main lighting is warming up and each of those would have up to 4 switches for different sections of the gym. The answer was text labels. Super easy, super simple. That's a pathological case, but business space has this problem, and multiple switches for single rooms is common enough in homes too.
It seems like the floorplan idea could be incorporated as a set of graphical map-based labeling on physical switches themselves. Anybody who knows the room relies on muscle memory, everyone else can use labels. And because the labels themselves aren't the active surface, they can be more specific that a touch sized button allows. Touching a kitchen on the map might be a lot of light at night, a switch underneath a picture of the kitchen that has the recessed lighting higligted wouldn't.
Because our current binary model of "flip this switch, this light comes on" is dumb. We want lighting "scenarios", not control of individual bulbs/small clusters of bulbs.
What you should be solving for is these lighting scenarios, for example "I walk to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen and I want the pathway lit" (this is called pathway lighting). Or "I want ambient light in the living room appropriate for movie watching", or "I want the nightlights turned on."
Believe it or not this is already (kind of) solved with what's called Lighting Control Systems [0]. They're complicated, expensive, and I've only seen them on very, very expensive homes.
Supposedly the price is coming down, who knows. I think affordable consumer-grade is going to be an internet-of-things kind of solution.
[0] http://www.lutron.com/en-US/Residential-Commercial-Solutions...
Well placed switches are good enough, no?
Hope you find it informative :-)
There are few things as annoying as that.
Since we're already using a Raspberry Pi for other purposes, I have the project of decoding the remote's protocol and driving an infrared led from one of the RPI's GPIO ports.
They were designed to save money, because nobody would forget to turn off the lights. They did an excellent job of keeping people in the dark, partially because of the above sensor problem -- typing on a keyboard doesn't provide enough movement to trigger the sensors -- and partially because of their incredibly high failure rate.
At about $50 per sensor module installed, they had to keep an electrician on full-time replacing sensors. I heard that eventually they stopped relying on trouble tickets and just swept the building over about a two week cycle.
Meanwhile, people bought lights that they could control by themselves. Many of them were halogens running on 150 to 450W.
Failed all the way around.
<shameless self plug> For example, my Android app, LampShade.io, has user-defined lighting 'moods' that work with the Philips Hue.
Currently these are primarily triggered via direct user interaction or through automation apps such as Tasker. I've also built a voice-controlled edition for Google Glass.
The app is still not as brainlessly convenient as a physical switch though. I don't think it can become that convenient without contextual inferring the state of the room/user, which may require more prevalent internet-of-things sensors to accomplish.
</shameless-self-plug>
But you're right, as good as LampShade may be I still have to whip out the phone, fire up LampShade, swipe to the light or scene that I want, tap a button. Thing is, I don't know how to make it better, I don't think I'm wired to come up with the clever solution. I've considered NFC tags on the wall, but I don't think I'm getting that past the wife. (Plus she's an iOS girl, so NFC won't do her any good.)
I believe good lockscreen widgets will be more convenient that NFC, and my next big update will focus on this.
Automation, scheduled lighting, predictive lighting(not yet implemented, think Nest), etc are all very powerful, but I doubt they will ever be comprehensive enough for all daily home lighting interaction.
Imagine you go in a hotel room, all this stuff is written in Chinese, you just woke in the night with an urgent natural need, and you just want a light on right now! So you have to read a sign with "go to bathroom"?
I think the idea of Don Norman is actually good for a big shared meeting room, were different people will have to change the lighting occasionally.
But for homes (and hotel rooms), just place your switches in a logical place and avoid too many lamps, that should be enough.
Or maybe this: have switches on main light at the doors of a room, and then each individual lamp has its switch on its cord. Wouldn't that be good enough?
And we want to encourage people to turn off lights when they're not being used, so a single switch is again useful. This might be saving tiny amounts of energy, but we want to move to a world where this kind of behaviour is built in.
When I used to work in prepress the printer we had was as long as a truck, used 480V, and had it's own fume hood to capture all the ozone it put out.
Of course this is an after-the-fact rationalization; in reality, it's probably just easier to install one set of switches than several.
So much for that.
Fortunately, all the places in my home that had more than two were places where you could control both interior and exterior circuits. My solution was to use black switches for the exterior lights and white for the interior. Like, a single panel might have a black and two whites, or a pair of each. I find it much more intuitive that way.
It would probably be cheaper just to use a touchscreen, and the switches could be updated if the room changes.
I question the need for custom smart light switch hardware like Goldee when low end Android tablets are significantly cheaper thanks to to the economics of scale.
I'm one of those people who can't be bothered to fiddle with my Eclipse perspectives even though I'm sure I could summon twenty strong opinions here on why I should. Do you really think people (excluding single men under thirty left to their own devices to configure a dwelling) will compose "lighting scenarios" for their homes?
Having a map of light status and location in my entryway and on my mobile devices would be sweet. No labelling. Program it once and it's good until the walls move.
In particular, I don't think this has "high cognitive load." To me it looks like a toddler could get "touch the place and the thing happens there."
Look at the illustration and imagine how many times residents and guests walk into that thing. Maybe v2.0 flips down or something but that's a whole other problem.
the switches should be placed on a horizontal plane
Also, the switches themselves have little lamps in them, so you can find them in the dark.
Problem solved!
We don't have lcd touch screen switches yet, but it is certainly on the radar.