Invisible technology, best technology

If you think about technology for a moment – what comes to mind? Computers? or smartphones? Perhaps something new and exciting like VR-goggles? The most obvious things tend to be the most “visible” forms of technology. Here’s some food for thought: The best technologies are the invisible technologies.

So what do I mean with invisible technologies?

A way to think about invisible technologies is that they are the set of infrastructure, tools and tech that have become indistinguishable from your daily life. So ingrained with our day-to-day that we don’t even reflect that we’re using them. Electricity and the internet are two examples. Given the definition above, even Google Search would qualify as an invisible technology. Once something works well enough, we tend to forget it exists. Until it doesn’t work, that is.

This has been referred to as the door knob phenomena: everyone uses a door knob at least once a day, but the only time you realise you’re using one is when it’s not working like you’d expect it to. The same can easily be said about electricity and Google Search.

In the mid 90s, the Internet was very much a visible technology. It wasn’t nearly as omnipresent, it was expensive, it was for enthusiasts. The fact that you had to have a (bulky) computer, a dial-up modem, and actively dial up to start browsing made it highly visible.

Some ten years later, it was a lot easier, cheaper, and faster. The transition from visible to invisible was in full swing. Nowadays, we don’t even reflect that most of our work and communications hinges upon the internet.

Here’s the thing. As soon as innovations work well enough, and do their job well enough, we tend to leave them to do their thing. As a society, we accept them and our attention moves elsewhere.

So now, you might wonder, what has this got to do with the smart office? More than you might think!

In an organization, where the goal is to maximize the productivity of employees, the tools and tech we use ought to be as invisible as possible. The only purpose of technology in the workplace should be to help people get things done. It’s true that visible technologies can be equally effective in this regard. The true leverage of the invisible technologies however, is that they unlock human productivity at a near-zero mental cost for the user. Take for example Google Search – possibly one of the most complicated products ever built. It’s an incredibly (some might even say unimaginable) effective tool for finding information, yet it’s still somehow so easy to use that even a 9-year old can use it.

The true leverage of invisible technologies is that they unlock human productivity at a near-zero mental cost for the user.

A work week is a zero-sum game – there are only so many hours in a day – which means time spent somewhere is time not spent elsewhere. From a business perspective, the least thing you’d like to introduce is another new thing, system or policy that saps away precious time and energy from the users. The users who were supposed to benefit from it in the first place. Reporting software, room booking solutions, planning software – too often employees are bogged down in solutions that seem to come from a past century (or another dimension). They might get the work done, eventually, but at what cost for the user?

What if all, or at least most of our day-to-day tasks in the office were as invisible as the door knob?