Nosey people still
exist, but these
days their options
for snooping
surreptitiously are
so much greater.
Curtain flickers not
need even approach
the window, so
there are few cues
as to who is
monitoring your
actions.

nicate amongst themselves and will be able to auto-organize depending on the context. Some pundits of what has been called “ambient intelligence” are very excited about this version of the IoT world.

I am largely in agreement; this all sounds really exciting. My favorite, desired scenario for all this auto-organization calls for the development of sentient socks that can find each other. Yes indeed, I want a sock drawer that resembles Noah’s ark, with neatly assembled socks stacked two by two. Right now what I have is a lot of singletons wondering where their other half went.

I have been spinning this kind of simple, everyday fantasy for a while. Years ago, Les Nelson, Tomas Sokoler, and I designed a suite of objects called “Tools That Tell Tales.” One such tale-telling tool would be the loaned wheely bag that reports back to you to say it is having a nice time on vacation with your friend. Perhaps that wheely bag is a spime—but when we elaborated this design space of chattering tools, the term had not yet been coined.

One thing to note in our scenario, however, was that the tools told you their tales only when you asked for them. We never tackled how on earth they would know when and whether or not to share their experiences spontaneously with us humans or with each other, should the situation so demand.

I realize there are fundamental concerns about the autonomy, politeness, and social decision-making of these semi-sentient, communicating things. I am not really sure I trust my socks to self-organize without disrupting the other inhabitants of the clothing drawer. And what if my confused and lonely socks get so distraught in their unsatisfactory search that they get into a fight with each other and with my other objects and they collectively crash the operating system? As I think about whether I would or would not trust my semi-sentient socks, I realize that, for me, the cloud on the horizon of this dream world of sentient (or at least semi-sentient) objects is trust in all its forms.

Trust is a slippery concept.
Judd Antin of the iSchool at UC
Berkeley and I checked out the

stats: The word has appeared in the titles of papers indexed by the ACM Digital Library more times between 2005 and 2007 (149 times) than in the previous seven years combined (1998–2006, 131 times). Research into trust is all about uncertainty and risk. Most of the reported research addresses trust in enterprises, especially in the context of e-commerce, trust as developed in mediated human-human communication contexts, or systems perspectives on trusted/untrusted networks and network security. In interface and interaction design, trust unpacks to the familiar concepts of reliability, predictability, credibility, and visibility/transparency.

I see at least three dimensions of uncertainty and risk for IoTs to address if they are to be deemed trustworthy by experiencers (these are not necessarily users, after all; we may just be experiencing these IoTs unknowingly—the word “use” implies awareness).

First there’s system reliability, consistency, credibility, and transparency. As system designers, we know that people will not continue to use technologies that they cannot trust to do the job they are supposed to do on a regular and predictable basis. The problem is, once there has been a breach we could not have foreseen, distrust sets in. And distrust is much harder than trust to navigate. Distrust is about fear and self-protection; it is about not believing in the product, the tool. Once someone distrusts a system, it is very difficult to regain their confidence. Lack of reliability and consistency are