Fun Should be Enough

I first found out about the Nintendo Alarm from Matt Webb’s unassailable blog, where he digs into some of the assumedly unexplored possibilities with mmWave radar. It’s weird and fun, and another example of how Nintendo always seem to win with “lateral thinking with withered technology.” After all, who would have even thought of making an alarm clock anymore, much less a fun one?

There are so many happy and amusing bits to what is easily one of the worst times of the day. They’re not rethinking your commute, they’re rewarding you for getting up with fanfare and song. There is one massive button/knob because what else do you need really, reflective of my favourite device design which is also morning-centric, the toaster. It measures your sleep with radar(!) and not with a cumbersome watch or thing under your pillow you will forget to charge or be annoyed by knowing about. Will it get old? Maybe, maybe not. My guess is it might take a while but will be fun enough to make you just about want to keep it.

It reminds me of when the iPad came out. A lot of hoopla was made about oh wow, we have a huge screen that doesn’t fit in your pocket and now there’s way more room to have fun with exploring human-machine interaction. And that is exactly what happened. There was a boatload of experimentation and just doing often dumb and fun things because you have a lot more room to do it. The systemisation and hollowing out of interaction hadn’t nearly set in as it has recently.

Design was once thought of as the realm of delight. I think a better word than ‘delight’ might be ‘human’ which this thing pretty much nails.