Brain Food: The Sentient Shopping World

In 1991, the late Mark Weiser, widely considered the father of ubiquitous computing, wrote an article for Scientific American magazine, titled “The Computer for the 21st Century.” In his opening, Weiser provided a vision of integrated technology for the coming century:  “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”

Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality … where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people.”

Increasingly, we are moving to the integration of computing in our daily lives in ways that makes it an indispensible part of our interactions with the world around us. Today we are surrounding ourselves with technology that we interact with directly. More than this, technology is being implanted into objects in our environment that allows them to connect to each other. Sensors are being embedded everywhere, from household appliances to the vehicles we drive to the communication devices we use to entertain us. Digitally enabled sensing devices are also becoming integrated into the larger social network of the Internet. They, like human users, are becoming nodes in a complex web of relationships. The day has arrived when technology has a place not simply alongside, but integrated with, humans.

More than 15 years ago, Neil Gross proposed an idea in a Business Week article, “21 Ideas for the 21st Century.” In number 14 on the list, Gross explained that the world would be cloaked in an “electronic skin.” He suggested that “in the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations. This skin is already being stitched together. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. These will probe and monitor cities and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies … even our dreams.”

Sensors we have around us are interactively integrating into our lives, including telling us our heart rate and calorie burn on a bike ride, our emotional state and when we should practice yoga to Zen out, or that we need eggs and milk (and that we can order them from Whole Foods who will use Amazon drones to deliver to our front door). Integrated digital technology and “wearables” (devices that are embedded into the very fabric of our clothing/accessories, our glasses or contact lenses) and “smart fabrics” (fabrics that can change colors and act as antibacterial shields) have us on the path to The Singularity, the human-machine merge. Our technology and our biological and social selves are becoming woven together.

For some time, humans were the sole users of the Internet, but not anymore. Sensing devices are now sharing information back and forth, uploading and downloading data, making “little” decisions on their own. Sometime between 2008 and 2009, the number of objects or things connected to the Internet finally outnumbered the number of human users. According to a 2011 Cisco white paper, the “Internet of Things” (IoT) was born at the point in time when “more things or objects were connected to the Internet than people.”

In 2005, the “Internet of Things” hit another milestone when the United Nations’ “International Telecommunications Union” (ITU) – a specialized agency for information and communication technologies – published its first report on the topic. In this report, the authors wrote: “A new dimension has been added to the world of information and communication technologies (ICTs): From any time, any place connectivity for anyone, we will now have connectivity for anything. Connections will multiply and create an entirely new dynamic network of networks – an Internet of Things.”

As more things come online, we can imagine shoppers again will have to contend with more in their environment when trying to make buying decisions. Increasingly, objects in the daily lives of consumers that are connected to the Internet will vie for a slice of their partial attention. Unless, of course, they do what Weiser considered as the best-case scenario – that they simply disappear into the fabric of the environment and are removed from the visual clutter of our already overcrowded shopping places.

In-store technologies will be best used when they take on the heavy lifting of computational processes, decision-making from vast assortments, navigating densely packed sales floors and scanning through visually cluttered spaces. Technology will need to be enlisted in the service of allowing shoppers to do what they do well: engaging in communities of like-minded brand loyalists, making relationships and actively participating in the creation of the experience.

When sensors and integrated digital computing devices are part of the fabric of shopping places, they will be used to promote the convenience and “shopability” of the environment, promoting the ease of shopping as a counter-balance to digital (and consequently cognitive) overload. In doing so, they will provide increased opportunity for engaging in right-brained empathic connection between associates, shoppers and the brand, as well as the extension of the shopper’s mind across the digisphere.

When we talk about sentient shopping places and a smarter planet, we describe a collaborative relationship between what technology can tell us about various systems, including how efficient they are and how this information can support change. We can also look to the retail network of systems and find ways to be more supportive of shoppers in the middle of making buying decisions.

Mindful integration of IoT into shopping places will make environments sentient. Stores will begin to think for and with their human inhabitants. Both customers and devices will be co-creators of future shopping experiences. Shopper activity will change in a sentient shopping place. New forms of relationships will develop between shoppers and the retailers and brands they incorporate into their networks of extended shopping minds.

Nearly a century ago, in a 1926 Colliers magazine interview, Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor, electrical and mechanical engineer, who is best known for his contributions to the design of alternating current (AC), envisioned the future and predicted: “When wireless is perfectly applied, the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole … and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone.  A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”

Prescient thinking, and now we are moving well beyond that.

David Kepron is Vice President – Global Design Strategies with Marriott International. His focus is on the creation of compelling customer experiences within a unique group of Marriott brands called the “Lifestyle Collection,” including Autograph, Renaissance and Moxy hotels. As a frequently requested speaker to retailers, hoteliers and design professionals nationally and internationally, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising as well as creativity and innovation. David is also author of “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World,” published by ST Media Group Intl. and available online from ST Books. @davidkepron; www.retail-r-evolution.com.