The Digital Layer: Enchanted Objects

Sep 12, 2014

Sogeti Labs

Davis Rose is a MIT Media Lab’s researcher and entrepreneur. His new book Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire and the Internet of Things came out recently. Last year we sat down wit David to discuss what he calls enchanted objects, or ordinary things, made extraordinary.

To answer the important question of which things we should start to enchant, you just have to study the history of the future and scan for fantasies like the autonomously driving car. Primal wishes are revealed though fables and fairy tales, for instance the talking mirror. Enchantment creates better affordances, like the ambient umbrella which lights up blue when precipitation is likely to occur.

Enchanted objects satisfy our six latent drives, dreams and wishes: omniscience, telepathy, protection, immortality, teleportation and expression.

Asked what special abilities enchanted objects offer, Rose mentions eleven categories: glanceability, wearability, useability, loveability, tangibility, learnability, expressability, gestureability, ingestability, affordability, sociability, and even the smokeability of the Blu electronic cigarettes. Eventually, Mr. Rose is certain, there won’t be a product category unaffected by enchanted objects.

Check out the interview we had with David at last years Sogeti Executive Summit on the internet of things in the videos below.

We talked to David on how adding connectivity to things enables us to build an emotional relationship with objects.

And how enchanted objects bring us closer to our fantasies about life

The future for the Internet of Things

The impact of IoT on business

About the author

Sogeti Labs

SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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