Smoke alarms should be rebranded as “this device is broken and needs to be replaced” alarms, to better reflect their most frequent use case.
Yes, everything is an interface problem.
August 9, 2008
About Dane
Dane Petersen is an experience designer who enjoys playing outside, talking loudly and waving his hands around. He recently completed a master's degree in interaction design at Indiana University, and currently works as an experience designer at Adaptive Path in San Francisco. Sometimes he even writes for the Adaptive Path weblog.
Dane is excitable and has trouble sitting still. He's worked as a wilderness guide, snowboard instructor, windsurf technician and envelope stuffer. He loves tea, saunas, typography, photography and homebrewing.
His portfolio at Brainside Out offers some great insight into the range of work he does.
You can email him at
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3 Comments
They’re handy devices which beep loudly to tell you that you’re making toast even thought you know you are making toast because it was you who put the toast in the toaster.
Those three long minutes between bread and toast are plenty of time to get completely distracted by something shiny on the internet, so I do appreciate that function.
They’re also handy at reminding you that you put a pot of water on the stove to boil, but that was three hours ago and all the water has since boiled off and now the non-stick coating is burning.
Not that I would know.
To paraphrase Mitch Headberg: You don’t have a smoke detector so much as a really efficient double-A battery draining device.