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 a one part interaction designer, one part design technologist, and three parts troublemaker. He enjoys playing outside, talking loudly and waving his hands around.
Dane has worked as a wilderness guide, snowboard instructor, windsurf technician and envelope stuffer. He loves space, airplanes, saunas, running, backpacking and homebrewing.
At GE he designed diagnostics apps for monitoring jet engines, at Filament he built cross-platform apps for managing industrial IoT sensor networks, and at Adaptive Path he helped companies like PG&E, Sunrun and Nike strategize great digital products.
His portfolio is at thegreatsunra.com.
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.