The Future Of Data – Watch That Dial

Here’s something to separate you from the rest of the boardroom: The Executive Dashboard.

As far as I can work out it’s a three-panel board of dials, upon which you hook prepared overlays of, for example, the countdown to your next sales meeting, the number of emails waiting for you, or how the market is doing. Data is fed to the dashboard through a national radio network, prodding the needles up the dial.

Not a bad idea. The approach is to have information seamless appear in the environment, rather than thrust at you — ‘push’ — or at the end of a long corridor called the Internet — ‘pull’. As the folks at Ambient Devices say, their vision “to embed information representation in everyday objects, making the physical environment a seamless interface to digital information”. (These are the guys who made the Ambient Orb, which “slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, the health of your stock portfolio, or if your boss or kid is on instant messenger.”)