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\[46:16\] So they were trying to figure out "How do we make this simplistic enough that people won't be afraid to actually use it?" In other cases it's like "Alright, let's put 15 layers of security around this thing so that people will be dissuaded from using it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Simplicity is good, and complexity is good. Simplicity in the fact that you've got one button... Back to the Kodak camera. "Hey, even you can push the button." I agree with that. It's kind of cool. Like, you've got this automatic camera, all you had to do was push the button and turn the thing... |
**Jerod Santo:** But the world in which we don't need any buttons - probably not coming anytime soon. What I find so interesting, Rachel, is you go from this topic of buttons and tactile controls to what you're working on now, which is smudges, sweat, coffee spills... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What...?! |
**Jerod Santo:** I've got to hear this story. So what you're working on now, "License to spill: Where dry devices meet liquid lives." Where did this come from? This seems like it's out of left field. |
**Rachel Plotnick:** You know, I like to keep people guessing a little bit, I guess... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Rachel Plotnick:** ...but they're actually not as far afield as they see them. I've always been interested in interfaces, and just thinking about how people interface more, you know, metaphorically with their devices. And I guess maybe this project emerged out of the pandemic and also having children, but I got reall... |
**Jerod Santo:** How do you go about looking into something like that? |
**Rachel Plotnick:** It was really not easy, actually. Just just like buttons, it was like "Alright, well, which buttons should I study? And which liquids should I study? Which devices?" But I kind of take this long historical approach. I actually start out with looking at babies who were teething on telephone cords in... |
I look at things like vinyl records and how smudges on the disc would create problems with it being able to play music. And then I move all the way into things like the Sony Walkman and early PCs, and keyboards and all the problems around liquids and dust, and things like that. And then moving more into the present, wi... |
So I kind of took this long range approach of thinking about "Hey, this kind of messiness", what I call media hygiene, how we kind of protect our devices from ourselves - it has been a problem for a really long time, but we kind of negotiated it in different ways at different moments. Even the buttons - they get wet, t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Media hygiene. Is part of your study how many germs are on my iPhone kind of thing? Or is it in that realm? |
**Rachel Plotnick:** \[49:39\] I looked at that a little bit, yeah. I mean, there was a lot of talk, especially during the pandemic, about what's appropriate for cleaning your phone, what are you allowed to put on it, what are you not, what happens if you take it in the bathroom... And I think that there's -- you know,... |
**Break**: \[50:16\] |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm reminded of the Truman Show, where everybody's watching Truman, of course, as the story climaxes, and will he or will he not escape his little enclave... New Haven? I don't know what it was called. And everyone's watching all around the world in their different contexts. And there's the one guy who... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Splashing, too. Big splashes. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And by the end he's getting excited, he's splashing, and becoming going crazy... I'm thinking "You're about to electrocute yourself, dude." So that would be a time not to use, I think, electricity, would be when we're splashing around in the tub, but... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Yeah, there were a lot of terrible stories about that, especially in the '20s and '30s, people dropping their radios in the bathtub, even children... You know, horrible deaths from electrocution. And obviously now we don't have to worry about that as much as we used to. But I think there's still ki... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Who is this book for? Is it for everyday people like Jerod and I, that we're just going to start taking caution or knowing when or what to expect with different devices? Like, who's the consumer or the reader, generally? |
**Rachel Plotnick:** \[54:01\] I'm hoping it'll be interesting for academics and laypeople. I think it speaks to a story that all of us kind of navigate on a daily basis. We often don't realize just how much we're thinking about "Should I put this in a case or not? Do I take this to the beach with me or do I leave it b... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How much did you open up the topic of right to repair, considering buttons? Like, going back to buttons, if it's behind a screen, it's less easily repairable. Whereas if it's a digital analog button, let's just say... I'm sure there's some digital behind the analogness of the button... But you can a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Haah...! \[laughter\] |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Nice! |
**Jerod Santo:** Somebody had to do it. |
**Rachel Plotnick:** No, that was definitely a part of my study. I think right to repair is really important to think about. And obviously, over time our devices have gotten harder and harder to repair. So if you do have an accident, the consequences for that are much greater than they used to be. And a lot of what I f... |
So I think there are a lot of kind of real world consequences for this, where we as consumers get penalized for our quote-unquote bad hygiene. We're treated like bad users, and these companies continue to kind of profit off of all of our mistakes, if you will. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How long was this research? How deep did you have to go? How was it funded? What was the purpose of this research? Obviously, you wrote a book, but was that the whole point of the research? What's the backstory there? |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Yeah, it took a few years. I started probably about 2019 working on this. I didn't know exactly what it was going to turn into at that time. Initially, I kind of started with the tactile stuff. I was looking at smudges on our smartphones, and just kind of thinking about screens and tactility and ha... |
So it's been about four years that I was working on the project. And I went into some archives, looked at Rolex's archives and kind of the history of waterproofing wristwatches in the military, and kind of went down a lot of paths as I was developing this... But the hope was always that it was going to turn into this k... |
**Jerod Santo:** So stop me if you've heard this one. This is going to sound like a joke, but it's not a joke. When we talk about computer/human interactions and hygiene - how do you eat Cheetos while you're coding? This is not a joke. This is real. I know it sounds like a joke. I learned this from Johnny Boursiquot, w... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** One-handed? |
**Jerod Santo:** No. Good guess. Adam, do you want to give it a shot? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Dispensed. There's some sort of dispenser. |
**Jerod Santo:** Very close. Chopsticks. |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Chopsticks... I've heard that. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So that's real-world dealing with two desires. Your desire to work and your desire to eat Cheetos. I guess three desires - and not to have Cheetos all over your stinking keyboard... Because that's some hygiene problems right there. |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Yeah, there's a good section of the book that looks at torture testing and all of the kind of bizarre trials we put our devices to see what will they stand up to. And in fact, I look at programmers and think about all night coding, and kind of the desire to have food and drinks near the device, and... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, because they don't really mix, but we want them to so bad. |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Yeah. Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[58:16\] Gosh... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Whether that's to our benefit, I don't know. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I don't know about that either. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There's a note here, at least in the description of the book, that says "Obsolescence culture." What does that reference to? Like planned obsolescence, or something else? |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Yeah, I think -- well, the way that things get made obsolete when they break, and that it's so easy to break things now. "Oh, I spilled this tiny bit of liquid on it, therefore now the whole thing is broken. Go out and buy a new one." It's pretty painful. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'll have to share my example then, since that's how it works... So we had a microwave. I say "had" because we had to swap it out. Thankfully, we could get the exact same one. And so this issue with the microwave was not the function of the microwave. It was the digital touchpad, which is kind of li... |
**Rachel Plotnick:** Yeah, those are membranes; membrane keys. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Membrane keys. There you go. Well, when you push certain buttons, they wouldn't do the function that the button did anymore. And then that was okay, because I was like "Well, I don't really push nine so frequently, so I'm okay with that. Fine." I can't do 19 minutes, which I would never do in a micr... |
It's like "Well, I have to have one..." You know? And then the screen that shows you -- like the liquid display, the LCD, if that's what it was. I don't think it was an LCD, but some sort of liquid crystal display... Which is LCD. \[laughter\] |
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