iPhone meets your Thermostat

I guess I've arrived in geekdom.  I'm blogging about a thermostat-the Nest.

I'll admit to liking a few Apple products a bunch and I hooked on their train a long time back with an Apple IIe, well before the first Macintosh in the 1980s.  There are many factors that went into this, but above all else a certain coolness provided the opening to learn that computing was cool, too. 

What they did for smartphones, portable music and handheld tablets is more than a bit obvious.  Key to that was design: making tools interesting enough that you wanted things you didn't know you wanted.

A while back I heard that a former Apple designer--a key member of the iPod design team--was creating a thermostat in a new business.  This might seem of no consequence at first.  But that would be wrong.

The one of the tools with the greatest impact you own that saves energy is your home thermostat.  Being a reasonably engaged conservationist, I have a programmable thermostat.  It saves us energy.  It reduces greenhouse gases.  It saves us money. 

And my thermostat is very, very uncool.  It's clunky.  It actually reminds me of the old IBM DOS computers from back in the early home computing days.  It's even the same color.  It certainly lacks any commonsense intuition in how it works, and it's lack of coolness encourages me to not pay it any attention.

The Idaho Conservation League is working to help save energy.  In the big picture we're working to help meaningfully impact climate change.  In the micro picture, however, we're trying to show folks that efficiency saves money.  That's a pretty powerful way to get people thinking.

But being cool is powerful, too.  Maybe more so.  If your thermostat is cool you'll pay more attention to it.  If it's well designed and intuitive you'll use it to it's full capacity.  If you do that you'll save money, electricity, gas, coal, hydro, or whatever and in the end, you'll be better off and so will the planet.

So here I am blogging about a thermostat.  I'll probably get one.

Rick Johnson