A strange looking communication and personal computing device, the Runcible, got a lot of attention when it was introduced at Mobile World Congress.
The device comes from a small San Francisco startup called Monohm. And talking to company founders Aubrey Anderson and George Arriola, a single theme kept coming up again and again: Monohm purposely limited the Runcible's functionality. For instance, you may keep only eight contacts in the address book, it doesn’t play music, and it will provide directions, but only in the form of a single red arrow that points the way forward.
The idea is to not demand the attention of the user, but rather to allow the user to stay heads-up and involved in real life.
Reading Ian Parker's profile of Apple’s Jony Ive in the New Yorker, I recognized some of the same ideas. Ive likes to talk about getting technology "out of the way” or being “pushed into the background.” For example, Ive said that he and his design team knew that notifications were a major feature of the Apple Watch, but decided to keep the messages short and simple to allow the user some freedom from the technology.
