Dashing the Dash Button into the Adjacent Possible
As part of our approach to explore the adjacent possible of new or already existing products, today we would like to have a look at an interesting approach of Amazon, to bring their one click buy functionality into the physical world:
Source: Gizmag / Amazon
It is basically a small, wi-fi-enabled push-button device that can be either hung or stuck at any household appliance to trigger an automatic (re)buy on any related, regularly used convenience good from a range of popular household products on Amazon.
Source: Gizmag / Amazon
While the improvement on the consumer convenience side - by ordering via a pushbutton compared to clicking a few buttons on any other device - seems rather marginal, rendering Amazon’s primary goal of this “innovation” - to increase online sales - pretty obvious, there is another layer to this idea, which is not immediately obvious from a sales oriented perspective.
Source: Gizmag / Amazon
The creative aspect of this otherwise rather blunt attempt to boost sales of frequently used household items relates to the elegant way in which such a simple device actually transforms any classic, non-connected household appliance into a (potentially) smart piece of connected technology - enabling it to become part of a new network of (social) internet of things.
The most important factor in this exciting transformation is however not the relatively simple technological setup but the challenge of finding the most meaningful context for this device - to create the greatest social value possible. Using our creative storytelling approach to explore the adjacent possible of the dash button, we have come up with the following use cases, that hopefully show an interesting route for possible new applications of this concept:
Put a pushbutton next to your bookshelf to prompt a diary of your latest readings, suggestions for new books based on your interests and reading habits or generate a full inventory of all your digital & physical literature - being automatically sent to you via email.
Or put it next to your radio or TV to prompt an email or message with suggestions for new music or movies based on your interests or past listening/watching habits.
Or put it on your fridge or microwave to trigger an email with random recipes by scraping recipe websites and returning random suggestions to inspire your cooking - or rather random suggestions for high-rated restaurants, take-aways or order-in places if you are not the cooking type.
But the best applications we can think of are social ones, where you might give such a pushbutton to your best friends to let them push it whenever they think of you, automatically triggering a friendly email / sms / whatsapp message to you - maybe asking to meet you while giving a random suggestion for a nice location.
Do you get the picture? Then take this story up and tell us your favourite applications of this idea - and continue with us exploring and extending the adjacent possible of this device. Maybe Amazon, IFTTT or even Google or Facebook get interested and help us build it as an open source kit which then can be freely adapted and programmed - according to your specific ideas and needs.
