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203 Epilogue The Technology Treadmill Digitizedandcomputerizedtechnologieshaverelentlesslymoved into every corner of our homes and daily lives. From mobile phones to digital clocks, from fax machines to digital cameras, such devices offer wonderful new capabilities, but at the same time these machines can be user unfriendly in the extreme. Consider the lowly thermostat, a device like the round, gold-colored analog units manufactured by Honeywell. Its design has not changed in over half a century and its operation is simplicity itself.1 The thermostat has a thermometer that tells one the actual temperature in the room, and a control—the outer shell of the round device—used to adjust the heat. To turn up the heat, one simply turns the shell clockwise, a long established behavior for raising or increasing the output of some machine or device, signaling the furnace to send more heat to the room while simultaneously moving the red indicator pointer along a temperature scale calibrated from 45 to 85 degrees. To lower the temperature one turns the shell in the opposite direction. The thermostat has no other control, not even an on or off switch, for it is wired into the house electric system and is ready at any time to adjust the heat. An analog thermometer like this is so user-friendly we use it without hardly noticing. By comparison, a digital thermostat is complexity personified, as I first discovered in 2005 when my wife and I completed an addition on our house. In the older part of the home we had the familiar Honeywell analog thermostats, but in the new wing each heating zone had a digital thermostat. Although these digital units communicate with the same furnace, they have many more controls and a more confusing interface; indeed, they epitomize the user unfriendliness computerization makes 204 user unfriendly possible. Along with an LCD screen, each has four buttons: one called “menu,” another named “item,” and two buttons marked respectively with an upward and downward pointing chevron. The buttons do different things, and the LCD screen shows different information, depending on what “mode” the thermostat is in, making it almost necessary to have the owner’s manual by one’s side when using the unit. Another complexity emerged when I noticed that our five thermostats (one each for the five radiant heating zones we have in our addition, essentially one per room) did not show the same information. In our first winter with the new technology , I went to raise the temperature in a couple rooms and saw that one thermostat displayed “room temperature” as its default while another indicated “slab temperature.” I knew that the temperature of the slab (in our case wooden floor, although the programmer called it “slab”) governed the temperature of the room. But I wasn’t sure how to make the rooms warmer, which was all I wanted to do. The manual that came with the thermostats was impossibly technical, aimed at installers as much as to users, so I experimented, somewhat randomly pressing buttons until I saw a screen called “Slab, adjust temperature”; this seemed right, and I found that by then pressing the Item button, a number registering the temperature appeared and by using the Up arrow button, I could increase that number. I did this, but even after twenty-four hours, plenty of time for the slow-to-change radiant heating to warm the rooms, they remained cold. I learned more about the dense complexities of my digital thermostats after the HVAC contractor who installed them and the radiant heating system came and tutored me. Although I had been on the right track adjusting the slab temperature, I had failed to “select” my changes by pressing the Item button after keying in a higher temperature. That essential fact was in the manual, but I’d missed it, but even after I learned how to enter my new and higher temperature, we were still shivering twentyfour hours later. It turned out that I had programmed what the system called a “temporary hold” on the original setting, one that only lasted for four hours on a single day. This was the result of the new functionality my digital thermostats provided; the units not only regulated heat but also kept track of time and date, allowing the units to automatically change a room’s temperature up to six times every twenty-four hours and to do so differently on different days of the week. I could...

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