I finally did it. I traded my truck-based SUV that carried 4 bikes (and smelled like it carried as many or more racers of said bikes) for a luxury crossover with leather seats, navigation, and a rear back-up camera. I love it. I would live in it if it had a kitchen and a bathroom. It’s just that awesome in its 0 to 60 in 6 second, 300 horsepower loveliness.

One specific feature that I love is the Intelligent Key. All I have to do is have the fob on my person (or in my purse) and I can open the doors, start the car with the push of a button, and lock the doors when I get out. It even knows if the key is inside or outside the car, and won’t let me lock it inside. But for all its whiz-bang technology, the Intelligent Key is, well, still just a key.

It makes me think of a concept I first heard about from my professor in graduate school, Janet Murray. When a new technology comes along, there is a period of time before the paradigm shift occurs, where the new technology is still applied in old ways. Think about the first Internet web sites. They may have had hyperlinks but they still closely resembled the printed page. Only later did the true interaction and communication possibilities become evident and even mainstream.

That’s where the Intelligent Key is today in my opinion. If it’s smart enough to know when the key is inside or out, or when I (with the key) come close, why can’t it automatically unlock the doors when I near, and lock them when I walk away? Why can’t the same key that opens my car open my garage, my front door, and my locker at the gym? Why can’t we replace the analog notion of a metal key inserted in a slot with mechanical tumblers, into the digital notion of a code that belongs to me and travels with me everywhere I go? Maybe one day our “keys” will really be a public/private encryption key that we can code into all the locks in our lives. Only then will the paradigm have truly shifted and the keyring become obsolete.

1. What a brilliant example of social marketing. Check out how Mozilla is generating buzz for Firefox 3 by asking folks to help them set a world record for number of downloads in one day:

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

2. From Jakob Nielsen’s blog, here is a very interesting post with the title OK-Cancel or Cancel-OK?.

We actually had this debate while working for a client (the Cancel-OK camp won):

After reading Nielsen’s blog entry, I actually think the OK-Cancel approach was appropriate after all, as most of the users for this web application would be on Windows and therefore used to the Microsoft UI paradigm.

3. Finally, here is a wonderful little classic film that I found on a physics blog, the classic ‘Powers of 10′. Wow, I’m back in the 10th grade working the projector for our Chemistry class (and irritated that no one else thinks the film is cool). _shiver_