Video: Smart People, Dumb Objects, Networked Environments

The world, we are told, will become a vast 'eco-system' of conversant devices, buildings and virtual environments. But somewhere behind all these 'machines' are people, and it's the people that, ultimately, make interactions 'smart'.

At ProductTank April, Usman Haque, founding partner of Umbrellium, founder of Haque Design + Research  and founder of Pachube, a real-time data infrastructure and community for the Internet of Things, talked about how, in an age of extreme connectivity, what becomes important is what we are connected to.

With real world examples drawing from angles including measuring the quality of air you breath in your city, radiation levels following the disaster at Fukushima, to connecting your houseplants to your electricity usage, Usman shows us what happens when you put people back in the centre of the data and the decision-making.