I agree with you, especially because I rarely LOOK at the light-switch I'm flipping. Even at a friend's apartment, which of the switches I need to flip when entering the bathroom is a muscle memory task now.
More importantly, the floorplan lightswitch (at least from my reading of this short piece on it) doesn't have a nice way to handle multiple sets of lights interlaced with each-other on the same physical area. Experimentation with which switch on a boundary of two rooms that you need to flip is cheap.
Where experimentation takes longer is where the floorplan switch fails too. I immediately think to a gymnasium that had a huge bank of light-switches, for things like overhead fans, exhaust fans, lights that would take 15 minutes to warm up (don't want to accidentally shut those off!), secondary low lighting for when the main lighting is warming up and each of those would have up to 4 switches for different sections of the gym. The answer was text labels. Super easy, super simple. That's a pathological case, but business space has this problem, and multiple switches for single rooms is common enough in homes too.
It seems like the floorplan idea could be incorporated as a set of graphical map-based labeling on physical switches themselves. Anybody who knows the room relies on muscle memory, everyone else can use labels. And because the labels themselves aren't the active surface, they can be more specific that a touch sized button allows. Touching a kitchen on the map might be a lot of light at night, a switch underneath a picture of the kitchen that has the recessed lighting higligted wouldn't.
More importantly, the floorplan lightswitch (at least from my reading of this short piece on it) doesn't have a nice way to handle multiple sets of lights interlaced with each-other on the same physical area. Experimentation with which switch on a boundary of two rooms that you need to flip is cheap.
Where experimentation takes longer is where the floorplan switch fails too. I immediately think to a gymnasium that had a huge bank of light-switches, for things like overhead fans, exhaust fans, lights that would take 15 minutes to warm up (don't want to accidentally shut those off!), secondary low lighting for when the main lighting is warming up and each of those would have up to 4 switches for different sections of the gym. The answer was text labels. Super easy, super simple. That's a pathological case, but business space has this problem, and multiple switches for single rooms is common enough in homes too.
It seems like the floorplan idea could be incorporated as a set of graphical map-based labeling on physical switches themselves. Anybody who knows the room relies on muscle memory, everyone else can use labels. And because the labels themselves aren't the active surface, they can be more specific that a touch sized button allows. Touching a kitchen on the map might be a lot of light at night, a switch underneath a picture of the kitchen that has the recessed lighting higligted wouldn't.