| Here's my simple test for a product of
today's technology: I go to the bookstore and check the shelves for remedial
books. The more books, the more my suspicions are raised. If
computers and computer programs supposedly are getting easier to use, why are so
many companies still making a nice living publishing books on how to use
them? Computers manipulate information, but information is invisible. There's nothing to see or touch. The programmer decides what you see on the screen. Computers don't have knobs like old radios. They don't have buttons, not real buttons. Instead, more and more programs display pictures of buttons, moving even further into abstraction and arbitrariness. I like computers, but I hope they will disappear, that they will seem as strange to our descendents as the technologies of our grandparents appear to us. Today's computers are indeed getting easier to use, but look where they started: so difficult that almost any improvement was welcome. Computers have the power to allow people within a company, across a nation or even around the world to work together. But this power will be wasted if tomorrow's computers aren't designed around the needs and capabilities of the human beings who must use them--a people centered philosophy, in other words. That means retooling computers to mesh with human strengths--observing, communication and innovating--instead of asking people to conform to the unnatural behavior computers demand. That just leads to error. Many of today's machines try to do too much. When a complicated word processor attempts to double as a desk-top publishing program or a kitchen appliance comes with half a dozen attachments, the product is bound to be clumsy and burdensome. My favorite example of a technological product on just the fight scale is an electronic dictionary. It can be made smaller, lighter and far easier to use than a print version, not only giving meanings but even pronouncing the words. Today's electronic dictionaries, with their tiny keys and barely readable displays, are primitive but they're on the fight track. We would no longer have to learn the arbitrary ways of the computer. We could simply learn the tools of our trade--sketchpads, spreadsheets and schedules. How wonderful it would be to ignore the capricious nature of technology--and get on with our work. |