Unit twenty-seven One gizmo, one chore 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 descendants as the technologies of our grandparents appear to us.
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. That means retooling computers to mesh with human strengths – observing, communicating 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 desktop publishing program or a kitchen appliance comes with half a dozen attachments, the product is bound to be unwieldy and burdensome. My favorite example of a technological product on just the right 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 legible displays, are primitive but they’re on the right track.
One gizmo, one chore. Now imagine a host of specialized devices replacing a single powerful computer that tries to do a little of everything. Imagine a pocket checkbook, a drawing pad, a file-folder-size spreadsheet. Each would be self-contained but would communicate with the others through infrared light beams or radio links. The word I just looked up in the dictionary would be inserted into the letter I am writing; the right picture or spreadsheet calculation would become part of a report I’m doing for work; my electronic checkbook would log on with the bank every evening to update and reconcile the figures.
We would no longer have to learn the arbitrary ways of the computer. We could simply learn the tools of our trade – sketch pads, spreadsheets, schedules. How wonderful if would be to ignore the capricious Nature of technology – and get on with our work.