The need to change the mind-set of computer users and designers sounds obvious, but we are marching in the opposite direction. Everywhere we turn we hear about almighty “cyberspace”! The hype promises that we will leave our boring lives, don goggles and body suits, and enter some metallic, three-dimensional, multimedia, terabyte-infested, gighertz-adorned otherworld.
To which I respond with the technical term: Baloney!
When the Industrial Revolution arrived with its great innovation, the motor, we didn’t leave our world to go to some remote motor-space! On the contrary, we brought the motors into our lives, as automobiles, refrigerators, drill presses, and pencil sharpeners. This absorption has been so complete that we refer to all these tools with names that declare their usage, not their “motorness.” These innovations led to a major socioeconomic movement precisely because they entered and affected profoundly our everyday lives. People have not changed fundamentally in thousands of years. Technology changes constantly. It’s the one that must adapt to us.
That’s exactly what will happen with information technology and its agadgets under human-centric computing. The longer we continue to believe that computers will take us to a magical new world, the longer we will delay their natural fusion with our lives, the hallmark of every major movement that aspires to be called a socioeconomic revolution.
Once we change our mind-set in earnest, we will no longer put up with the maddening computer faults we now suffer. And we will be careful about what we accept from the proselytizers of technology. No longer will we be seduced by fancy buzzwords like
“multimedia,” “intelligent agents,” “push-versus-pull technologies," “convergence,” “broadband,” “gigahertz” and “gigabytes,” and a few hundred others already with us and yet to come. Instead, we will behave more like we do when we shop for a car: “Rather than tell me how fast the engine turns or whether it has an overhead cam, tell me about many people it seats comfortably, the gas mileage it gets, and its annual maintenance cost.” We must begin asking the same kinds of questions about computers and software: “Rather than tell me about all its gigas of processor speed and memory, tell me how quickly it can find and show me any movie I want to see, or help me find a replacement part for my lawn tractor.”
As users, we want to know how much more we can achieve with a given machine or software, and at what effort, compared with what we are doing now. We’ll accept quantitative or qualitative answers, as long as they address these kinds of questions. First, we’ll be told that computers are different and don’t admit to such measures. Nonsense. If we insist, designers and manufacturers will be compelled to respond. As they do, they will gradually adopt the new mind-set too. Eventually, they will be anxious to innovate, develop measures of usefulness, and brag about the real utility their products and services bring, versus that of their competitors.
And when the computers “vanish,” as motors did earlier, we’ll know the Information Revolution has finished!
Excerpt from "The Unfinished Revolution" by Michael L. Dertouzos
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