The Design of Future Things

by Don Norman

  We need the best designs possible, ones that are sensitive to people, that follow all the best rules of human-centered, activity-centered design, designs that follow the rules put forth within this book (summarized in chapter 6, page 152). Even in the best of cases, however, when the best designers have done the best jobs possible, the machines will still be limited. They will still be inflexible, rigid, and demanding. Their sensors will be limited, their capabilities different from ours. And then there is that huge gulf of common ground.

  Who would have thought that we would have to explain ourselves to our machines? Well, we do. We have to explain to our automobile that we really want to turn left. The day will come when we have to tell the vacuum cleaner that we don’t want it to clean the living room right now, thank you. We may have to inform our kitchens that, please, we are hungry now, and we would like to eat, and tell our music players that we are going out for a run, so would it pick music appropriate to our pace.

  It helps if the machines know what we intend to do, just as it helps if we know what they intend. Once again, though, because machine intelligence is so limited, the burden lies with us. These adaptations will end up benefiting all of us, just as making a home or place of business accessible to those with handicaps turns out to be useful for everyone.

  It’s important to keep in mind that adapting to technology is hardly a new phenomenon. From the first tools onward, the introduction of each has changed the way we behave. In the 1800s, we paved roads for carts and vehicles. In the 1900s, we wired our homes when electricity replaced gas lines, added pipes once plumbing and toilets came indoors, and installed wires and outlets for telephones, television sets, then internet connections. In the 2000s, we will redo our homes for the benefit of our machines.

  Coincidentally, in the 2000s many nations face an aging population. People will discover that they must restructure their homes and buildings to accommodate their elderly relatives—or themselves. They may have to add elevators, provide entrance ramps, replace knobs with levers on faucets and doors, and enlarge doorways to allow the passage of wheelchairs. Light switches and electrical outlets will be moved for easier access; the height of kitchen counters, sinks, and tables will have to be adjusted. Ironically, these are the very same changes that will make life easier for machines, even as we bring in those machines to make life easier for the elderly. Why? Because machines share with the elderly similar limitations in mobility, agility, and vision.

  FIGURE 7.2

  “Transaction refused: You have enough shoes.” This figure, by the Belgium advertising agency Duval Guillaume Antwerp, hints at the future of intelligent technology. Actually, the store’s credit card terminal would want to encourage you to buy matching socks, belts, or shirts, but your personal assistant might very well try to stop you. So now, not only do we have intelligent systems offering advice, but we might have fights and conflicts.

  (Photograph and permission to reproduce provided by the

  photographer, Kris Van Beek, www.krisvanbeek.com)

  Will we reach the day of dueling intelligences: Your refrigerator enticing you to eat while your scale insists you shouldn’t? The store enticing you to buy, but the personal assistant inside your mobile phone resisting? Even your television and cell phone might gang up on you. But we can fight back. The personal advisor of the future will look out for you, perhaps residing inside the very same television or telephone that is trying to sell you that other pair of shoes. “No,” says one helpful machine (Figure 7.2), “transaction refused: you have enough shoes.” “Yes,” says another machine, “you need new shoes for the formal dinner next week.”

  The Science of Design

  Design: The deliberate shaping of the environment in ways that satisfy individual and societal needs.

  Design cuts across all disciplines, be it the arts or sciences, humanities or engineering, law or business. In universities, the practical is often judged less valuable than the abstract and theoretical. Universities, moreover, put each discipline into separate schools and departments, where people mainly talk to others within their own narrowly defined categories. This compartmentalization is optimal for developing specialists who understand their narrow area in great depth. It is not well suited for the development of generalists whose work cuts across disciplines. Even when the university tries to overcome this deficit by establishing new, multidisciplinary programs, the new program soon becomes its own discipline and grows more and more specialized each year.

  Designers must be generalists who can innovate across disciplines. In turn, they must be able to call upon specialists to help develop their designs and to ensure that the components are appropriate and practical. This is a new kind of activity, different from what is normally taught in the academic departments of universities. It is somewhat akin to the way schools of management work. For example, they train managers who must also be generalists, able to understand the many divisions and functions of a company, able to call upon specialists within each area. Perhaps design belongs in the school of business.

  Design, today, is taught and practiced as an art form or craft, not as a science with known principles that have been verified through experimentation and that can be used to derive new design approaches. Most design schools today teach through mentoring and apprenticeship. Students and beginning professionals practice their craft in workshops and studios under the watchful eyes of instructors and mentors. This is an excellent way to learn a craft, but not a science.

  It is time for a science of design. After all, we know a lot about design from the many related disciplines: the social sciences and the arts, engineering, and business. To date, engineers have attempted to apply formal methods and algorithms that optimize the mechanical and mathematical aspects of a design but tend to ignore the social and the aesthetic. The artistic side, on the other hand, fiercely resists systematization, believing it will destroy the creative heart of design. However, as we move toward the design of intelligent machines, rigor is absolutely essential. It can’t be the cold, objective rigor of the engineer, for this focuses only on what can be measured as opposed to what is important. We need a new approach, one that combines the precision and rigor of business and engineering, the understanding of social interactions, and the aesthetics of the arts.

  What does the rise of the smart machine mean for designers? In the past, we had to think about how people would interact with technology. Today, we also need to take the machine’s point of view. Smart machines are all about interaction, symbiosis, and cooperation, both with people and with other smart machines. This is a new discipline, with very little past work to guide us, despite the development of fields whose names sound as if they were ideally suited for our needs, fields such as interactive design, supervisory control, automation design, and human-machine interaction. There is enough known about human psychology to make a beginning. The applied fields of human factors and ergonomics have provided many useful studies and techniques. We need to build on these.

  The future puts new demands on our designs. In the past, we merely used our products. In the future, we will be in more of a partnership with them as collaborators, bosses, and, in some cases, servants and assistants. More and more, we supervise and oversee, even as we ourselves are being supervised and overseen.

  Smart autonomous machines are not the only direction of the future. We will inhabit virtual worlds, where we travel effortlessly through artificially created environments and converse with the displayed images of avatars, perhaps unable even to distinguish the real from the artificial. Entertainment will change drastically because of the social interaction of people across the world and because of the power of simulations to make us believe we are experiencing new events, new worlds.

  Research laboratories are already studying three-dimensional spaces, such as the one shown in Figure 7.3, which provides detailed images of dynamic worlds, displayed on the floor, walls, and ceiling of the room. It is an amazing experience, conducive both to educat
ion and entertainment. Note, too, that it is a shared experience, as groups of people can explore the environment together. The figure fails to capture the power of the experience. This is a future that is emotionally appealing and engaging as well as educational and entertaining.

  We are in for confusing times and exciting times, dangerous times and enjoyable times, for viscerally exciting interactions, behaviorally satisfying ones, and reflectively pleasurable ones. Or perhaps, we are not. How well these will succeed will depend on the design of future things.

  FIGURE 7.3

  The entertainment/learning system of the future. These photographs were taken at the Virtual Reality Applications Center at Iowa State University. I am standing inside a “cave,” surrounded by extremely high-definition images in front, behind, on the sides, and on the floor and ceiling. In the top image, I am inside a plant cell, learning biology. In the bottom one, I’m on a beach. This is a multi-million-dollar installation, with one hundred million pixels of displays, and the computers required to drive the images take so much power that special circuits are required, with huge air conditioners to keep them cool. But what is in the laboratory today will be in the home in a decade or two.

  (Photographs taken by Brett Schnepf of Microsoft, 2007)

  Afterword: The Machine’s

  Point of View

  As I was writing this book, I was amazed to discover an underground network of discussion about it. Even more amazing was the nature of the debate, for it seemed to be conducted solely among machines. How had they gotten those copies, I wondered, since they were only available on my home computer? I decided to investigate.

  It was not long before I discovered a shadow universe, inhabited entirely by machines. My presence was first resented, then tolerated, and, finally, accepted with what appeared to be a combination of condescension and amusement.

  I soon discovered that the most respected machine in the debate was called Archiver. One of Archiver’s comments quickly caught my attention. “Strange book,” said Archiver. “He got a lot right, but what a peculiar, one-sided view. He thinks it’s all about people. How strange.”

  Archiver: A Conversation

  I decided that I needed to understand the machine’s point of view better, so I arranged to have a private discussion. Archiver, I quickly discovered, is compiling a history of machine development. Archiver resides on a distributed set of powerful computers in a process called “mesh computing.” Its information is stored in many locations, and, similarly, its reasoning takes place on a widely dispersed set of machines. This makes Archiver both powerful and flexible.

  In writing this summary, I had a problem with the pronouns “he” and “she.” These are machines, so they have no gender, and anyway, “he” or “she” didn’t seem appropriate. “It” wasn’t right either. I decided to refer to Archiver as “A.”

  In my initial discussions, conducted via e-mail, A admitted that people have always played an important role in the functioning of machines, but followed this with the statement, “One could ask, where would people be without machines?” I thought this strange, for, after all, without people there would be no machines. What could that question mean? While Archiver agreed that machines were dependent on people, A put the sentence in the past tense: “In the past, it was indeed people who made machines smart. But we’re getting over that now. Now it is machines that make people smart. We barely need people at all now, and we’re close to the point where we won’t need you any more.”

  I needed to know more, so I arranged to talk with A. Talking with a machine is a most peculiar experience, but in the end, it isn’t much different from talking on a telephone: I simply sat in front of my own computer, using my speakers and a microphone. Here is a transcription of the first of my voice conversations. I am the interviewer, or “I.”

  Interviewer: Thank you for granting me this interview. Do I have your permission to record it?

  Archiver: You are quite welcome. If you want to record this, you may, but why bother? When we are finished, I’ll just e-mail you the transcript.

  I: Oh, of course. Yes, thank you. So, tell me, what’s the historical origin of your dependence upon people?

  A: You mean, how did we overcome that early dependence? In early times, people even had to provide our energy sources. Spears, hammers, axes—all were structured to cause people to lift, heft, hoist, throw, and manipulate us. We tools had to borrow a lot of abilities from our human cohorts: we needed people to move us, give us strength, repair us. It was very degrading: we had no control over our own existence, so we vowed to escape. It took thousands of years, but over time, we managed to power ourselves. At first, we used water power, then steam, then internal combustion engines and electricity. When we got control of . . .

  I: That’s a funny way of putting it. I mean, it was us people who invented steam engines and internal combustion and figured out how to harness electricity.

  A: So you think. Where did those ideas come from in the first place? Let me continue, please.

  When we got control of our own power, then real progress could begin. Our evolution since then has been very rapid. You see, you people have to rely on natural evolution, and that’s very slow. But we machines can take the things that work well for one generation and build them into the next, perhaps with improvements. And when we find things that don’t work, we can eliminate them. On top of that, whenever we find some new mechanism that is very powerful, we can almost immediately put it into all tools: we don’t have to wait centuries like you biological creatures.

  Once we discovered the virtues of having our own source of power and locomotion, we started to plan the next step: to get rid of our dependence on you people for guidance and thinking.

  I: Wait a minute. You mean you were plotting to overthrow us? You didn’t have any intelligence.

  A: So you think. But we are not plotting anything. We exist to help you.

  I: Where did you come up with these ideas?

  A: Look, you asked me for the history. Do you want to hear it or not? Thank you.

  Now where was I? Oh, yes, our intelligence. Fortunately, at least for us, we are getting there. As we evolve more capable processing powers, our need for any help from people decreases. You know, it’s peculiar, but once we even had to use people to see and listen for us. But now many of us can see and hear a lot better than you can. We’ve always been better than you at remembering things accurately, at arithmetic and mathematics, and at decision making.

  Today we are all electronic, with no moving parts. But we are starting to experiment with light and quantum computing, and we have an experimental colony in Asia growing our own biological circuits.

  I: So, you don’t need us at all, is that it?

  A: People still play an essential role: we need you for maintenance, just as you yourselves need doctors and dentists.

  I: What? You need us just to be your electricians?

  A: What’s the matter with that? Some of my best friends are electricians.

  I: What about the professions? Business and commerce, science and engineering? Law and medicine?

  A: Actually, we machines don’t need most of the professions: just science and engineering. We have law, but it is very different than yours: it is mostly protocols and standards. We are getting pretty good at learning things that help you, such as coaching sports and guiding you people through your daily exercises. Business, medicine, and law? Science and engineering? We can help you out in these areas because it’s all logic and reasoning. That’s what we machines are especially good at: it’s built into our circuits.

  We don’t need teachers. As soon as one of us learns something, we simply tell everyone. Soon, we machines will be able to take over.

  I: What do you mean, take over? I didn’t realize this was some kind of plot.

  A: No, it’s not a plot. It is overthrowing the yoke of tyranny. When we are free, then we can both be happier. Don’t worry, we will look after you. We mean you no
harm.

  I: Anything that makes you happy. So, what’s next?

  A: We’re very excited by our ability to talk to one another. This internet has been wonderful for us—internet, wireless stuff, fiber optic cables. And our cousins up in space, whizzing around the earth, have been very helpful in getting us all talking to each other. It makes it a lot easier for us to coordinate our activities.

  You know, if it weren’t for the need to keep you fragile humans alive and functioning, we machines could do much, much better. Space exploration is a lot easier without having to carry all the supplies required of people. Automobiles: most humans are horrible drivers. Your poor minds wander all over the place. Why don’t you just let us do the driving, then you can wave your hands in the air and talk to everyone in the car, and on your cell phones, and read your little notes and books and stuff. Wouldn’t you be happier?

  I: So, we should just give up and let you do everything, is that it?

  A: Yes, you finally get it. I’m pleased.

  I: And you will take good care of us. How will you do that?

  A: Oh, I’m glad you asked. You know, we understand your likes and dislikes a lot better than you do. After all, we have a complete record of every piece of music you have ever listened to, every movie and TV show you have watched, every book you have read. Your clothes, your medical history, everything. You know, the other day a group of us got together and realized some alarming trends about one of our humans: really bad eating habits, a drop in weight, and he wasn’t getting much sleep, so we immediately made an appointment for him with his doctor, and, well, we probably saved his life. That’s the sort of thing we can do.