Etc.
"By tracing the history of navigation and of the associated tools, Edward Hutchins (
Cognition in the Wild) shows how different contexts demand different solutions. He makes one especially insightful observation. He argues that tools often don't so much enhance our ability to do a particular task, such as trigonometry (something that is fundamental to navigation); rather, more often than not they recast the problem in a different representation that simply side-steps the need for that task to be done.
That is, rather than being seen as a better calculator, or some prosthesis to enhance our speed or accuracy at doing a particular calculation, the tool is often better understood as a notational or representational device. We can think about this in the perspective of those old adages that we learned in Philosophy 101:
Notation is a tool of thought.
A problem properly represented is largely solved.What Hutchins reinforces is that notational or representational systems are not restricted to things that we draw or write. Rather, physical devices can have the same impact on the representation of a problem--such as navigation--as the zero and decimal had in facilitation our ability to do multiplication and division, compared with doing them using Roman numerals..."
“Another challenge at the societal scale is to understand the long-term impact of interactive systems that we create. So far, this was very much trial and error. Providing unlimited and easy-to-use mass communication to individuals without journalistic training has changed how we read news. Personal communication devices and instant messaging have altered communication patterns in families and classrooms. Working in the office using a computer in order to create texts is reducing our physical movements. The way that we design interactive systems, the things we make easy or hard to use, and the modalities that we choose in our interaction design have inevitably resulted in long-term impacts on people. With the current methods and tools in HCI, we are well equipped to do a great job in developing easy-to-use systems with an amazing short-term user experience for the individual. However, looking at upcoming major innovations in mobility and healthcare technologies, the interfaces we design may have many more consequences. One major challenge at scale is to design for a longer-term user experience (months to years) on a societal scale. Here we still first have to research and invent methods and tools.”
— Albrecht Schmidt
"Designers are often excellent at talking about the theory of design in general. This goes back to the word 'design' being so amorphous. It is sometimes as if someone who's doing a celebrity blog or gossip blog started invoking Faulkner. The theory of good writing is important. People create good writing. It is true that good writing changes people's lives. The same is true with good design. When you talk about it at the theoretical level, design solves problems. However, often the way that a product comes into being isn't because a bunch of expert designers sat down and said, 'What are the most important problems that we can solve?' It's that the phone rang, and a company said, 'We need more products in this area. What can you do for us?'
I read once about a new design for a fire extinguisher, and it was really interesting because it was a very sleek-looking, iPod-esque, fire extinguisher. It won a lot of design awards. The idea was sort of rational as well. Fire extinguishers as they are now are ugly. Because they're ugly, people forget where they are; they leave them places; they forget to replace them. By having a really beautiful fire extinguisher, they're excited about it, and they'll leave it on the counter. This is supposed to be a fire extinguisher that you leave on the counter. It got a lot of positive attention.
Designers are constantly lecturing that it's not how it looks; it's how it works. This, however, won a major design award based on how it looked because the judges never handled the object. They just looked at photographs of it and the description provided by the company. I’m sure it worked fine, but what was the core problem that brought it to life? Not enough people have fire extinguishers. Who are those people, and what is the best way to get them fire extinguishers, and is the best way to start making fire extinguishers look like iPods?
Maybe what's really going on there is introducing an interesting novelty into the market. It gets a lot of attention, and the margins are pretty good, and they sell, and all of a sudden people who probably already had a fire extinguisher are buying it because it's a new, interesting object. Sales are made. You can sort of rationalize it as it's solving a problem, but I would wonder whether it was a problem that was invented after the fact. That's their starting point. You can have a conversation about what's the best way to solve that problem. I'm not sure that a really stylish fire extinguisher would be the winning answer in a non-marketplace-driven discussion of how to solve that problem.”
“The assumption that technologies fade into the background never to be heard again is largely a Western one. The fade of technology is smoother when we aren’t reminded that it’s there: if it largely works as expected; if when it breaks it’s either replaced as a whole rather than in parts (think toaster) or in a modular fashion that limits what we see of the underlying technology (think inkjet cartridge); or if it includes a business model that limits how much we need to think about the ongoing cost of use (think subscriptions). But in most parts of the world, the underlying infrastructure is much less reliable, more likely to be used near capacity, and there are more highly resource-constrained consumers with business models that encourage careful reflection on the cost of use at the time of use.
The net result is that consumers are reminded of the underlying technologies and they live in a society that retains a higher volume of literacy. Just as technology is not adopted evenly across the board, it does not fade evenly either. I’ve spent years tracking the evolution of repair cultures around the world from Afghanistan to India, Nigeria to Indonesia, and how people acquire the literacy, skills, and awareness to repair even the most complex technologies. This is not to say that the desire to understand technology is especially great there, but rather that the necessity to understand technology, to appreciate the different ways it might be used, is greater, because at a base level it’s a useful skill for survival. […] This high level of awareness, literacy, and drive to understand the underlying properties of technology can lead to different usage patterns than the original designer(s) expected (if there was a designer at all) and lead to significant new business opportunities.”
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
— Alfred Whitehead (1911)
“Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. […] As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. […] Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.”
“No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation. We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have. We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.”
"The world is not yet finished, but everyone is behaving as if everything was known. This is not true. In fact, the computer world as we know it is based upon one tradition that has been waddling along for the last fifty years, growing in size and ungainliness, and is essentially defining the way we do everything. My view is that today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life. And the imposition of inappropriate structures throughout the computer is the imposition of inappropriate structures on the things we want to do in the human world."
"It'll be a sad day when we no longer have our lists... they make the world seem bigger."
“A great tool can sometimes help you do the wrong thing faster.”
— Andrew Stellman & Jennifer Greene