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Designing Outside Human Limitations
Spent yesterday with a colleague refining the goals of our next user study and discussing where we should focus our research energies next year. Talking through what to research is one of the more pleasurable aspects of this job - there's typically some scope to decide where to conduct user studies, you don't need to lug 26kg of equipment through rush-hour Tokyo to get there, assistants always turn up on time, the printer always works, you don't every run out of quarters for the launderette, and the deadlines have yet to be set.
At some point in the day we cycled over to Shimo Kitazawa to be surrounded by people and to reflect on whether what we had planned was feasible. There can be a jarring moment in user studies where you realise you were well off the mark 'of course people are going to react in that way when you do xyz!?' and being surrounded by people going about their business is a good reality check before even running a pilot study. At some point in our wander through the neighbourhood we ended up in a Vietnamese restaurant, and seated on the counter watching the chef prepare the food and continued our discussion. In front of us, on the counter was a bowl of small, brass spinning tops for sale. I picked one up and spun it on the flat wooden counter.
This spinning top had two properties that made it special. Being pure brass with no decoration and perfect symmetry it looked identical when it was spinning compared to when it was stationary. In addition it was so finely balanced and the table surface so condusive to spinning that it seemingly spun for minutes. The only time you could tell it was moving was at the beginning of the spin cycle - when it slowly orbited an imaginary planet before settling in one place, and at the very end when it lost its momentum and spun out. After being spun it quickly became a background activity, since it required no further interaction and other tasks like tucking into the food and continuing conversations took over.
There was a moment when our attention returned to the top which because it was so long since it was last spun appears totally stationary seemingly balanced upright on its tip and somehow defying gravity. There were no cues to it spinning, and the affect was simply indistinguishable from magic. Do magicians have a word or phrase to describe the affect of tricking human perception? (not closure, but something similar?)
A lot of the time we think about designing to and within human limitations - think usability, think ergonomics. There's a world out there that is beyond human perception (and to extrapolate this, there is a world out there that is beyond the perception of the tools we can perceivable design). Increasingly however the objects we carry are able to extend our human capabilities: cameras can record more accurately or, shown in the example below - can record differently to (my) falable human memory; mobile phones enable you to shout further; text messaging is nothing less than shifting time and space.
What human capabilities will be extended or dampened by what tools next? Why?
Writing from Shimo Kitazawa | September 17, 2005 | Permalink
Comments
Excellent observation and conclusion
Posted by: Twodeadpoets at September 18, 2005 4:12 PM
Well, it's not much of a prognostication at this point, but I think that search engines, and their near-future extensions, will be the next thing to have significant impact on human behaviour.
Just minutes ago, I needed a reference for a photocopied book excerpt. The problem: no clues as to the text's origins. A few years ago, the only possible way to find that source would have been hours in a library and conversations with several relevant experts. Today, thanks to Amazon's A9 search, I just typed in a sentence from the page and found the book immediately.
Google is already a daily necessity for a small minority of the population--roughly where mobile phones were in the 80's (essential for some businessmen, but not a reality for most people). But as with mobile phones, when internet search reaches a certain "form factor" (and maybe price point?), it may well explode into an unexpected ubiquity. This will almost certainly happen on a portable device of some sort. You can Google from your phone already, but not in a terribly useful fashion (tangentially, I'm not convinced that the Semantic Web is the answer to this, but it is a possible component.
On the other hand, the next burst of human-extending technology may come from the pharmaceutical companies. Drugs that increase memory, attentive focus, reduce (or eliminate!) the need for sleep, and let us live to a healthy 200 years old are just around the corner, according to some.
Personally, I'll take both. I'm waiting for the neural nanobots that can create ad hoc mental structures: something that can enhance my appreciation of relativistic equations, or orchestral music, as desired. Although at that point we're no longer carrying our technology, but becoming it.
Posted by: Andrew at September 18, 2005 9:38 PM