The Design of Everyday Things (49 page)

Radical innovation changes paradigms. The typewriter was a radical innovation that had dramatic impact upon office and home writing. It helped provide a role for women in offices as typists and secretaries, which led to the redefinition of the job of secretary to be a dead end rather than the first step toward an executive position. Similarly, the automobile transformed home life, allowing people to live at a distance from their work and radically impacting the world of business. It also turned out to be a massive source of air pollution (although it did eliminate horse manure from city streets). It is a major cause of accidental death, with a worldwide fatality rate of over one million each year. The introduction of electric lighting, the airplane, radio, television, home computer, and social networks all had massive social impacts. Mobile phones changed the phone industry, and the use of the technical communication system called packet switching led to the Internet. These are radical innovations. Radical innovation changes lives and industries. Incremental innovation makes things better. We need both.

INCREMENTAL INNOVATION

Most design evolves through incremental innovation by means of continual testing and refinement. In the ideal case, the design is tested, problem areas are discovered and modified, and then the product is continually retested and remodified. If a change makes matters worse, well, it just gets changed again on the next go-round. Eventually the bad features are modified into good ones, while the good ones are kept. The technical term for this process is
hill climbing
, analogous to climbing a hill blindfolded. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take one step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill, or at least at a local peak.

Hill climbing. This method is the secret to incremental innovation. This is at the heart of the human-centered design process discussed in
Chapter 6
. Does hill climbing always work? Although it guarantees that the design will reach the top of the hill, what if the design is not on the best possible hill? Hill climbing cannot find higher hills: it can only find the peak of the hill it started from. Want to try a different hill? Try radical innovation, although that is as likely to find a worse hill as a better one.

RADICAL INNOVATION

Incremental innovation starts with existing products and makes them better. Radical innovation starts fresh, often driven by new technologies that make possible new capabilities. Thus, the invention of vacuum tubes was a radical innovation, paving the way for rapid advances in radio and television. Similarly, the invention of the transistor allowed dramatic advances in electronic devices, computational power, increased reliability, and lower costs. The development of GPS satellites unleashed a torrent of location-based services.

A second factor is the reconsideration of the meaning of technology. Modern data networks serve as an example. Newspapers, magazines, and books were once thought of as part of the publishing industry, very different from radio and television broadcasting. All of these were different from movies and music. But once the Internet took hold, along with enhanced and inexpensive computer power and displays, it became clear that all of these disparate industries were really just different forms of information providers, so that all could be conveyed to customers by a single medium. This redefinition collapses together the publishing, telephone, television and cable broadcasting, and music industries. We still have books, newspapers, and magazines, television shows and
movies, musicians and music, but the way by which they are distributed has changed, thereby requiring massive restructuring of their corresponding industries. Electronic games, another radical innovation, are combining with film and video on the one hand, and books on the other, to form new types of interactive engagement. The collapsing of industries is still taking place, and what will replace them is not yet clear.

Radical innovation is what many people seek, for it is the big, spectacular form of change. But most radical ideas fail, and even those that succeed can take decades and, as this chapter has already illustrated, they may take centuries to succeed. Incremental product innovation is difficult, but these difficulties pale to insignificance compared to the challenges faced by radical innovation. Incremental innovations occur by the millions each year; radical innovation is far less frequent.

What industries are ready for radical innovation? Try education, transportation, medicine, and housing, all of which are overdue for major transformation.

The Design of Everyday Things: 1988–2038

Technology changes rapidly, people and culture change slowly. Or as the French put it:

          
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
.

          
The more things change, the more they are the same
.

Evolutionary change to people is always taking place, but the pace of human evolutionary change is measured in thousands of years. Human cultures change somewhat more rapidly over periods measured in decades or centuries. Microcultures, such as the way by which teenagers differ from adults, can change in a generation. What this means is that although technology is continually introducing new means of doing things, people are resistant to changes in the way they do things.

Consider three simple examples: social interaction, communication, and music. These represent three different human activities, but each is so fundamental to human life that all three have persisted throughout recorded history and will persist, despite major changes in the technologies that support these activities. They are akin to eating: new technologies will change the types of food we eat and the way it is prepared, but will never eliminate the need to eat. People often ask me to predict “the next great change.” My answer is to tell them to examine some fundamentals, such as social interaction, communication, sports and play, music and entertainment. The changes will take place within spheres of activity such as these. Are these the only fundamentals? Of course not: add education (and learning), business (and commerce), transportation, self-expression, the arts, and of course, sex. And don't forget important sustaining activities, such as the need for good health, food and drink, clothing, and housing. Fundamental needs will also stay the same, even if they get satisfied in radically different ways.

The Design of Everyday Things
was first published in 1988 (when it was called
The Psychology of Everyday Things
). Since the original publication, technology has changed so much that even though the principles remained constant, many of the examples from 1988 are no longer relevant. The technology of interaction has changed. Oh yes, doors and switches, faucets and taps still provide the same difficulties they did back then, but now we have new sources of difficulties and confusion. The same principles that worked before still apply, but this time they must also be applied to intelligent machines, to the continuous interaction with large data sources, to social networks and to communication systems and products that enable lifelong interaction with friends and acquaintances across the world.

We gesture and dance to interact with our devices, and in turn they interact with us via sound and touch, and through multiple displays of all sizes—some that we wear; some on the floor, walls, or ceilings; and some projected directly into our eyes. We speak to our devices and they speak back. And as they get more and more intelligent, they take over many of the activities we thought that
only people could do. Artificial intelligence pervades our lives and devices, from our thermostats to our automobiles. Technologies are always undergoing change.

AS TECHNOLOGIES CHANGE WILL PEOPLE STAY THE SAME?

As we develop new forms of interaction and communication, what new principles are required? What happens when we wear augmented reality glasses or embed more and more technology within our bodies? Gestures and body movements are fun, but not very precise.

For many millennia, even though technology has undergone radical change, people have remained the same. Will this hold true in the future? What happens as we add more and more enhancements inside the human body? People with prosthetic limbs will be faster, stronger, and better runners or sports players than normal players. Implanted hearing devices and artificial lenses and corneas are already in use. Implanted memory and communication devices will mean that some people will have permanently enhanced reality, never lacking for information. Implanted computational devices could enhance thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making. People might become cyborgs: part biology, part artificial technology. In turn, machines will become more like people, with neural-like computational abilities and humanlike behavior. Moreover, new developments in biology might add to the list of artificial supplements, with genetic modification of people and biological processors and devices for machines.

All of these changes raise considerable ethical issues. The long-held view that even as technology changes, people remain the same may no longer hold. Moreover, a new species is arising, artificial devices that have many of the capabilities of animals and people, sometimes superior abilities. (That machines might be better than people at some things has long been true: they are clearly stronger and faster. Even the simple desk calculator can do arithmetic better than we can, which is why we use them. Many computer programs can do advanced mathematics better than we can, which
makes them valuable assistants.) People are changing; machines are changing. This also means that cultures are changing.

There is no question that human culture has been vastly impacted by the advent of technology. Our lives, our family size and living arrangements, and the role played by business and education in our lives are all governed by the technologies of the era. Modern communication technology changes the nature of joint work. As some people get advanced cognitive skills due to implants, while some machines gain enhanced human-qualities through advanced technologies, artificial intelligence, and perhaps bionic technologies, we can expect even more changes. Technology, people, and cultures: all will change.

THINGS THAT MAKE US SMART

Couple the use of full-body motion and gestures with high-quality auditory and visual displays that can be superimposed over the sounds and sights of the world to amplify them, to explain and annotate them, and we give to people power that exceeds anything ever known before. What do the limits of human memory mean when a machine can remind us of all that has happened before, at precisely the exact time the information is needed? One argument is that technology makes us smart: we remember far more than ever before and our cognitive abilities are much enhanced.

Another argument is that technology makes us stupid. Sure, we look smart with the technology, but take it away and we are worse off than before it existed. We have become dependent upon our technologies to navigate the world, to hold intelligent conversation, to write intelligently, and to remember.

Once technology can do our arithmetic, can remember for us, and can tell us how to behave, then we have no need to learn these things. But the instant the technology goes away, we are left helpless, unable to do any basic functions. We are now so dependent upon technology that when we are deprived, we suffer. We are unable to make our own clothes from plants and animal skins, unable to grow and harvest crops or catch animals. Without technology, we would starve or freeze to death. Without
cognitive technologies, will we fall into an equivalent state of ignorance?

These fears have long been with us. In ancient Greece, Plato tells us that Socrates complained about the impact of books, arguing that reliance on written material would diminish not only memory but the very need to think, to debate, to learn through discussion. After all, said Socrates, when a person tells you something, you can question the statement, discuss and debate it, thereby enhancing the material and the understanding. With a book, well, what can you do? You can't argue back.

But over the years, the human brain has remained much the same. Human intelligence has certainly not diminished. True, we no longer learn how to memorize vast amounts of material. We no longer need to be completely proficient at arithmetic, for calculators—present as dedicated devices or on almost every computer or phone—take care of that task for us. But does that make us stupid? Does the fact that I can no longer remember my own phone number indicate my growing feebleness? No, on the contrary, it unleashes the mind from the petty tyranny of tending to the trivial and allows it to concentrate on the important and the critical.

Reliance on technology is a benefit to humanity. With technology, the brain gets neither better nor worse. Instead, it is the task that changes. Human plus machine is more powerful than either human or machine alone.

The best chess-playing machine can beat the best human chess player. But guess what, the combination of human plus machine can beat the best human and the best machine. Moreover, this winning combination need not have the best human or machine. As MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson explained at a meeting of the National Academy of Engineering:

          
The best chess player in the world today is not a computer or a human but a team of
humans and computers working together. In freestyle chess competitions, where teams of humans and computers compete,
the winners tend not to be the teams with the most powerful computers or the best chess players. The winning teams are able to leverage the unique skills of humans and computers to work together. That is a metaphor for what we can do going forward: have people and technology work together in new ways to create value
. (Brynjolfsson, 2012.)