Design of Everyday Things [114]
Now consider the information world of the future. The modern laser disk is capable of holding billions of characters of information.13 This means that instead of purchasing individual books, we can now purchase whole libraries. One compact disk can hold hundreds of thousands (even millions) of printed pages of information. Whole encyclopaedias can be available at our fingertips, through our computer terminals and television screens. And when every home is connected to a central computer system through improved capacity telephone lines, or the cable television wire, or a rooftop antenna aimed at the neighborhood earth satellite, the information of the world is available to all.
There are two costs for these pleasures. One is economic: it may only cost a few dollars to manufacture a compact disk that contains the contents of one hundred books, but the cost to the consumer will be measured in the hundreds of dollars. After all, each book took an author several years of effort and a publishing house with editors and book designers another three to nine months. Connection to the world’s libraries through the telephone, television, and satellite lines of the world cost money to the telephone, cable, and communication companies. These costs have to be recovered. Those of us who use the computer library search facilities available today know that it is most convenient to have them available but that each second of use is marked by the tension that the costs are piling up. Stop to reflect on something, and your bill increases astronomically. The true costs of these systems are high, and the user’s continual thought that each use exacts a cost is not reassuring.
The second cost is the difficulty of finding anything in such large data bases. I can’t always find my car keys or the book I was reading last night. When I read an interesting article and store it away in my files for some unknown but probable future use, I know at the time I stick it away that I may never be able to remember where I put it. If I already have these difficulties with my own limited possessions and books, imagine what it will be like when trying to find something in the libraries and data bases of the world, where the organization was done by someone else who had no idea of what my needs were. Chaos. Sheer chaos.
The society of the future: something to look forward to with pleasure, contemplation, and dread.
The Design of Everyday Things
That design affects society is hardly news to designers. Many take the implications of their work seriously. But the conscious manipulation of society has severe drawbacks, not the least of which is the fact that not everyone agrees on the appropriate goals. Design, therefore, takes on political significance; indeed, design philosophies vary in important ways across political systems. In Western cultures, design has reflected the capitalistic importance of the marketplace, with an emphasis on exterior features deemed to be attractive to the purchaser. In the consumer economy taste is not the criterion in the marketing of expensive foods or drinks, usability is not the primary criterion in the marketing of home and office appliances. We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.14
Everyday tasks are not difficult because of their inherent complexity. They are difficult only because they require learning arbitrary relationships and arbitrary mappings, and because they sometimes require precision in their execution. The difficulties can be avoided through design that makes obvious what operations are necessary. Good design exploits constraints so that the user feels as if there is only one possible thing to do—the right thing, of course. The designer has to understand and exploit natural constraints of all kinds.
Errors are an unavoidable part of everyday life. Proper design can help decrease the incidence and severity of errors by eliminating the causes of some, minimizing the possibilities of