Design of Everyday Things - Norman, Don [124]
22 The ideas in this section were developed jointly with Jim Miller of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), of Austin, Texas, the American research consortium for the development of future technologies for computers.
CHAPTER SEVEN: User-Centered Design
1 Lynch (1972), Whaf time is this place? (pp. 66-67).
2 An excellent treatment of overautomation is Weiner and Curry’s (1980) paper, “Flight-deck automation: Promises and problems.”
3 I have enough friends on national and international standards committees for me to realize that the process of determining an internationally accepted standard is laborious. Even when all parties agree on the merits of standardization, the task of selecting standards becomes a lengthy and political issue. A small company or a single designer can standardize products without too much difficulty, but it is much more difficult for an industrial, national, or international body to agree to standards. There even exists a standardized procedure for establishing national and international standards. A set of national and international organizations works on standards; when a new standard is proposed, it must work its way up through the organizational hierarchy. Each step is complex, for if there are three ways of doing something, then there are sure to be strong proponents of each of the three ways, plus people who will argue that it is too early to standardize. Each proposal is debated at the meeting where it is presented, then taken back to the sponsoring organization—which is sometimes a company, sometimes a professional society—where objections and counterobjections are collected. Then the standards committee meets again to discuss the objections. And again and again and again. Any company that is already marketing a product that meets the proposed standard will have a huge economic advantage, and the debates are therefore often affected by the economics and politics of the issues as much as by real technological substance. The process is almost guaranteed to take five years, and quite often longer.
The resulting standard is usually a compromise among the various competing positions, oftentimes an inferior compromise. Sometimes the answer is to agree on several incompatible standards. Witness the existence of both metric and English units; of left-hand and right-hand drive automobiles; of three different kinds of color television, all incompatible. There are several international standards for the voltages and frequency of electricity and several different kinds of electrical plugs and sockets—which cannot be interchanged.
Actually, my description of how standards are achieved is more hope than reality. One of my colleagues, Jonathan Grudin, who has worked on national and international standards for the design of computer work stations, commented on my paragraphs this way:
You said standards development “must work its way up through the organizational hierarchy” but in fact with the international standard increasingly the goal, it is a vastly more iterative procedure, at least in the ANSI-ISO arena [ANSI is American National Standards Institute: the standards are labeled things like ANSC X3V1, where the I for Institute is replaced with a C for Committee. ISO is International Standards Organization]. What happens is that someone draws up a proposal or parts of one, and it is quickly hashed up a bit at the national meeting then carried to the next international meeting. There it gets hashed up a lot more, often rewritten or extended, and brought back to all of the national meetings.