F is for Future

Future technologies are sometimes easier to focus on than existing ones. For example, over dinner this evening a friend was telling me about a colleague who had done early work on user interfaces that incorporate portable videorecorders. The problem was, the colleague had pursued this research so long ago that there were no portable videorecorders – the technology itself was off still some years in the future. In a situation like that, what’s a scientist to do?

The solution was to design studies in which participants wore a big backpack. All of the stuff it took to emulate a portable video recorder was in that backpack. It was just like the real thing, if you ignored the fact that you were carrying a large backpack on your back.

While my friend was talking, I began to see that not having a real portable videorecorder had helped those scientists gain insights into the technology they were researching. By needing to emulate the device, they were able to keep the device itself in focus. They were forced to think about its properties, rather than merely take those properties for granted.

After all, people are all too good at taking technologies for granted. Air conditioners, washing machines, clocks, pen and paper, these are just a few of many technologies that have completely altered our lives, but that we never think about. In a way, you can say that a technology has become completely successful precisely at the point when we no longer think about it. The flying car may be the subject of hundreds of speculative articles, but the washing machine has transformed countless millions of lives.

And so perhaps we need a little jolt, a way of pinching ourselves, so that we can truly see the technologies we use every day, rather than simply taking them for granted. Maybe we need to pretend they don’t exist yet, like that emulated portable videorecorder my friend was talking about.

Imagine experiments with driving that involved a team of researchers pushing a make believe car around here and there, while a driver sat inside the fake automobile, pressing on the gas and the break, and turning a steering wheel. The team would need to observe the driver, looking at how he or she moved the steering wheel, and then figure out whether to turn left or right, when to accelarate and when to stop.

Or how about experiments that emulate email by having researchers physically carry the text message typed by a correspondent from one room across to another room. That text is then read by the other correspondent, and the typed reply is carried back to the first room. The task of emulation becomes progressively more interesting as more correspondents are added to the experiment.

Similarly, we could emulate internet search via a team of researchers and a library. The team members would need to learn to organize themselves, to fan out and efficiently look for answers in complementary places on the library shelves.

And what about text to speech, or speech to text, automatic translation between languages, even the humble thermostat. These are all amenable to this kind of emulative analysis.

I’m not suggesting that we operate this way in our real lives – that would be silly. But rather that we use this kind of technique – deliberately falling back on “Wizard of Oz” methods, a kind of “F is for Fake” approach, as Orson Welles might have said – even when such approaches are not necessary, in order to force ourselves to examine and to revisit the interface itself, to break down and focus on our interactions with our modern technological tools in a way that does not permit us to take them for granted.

Besides, imagine the following scenario: You sit in a high-tech looking platform and operate a plastic joystick while a team of people carries you around the room, swooping, lifting and banking, hovering and gliding. Finally you get to have that flying car. 🙂