The Evolution of the Tools...and the Devolution
of the Users
Clark Dodsworth
Introduction
This paper discusses issues involved in the evolution of digital interfaces which impact the design of public interactive systems for museums and other public facilities. Digital hardware is approaching a point on the cost/performance curve that enables a qualitative leap in interactive exhibit design. We are crossing the threshold into the Era of the Good Interface: an interface that is not separate from the content, the design, or the user experience. New tools and devices enable design teams to make the entire exhibit a part of the interface, which, if properly done, results in a far more engaging user experience. Another name for the Era of the Good Interface is also the single most important trend in computing today: Human-Centered Design. That mantra has been in use for years by researchers, but ignored for reasons of cost and inertia by manufacturers and designers. A result of this trend will be the everyday use of wireless local-area networks, the internet, and analog and digital sensors and actuators, to enable what has been called "smart rooms" and "ambient intelligence." In museums, it will be smart exhibits. The Good Interface is simply intelligent exhibit design, extraordinarily enhanced with cost-effective tools that are finally becoming as subtly useful as the traditional ones.
Tool as Interface
I work in terms of a concept long since discarded by anthropologists and archaeologists; "homo habilis" . . . man, the tool user. Everything I analyze, design, or plan, and most of the man-made environment, is a tool. More specifically, I think of tools as interfaces that are used to accomplish goals. An interface should be designed for the user, and the design process must start with the user. All evolutionary processes, including good design, occur from the ground up in response to ever-changing needs.
Interfaces/tools can be simple, eloquent and effective, like the handle of a screwdriver. Or they can be opaque and mute, like the windows-keyboard-mouse of a PC. Often, the more direct the interface is, the better; if you can see exactly what it is that you are doing, you have a better chance at success. Sidewalks are easier to use on a clear day than in dense fog. As tools go, sidewalks have evolved a long way; some even move. Their evolutionary design was a world-wide effort that went on for centuries; we are pretty good at sidewalks by now.
Crops like wheat presented a more difficult problem. It may have been an ancient Mesopotamian who first asked, "How can we harvest all this?" and the initial answer was a narrow rock that fits in your fist, flaked to have a sharp, curved edge. Not an answer that scales well, but within that tool lay all the utility that drove its design evolution over many generations into the two-handed scythe.
Figure 1: Two-handed scythe
Now, the scythe is not at first glance an obvious solution. In fact, it looks extremely primitive; the handle is very like a piece of a tree limb, and the blade looks exactly like a cross-section of some Pleistocene carnivore's fang. It has an oddly curved shaft and weirdly-placed handles. The thing does not even initially make sense until you pick it up. Then, extraordinarily, it teaches you how to hold itself and how to wield itself, even if you picked it up the wrong way. Parts of it gradually became shaped to the task, and the rest of it became shaped to the user, so that, finally, it became able to shape the behavior of the user. Sounds a little like dog training, doesn't it? It is an excellent example of both a well-designed interface and an evolutionarily mature device; one that wants to do what it is intended to do, and has technique implicit in its design.
Figure 2. Ease of learning vs. number of habitual users
Using this example, we can graph the effectiveness of design for any tool against the length of time since it was invented. There are in general only two options; either the effectiveness incrementally increases over time, or the tool becomes extinct (Figure 2).
We can also graph the number of repeat users against the length of time it takes to learn how to use a particular tool, whether hardware, software-or a combination of both (Figure 3). That measure is just another way of talking about acceptance of a tool in our culture. Devices with embedded processing power that are self-explanatory-and that adapt to each individual user-will be indispensable in myriad contexts besides museums. We are past the time when ones that do not are unquestioningly accepted by an ignorant public.
Figure 3. Evolutionary maturity of design vs. longevity of use
The Conundrum
Only the very best interfaces can teach you how to use themselves. That is where our youngest devices, computers, fail most miserably-because they are also our most powerful and enable us to make mistakes most efficiently. Since the things they do are so desirable, we now have myriad digital tools that are only slightly designed for us; we must puzzle out what they do and adapt to them. And specifically because of the tiny range of ways we are given to interact with them-the lack of available communicative nuance-we all devolve toward employing just a narrow portion of our perceptual skills, our communication abilities, and in fact our cognition, to operate these devices. We use a few fingers for key-pushing and we stare into a small window that occasionally beeps . . . a terrible situation! The conundrum for you and me lies between the huge social potential inherent in interactive exhibits and the exceedingly narrow result. Once you know what is actually possible, and becoming quite affordable, most interactive exhibits feel like you're watching Imax through a keyhole.
As tools to educate, communicate, transact, or convey information, modern public interactive systems, whether in airports or museums, consistently manage to be simultaneously tedious, irritating, and inefficient. Our problem has not been just the slow evolution of the interface hardware. The software is far more difficult than the hardware, so it needs an even longer time to evolve into something that will not drive you crazy. The ideal illustration of slowness in software evolution is the Y2K issue. Both the software and the physical devices conspire to reduce the effectiveness of your daily life and the perceived quality of a museum visit.
Contrast the shape of that co-evolved scythe with the forms found in our most advanced devices. Your monitor is either rectangular and heavy, or rectangular and tiny, and your keyboard is a flat planar rectangle, with each key placed exactly where your fingers naturally land when you grasp it .... oh, they aren't, and you don't GRASP a keyboard? Your fingers don't curl around the sides of it like the sides of a pinball machine? Well--they will.
Finally, our problem is also not the designers, because up to now they've been constrained by expensive, time-consuming, unwieldy components--both software and hardware--plus a design philosophy about interactive software which assumes that even a highly capable device does not need to know anything about the user who just walked up to it. Or even that there is someone standing there.
Survival
Now we can consider another evolutionary perspective on those same interactive exhibits: survival. The average exhibit doesn't have the adaptive ability, coping skills, or sensory apparatus of a common polliwog-and certainly nothing nearly as sophisticated as a bunny rabbit. Over 98% of them can neither see nor hear, and yet they're supposed to somehow survive hundreds of thousands of encounters with the most devious predator on the planet: us. Now, the definition of survival for an exhibit is easy-and comes in two parts: defense and sustenance. It must first, not break when used, which is the defense part, and second, it must capture and sustain the interest of those human users, or it will be thrown out, which is the sustenance part.
Unfortunately, the defensive strategy chosen by designers is that of the turtle, which isolates the system from its users and reduces its ability to do anything but crawl. The sustenance side of the equation is greatly hindered by this defensive design; it limits the sensory bandwidth of interaction, it limits the topic areas that can be effectively explored, and it especially limits the number of users that are able to jointly partake of the educational experience.
Sustenance is also limited in a far more important way: by the exhibit's adaptive ability and coping skills that I mentioned earlier. Exhibits tend to present the same reactions to everyone, regardless of age, education, height, handedness, interests, or what exhibit you've just come from. In the highly competitive world of rabbits, that is a recipe for rabbit stew, and we know altogether more than we'd like to about what the competition for leisure time looks like now.
All these problems are old news to interface researchers and other computer people, but we also have new news: a solution. Better yet, museums, heritage sites, and other public facilities will not even have to pay for it. The solution for good interactivity will be developed for them by the consumer electronics industry, AKA Sony, Motorola and Nokia. Those companies and many others are currently spending hundreds of millions of product development dollars in their first genuinely interesting competition in over a decade. They are going to provide the Good Interface for us, and they are going to do it because they must.
Why Consumer Electronics?
The consumer electronics industry has already achieved the ultimate in machine-centered design; the 68-button remote control for TVs. And all those companies have accomplished this amazing feat equally well. Together, they have triumphed over the average consumer in the competition for greatest number of unusable features--but they've recently realized their mistake and the smart ones are repenting. Their only recourse is to completely change the way they think about the interface--and how it's designed. They now have to compete on things like usefulness instead of features, and real usefulness means one thing; human-centered design.
In the next 5 years, consumer electronics companies now intend that your living room have Ambient Intelligence. Your stereo and TV will both recognize your face when you walk into the room, and who is or is not with you. Then, depending on the time of day, the day of week, their accumulated histories of your habits of use, and their knowledge of your predilections, they jointly decide what to do for you. And the single most crucial thing they must do for you is to not irritate you. Of course, that is the opposite of how interactive systems work for us now.
There are four developments that make this change possible: First, tiny, powerful and cheap computers will be embedded in everything, and second, most of them are going to be communicating with each other, with your home computer, with online servers, and with their manufacturer, all the time. Third, tiny sensor chips will be constantly gathering information from the room; the light level, temperature, sounds, and human behaviors. Then they integrate all of it in order to decide what to do next. And finally, the software they need in order to make good decisions is being written; it is called Embedded Systems software, and it is perhaps the hottest area of software development right now. Consider Lego's Mindstorms as a precursor.
The competition will be fierce, and it will not be just Sony vs. Philips vs. Motorola. It will also be Toshiba vs. Apple vs. Disney vs. Paramount. Because of Human-Centered Design, computers are about to change from being general-purpose devices to being specifically customized for certain uses--and many of those uses are going to be sponsored and licensed.
What Does this Mean to You?
The public spaces, exhibits, and attractions we design will receive for free all the Darwinian booty from that expensive consumer electronics bloodbath; the subcomponents that make intelligent devices possible.
What our new exhibit designs will use are the survival strategies of a somewhat more advanced mammal than the rabbit; the human street busker. Street performing is an ancient occupation, one whose success depends on constant and detailed observation of the audience, followed by just as constant and nuanced tuning and selection of exactly what to do next . . . to keep coins falling into the hat. Good performers seem to be magnificent at improvisation, but it is all carefully calculated: it's really just a limited set of tested and proven, well-rehearsed bits, gags, moves, routines, and one-liners, each waiting to be rolled out when that dynamic, complicated, equation known as the audience, the guest, or the user, triggers it.
What we must and will have is exhibits that perceive the visitors' presence, activities and reactions, and deduce things about those visitors' interests, responding subtly and appropriately. You can count on networks that track the attractions a family visits in a theme park, where they eat, what they buy, and can even see that the 4-year-old is asleep. You can count on exhibits in a museum that present facets of the same information in very different ways to different people; adapting to each user. When those exhibits are properly designed, they will enable small groups of people to share the learning experiences, just like theme park rides. And those same socially adept interactive exhibits will comment and build upon what the children learned at previous exhibits, tying the entire experience together.
The new, additional layer of designed intelligence in a museum brings more of the personality, history, and meaning of the collection to life. It also contextualizes that information for the individual, and it will remember that individual on the next visit, helping establish a more personal relationship for the institution. A good museum exhibit does not have to be explicitly entertaining if it is implicitly engaging. By seamlessly conveying an entire experience, it presents custom-tailored facets of the content without artificially separating the explanation from the artifact or phenomenon being explained.
So, if you encounter an interactive exhibit that looks suspiciously rectilinear, doesn't know how to communicate with its peers, can't converse with you, can be used by only one person at a time, and which you can sneak up on, then it's on its way to extinction . . . and the sooner the better. It should not be permitted to reproduce or to bore your guests, and it should not be allowed to enforce arid, solitary museum experiences on those guests.
Clark Dodsworth is the principal of Osage Associates in San Francisco CA. His book Digital Illusion: Entertaining the Future with High Technology (published by Addison-Wesley) was reviewed in The Informal Learning Review no. 34. The above essay was presented at the Trends in Leisure Entertainment (TiLE) conference in London, England in May 1999.