Book Review: Things That Make Us Smart
Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine
This book, by Donald Norman
The good news is that technology can make us smart. The human mind is limited in capability. There is only so much we can remember, only so much we can learn. But among our abilities is that of devising artificial devices – artifacts – that expand our capabilities. We invent things that make us smart. Through technology we can think better and more clearly. We have access to accurate information. We can work effectively with others, whether together in the same place or separate in space or time.
The bad news is that technology can make us stupid. The technology for creating things has far outstripped our understanding of them. Things that can make us smart can also make us dumb. Technology has not been planned, it just happened and what this book focuses on is what is wrong with the design of technology that requires people to behave in machine-centred ways for which people are not well suited. What does that mean? When technology is not designed from a human-centred point of view, it doesn't reduce the incidence of human error nor minimise the impact when errors do occur. Yes, people do indeed err. Therefore the technology should be designed to take this well-known fact into account. Instead the tendency is to blame the person who errs, even though the fault might lie with the technology, even though to err is indeed very human.
We are in the middle of what some people call “the information explosion”, but there is too much information for anyone to assimilate, the information is of doubtful quality, and perhaps most important, the things we collect statistics about are primarily those things that are easiest to identify and count or measure – which may have little or no connection with those factors of greatest importance. It is easy to collect statistics on number of hours worked, on cost of equipment, and on such statistical indexes as “productivity of labour”. It is much more difficult to collect statistics on the quality of a product or its effect on the quality of life.
We humans are thinking, interpreting creatures. The mind tends to seek explanations, to interpret, to make suggestions. We are active, creative social beings. We seek interaction with others. Unlike machines, we change our behaviour as we attempt to understand what others expect from us. All of these natural tendencies are thwarted by the engineering approach to efficiency. The machine-centred view is concerned primarily with operations per second.
This approach emphasises short-term productivity and treats workers in isolation from the social structure in which they participate. The result is a deterioration of long-term goals such as quality of product, satisfaction of the worker, and the need for a nurturing social environment. Worse, the machine-centred approach to the design of a job leads to an uninspired society, where mental creativity is much reduced. None of this was planned, it is an accidental by-product of the age.
There are many modes of cognition, many different ways by which thinking takes place. The two modes particularly relevant here are experiential cognition and reflective cognition. The experiential mode leads to a state in which we perceive and react to the events around us, efficiently and effortlessly. This is the mode of expert behaviour, and it is a key component of efficient performance. The reflective mode is that of comparison and and contrast, of thought, of decision-making. This is the mode that leads to new ideas, novel responses. Both modes are essential for human performance, although each mode requires very different technological support.
These two modes of cognition do not capture all of thought, nor are they completely independent: It is possible to have a mixture, enjoying the experiential mode while simultaneously reflecting on it. Still, much of our use of technology seems to force us toward one extreme or the other. Many existing sets of instrumentation and equipment fail by providing reflective tools for experiential situations or experiential tools for reflective situations.
So what can this book give you? It explains not only how technology can detract or support these two kinds of cognition, but also the three kinds of learning: accretion (accumulation of facts), tuning ( turning knowledge into experience through practise) and restructuring (organising knowledge into the right conceptual structures through reflection). It further delves into the power of representation, and how to represent information to best match human cognition, how the human mind works and remembers things, how knowledge becomes organised in our minds and how to design technology with this in mind.
We have now the advantage of over 10 years of hindsight from the time this book was written, but amazingly or maybe sadly, although technology has come a long way since then, it has hardly improved at all in the areas discussed in this book, i.e becoming more human-centred. Therefore the subjects raised are still relevant today and clearly will need a lot more focus in years to come from designers, business, investors and the like if we are to have technology available to us, which will build on our strengths rather than reinforce our weaknesses.
Remember the motto of the 1933 Chicago World's Fair: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms"? That was a machine-centred view of the world – unabashedly, proudly machine centred. It is time to revolt. We can't conform, moreover, we shouldn't have to. It's science and technology – and thereby industry – that should do the conforming. Therefore it is time for a person-centred motto, one that puts the emphasis right:
People Propose, Science Studies, Technology Conforms
Comments