The Future is Then
Technologies like AI and Blockchain are showing up more and more in the mainstream designer’s toolkit. As part of our series on emerging tech’s need for designers (including these two posts), we’ve taken a moment to reflect on how we’ve come to understand the technologies that used to baffle us.
The morning of IDEO Cambridge’s 2017 portfolio review began with a breakfast monster: a wild-eyed, seven foot tall red velour face that stood in the corner, growling with satisfaction as each designer reached in through its mouth to retrieve a breakfast burrito.
Matt Brown, a design lead at IDEO and the man behind the monster (both literally and figuratively), had rigged up an analog modular synth complete with a theremin to dial in the monster’s growl tone.
“There’s something nice,” he remarked to me later while explaining the monster’s synth rig, “about not having any computer involved at all.”
It’s easy to relate with the sentiment. Despite our tremendous technological capabilities, disconnecting and getting away from our devices remains quite appealing. In a sense it seems odd: how is it that analog, mechanical, or even simple physical systems are still often more interesting to us than the vastly more sophisticated experiences computers can deliver?
There’s no one simple answer, but let’s focus on one possible explanation: the predictability of simple systems and tools is more engaging than the power of complex technology. From fighter jets to smart speakers, technology experiences that build on simple, familiar behaviors and interactions have unique advantages in delivering usable, straightforward experiences. While that might not be a revelation, what is interesting is that the arc of our high-tech world seems to be bending back towards more analog-seeming experiences.
Get Physical
Our brains are incredibly sophisticated at understanding physical objects, and the closer an interaction maps to the physical, the easier it is for us to understand due to our predisposition to understanding physical phenomena.
In fact, humans grow up with an innate understanding of physics — babies as young as two months old have been shown to already have a basic comprehension of physical laws, which only gets refined as they get older. As adults, our understanding of physics is so ingrained we seldom even realize how powerful it is. Think about the act of swerving to avoid an obstacle in the road or reflexively catching a fly ball — your brain makes numerous calculations to achieve those goals so you don’t run off the road or end up with a baseball in your popcorn. We do all this without realizing the difficultly of the problem we just solved almost instantaneously — because our brains have millennia of ingrained understanding of how the physical world around us works.
Computers that can experience errors, viruses, unexpected changes in user interfaces, and any number of other abstract, intangible but utterly show-stopping ailments are understandably off-putting to an organism with millennia of expertise in physical objects. We still have limited facility with machines that can seemingly defy physics with their simultaneous unpredictability and inflexibility. Matt’s synthesizers, on the other hand, are simple machines. While they can be chained together in ways that create bizarre and other-worldly sounds, each individual component is easily understood and will always behave predictably.
Take Flight
In the aeronautics industry, where technological decisions are not made lightly, digital innovations have often taken cues from their analog predecessors in order to improve usability for pilots.
In the early days of flight, all aircraft were controlled by fully mechanical systems. The pilot’s controls were connected by physical links to the plane’s control surfaces. Pull a lever, a flap moves — pretty straightforward. However, since the early 20th century, electrical systems have been used in addition to, or sometimes in place of, the mechanical.
Electrical (and computerized) “fly-by-wire” systems allow for significant gains in safety and efficiency. Rather than relying on a pilot to read instruments and properly interpret their output to make adjustments, a computer can take data from multiple instruments (far more than a pilot could contend with) and automatically make adjustments to servo-controlled control surfaces.
More remarkably still, fly-by-wire systems have been successful in making previously impossible aeronautic feats quite manageable for a pilot. Many modern fighter jets like the F-16 are not naturally stable in flight, but through constant, tiny adjustments with fly-by-wire systems they are able to fly smoothly. Without those adjustments, the plane would not be able to stay in the sky.
Though the change in flight system is radical, the change in controls has been incremental. The pilot’s experience is similar to using a mechanical control stick that directly makes adjustments, but instead the pilot uses a joystick to signal their intent to the system, which, in response, performs myriad complex adjustments to deliver the pilot’s requested change in trajectory. The result is a system that cannot function without significant computation, but functions analogously to its mechanical predecessors — and just as predictably.
Look for a Familiar (Inter)Face
That type of achievement — creating a familiar and predictable interface for a complex system — is not a new goal for designers. But it seems we’re about to see a new level of success with interfaces that feel more natural and function more like their analog predecessors in our day-to-day lives.
Computers as we know them — things with displays and keyboards, and even things with touch screens that fit in your pocket — were always just a stop along the way, not a destination. No one wants cumbersome devices that invade our lives and ruin our posture, eyes, and attention spans to be so pervasive, but we’ve made compromises in order to accomplish all the nice things that computers do for us. The next step is to maintain those nice things while minimizing the compromises.
Voice control systems (like Amazon Echo and Google Home) are an early example of that future. At the moment they’re essentially weird dust collectors that can play music and respond cleverly when you swear at them. Imagine a future where they can pay your taxes, renew your driver’s license or remind you to call your mom just because it’s been a while — and do it all in a way that makes sense to your brain’s fundamental understanding of speech and physical movement.
AI is (probably) not going to bring about the end of civilization. But it may well make our homes and offices look and feel more like it did before we accepted pervasive computation into our lives — without sacrificing the capabilities that our current computers provide. Like the controls on the F-16, the controls of our digital lives will increasingly abstract away the complexity underneath and provide us with familiar, predictable interfaces that work with, rather than against, our natural understanding of the world.
Back from the Future
Deep Learning, analog synths, and F-16s are all radically different systems. But they are all exactly the sorts of familiar, predictable, experiences we should be trying to emulate with new technologies. They represent points on a trajectory towards a world of technology that accomplishes more by interfering less. It might seem as though we have already reached a point of mind-boggling technological sophistication and only incremental improvements remain, but perhaps that is exactly the problem — our technologies make their users aware of how complex they are with their failures, faltering and, yes, unpredictability. For this reason, analog and physical experiences are not going anywhere — and perhaps a bit of inspiration for achieving more human systems can be found in a high-tech fighter jet.
Special thanks to Matt Brown and his breakfast monster accomplices Emma Baker and Ashley Holtgraver for the thought-provoking (and tasty) breakfast, as well as Don Blair for the fly-by-wire inspiration.
