Filling the gap between intention and actions.

Thoughts on HER by Spike Jonze

I finally got to see the movie Her by Spike Jonze. After a couple of months of dodging spoilers and random articles online I watched this movie with no previous knowledge whatsoever other than the trailer facts; Joaquin Phoenix (JP) is a lonely guy that has some sort of crush on a female voice.

** Spoiler Alert

The movie is set in a not so distant future where people have pretty amazing smartphones and single earbuds with microphones they use to talk with their smartphones by using Siri-like commands like “read email”, “delete”, “next”, etc. The information is served both on a screen or by the earbuds so they can listen to their emails, news, music, etc.

In the first minutes of the movie you’ll see how JP downloads this new OS that, according to the commercial, feels like a real human being.

**end

And that new OS is what’s this post is all about:

Dealing with a computer that feels human.

Computers, smartphones and similar devices are really complex machines with simple purposes for the general public (communication, storage and access). To lower the complexity of these machines we use metaphors that help us understanding how they work by associating their complex structures to well known objects in the physical world. Examples of these metaphors are inboxes, folders, lists, desktops and windows among many others.

The issue with these metaphors is that they have been brought to the digital ecosystem because of their virtues but they have also brought their conceptual problems.

Example. The desktop metaphor is great to understand your workspace. However workspaces get messy as you use them in the real world. They will get full of notes, documents, papers, tools, random objects, etc as you work with them. Your natural messiness will slow down your productivity both in the physical world and in a digital environment unless you clean it up. While this seems natural when dealing with physical objects, why would you consciously keep your digital desktop clean to be more efficient?

Digital metaphors have been developed up to a point where they still require too many conscious actions from the user.

The need for a sense of control

If you think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the base line that wraps up the whole concept is the human need for a sense of control. We need to be certain that our needs are going to be met from bottom to top. When we deal with computers this is translated into organizational actions. For instance, the need for having a cleaned desktop, organized folders and an inbox with zero unread emails. We have applied the need for a sense of control to the digital world like a heavy and unnecessary legacy.

Imagine we were to remove all the barriers in between two people that send each other a message. During the communication process they would mentally judge the other person and categorize the importance of the message depending on many factors. They could even forget the message if it’s considered irrelevant.

The need for a sense of control, organization, and categorization is inherent in all of us human beings but their processes normally run in our subconscious.

And that’s what’s magical about the movie HER. In the first 10 minutes, as soon as the Siri-like voice breaks in as a human-like voice, Joaquin Phoenix has to automatically change his voice commands. You won’t hear him again saying things like “Delete email”, “Read next”, “archive this or that”, “Read my feeds”… Suddenly that doesn’t matter, the computer feels like a human and we deal with it like we do with our own kind.

The magic between JP and his computer is that they communicate with each other as you would do in a normal conversation. In this context all the categorization and organizational transactions that normally take place in the relationship between man and machine disappear.

Their common spoken language becomes the new interface (the point where two systems connect to communicate with each other) and all the previous organizational conscious actions now take place in JP’s subconscious.

The closest examples we can find nowadays of this kind of relationship / interaction with computers are voice activated devices. We are really far from the reality pictured in HER but at least now you can say “Call my brother!” instead of unlocking your phone, accessing contacts, selecting favorites, scanning a list and finally tapping on your brother’s profile and then phone number. Not bad, huh?

“I believe if we reduce the time between intention and action, it causes a major change in what you can do, period,”
Thad Starner

Imagine if we could deal with machines by removing all the unnecessary actions that take us apart from our purposes.

END