Rethinking Design: From the Methodology of Innovation to the Object of Design

摘要

According to proponents of user-centered design, the quest for innovating through technology has gone horribly wrong. There are concerns about the illusion of progress hiding the reality of monstrously unusable technology. This concern is expressed by Alan Cooper when he says: "The high-tech industry is in denial of a simple fact that every person with a cell phone or a word processor can clearly see: Our computerized tools are too hard to use."1 This quote directs attention to challenges of software production whereby technology often fails people and their needs. More recently, during the 2018 British Human Computer Interaction conference, a keynote presentation on artificial intelligence (AI) featured spacecraft computer HAL 9000 from the film 2001—a Stanley Kubrick film made in 1968. In the film, HAL interacts through voice with the crew, and future technology is imagined to have human-like intelligence. The video clip shown at the conference was a satire that reimagined HAL as Amazon.com's Alexa. Alexa is a virtual assistant and smart speaker that came to market in 2017 and reflects the current state of AI technology. In a comical twist, the computer (as Alexa) does not respond meaningfully to the crew's commands, but reacts in clearly misconceived ways to what was requested. For example, it plays the music band "The Doors" instead of opening the doors of the spacecraft as requested, or instead of answering what the problem was, it finds information about a film called "Problem Child." What we see is a computer unable to understand human speech and meaning, and the result is comical because we are familiar with technology behaving in bewildering ways. The comments from the audience suggested that we need "better representations" of the context and the world surrounding these human-computer interactions, but Cooper argues that the solutions to these problems do not begin with better technology: As engineers, their belief is in technology, and they have faith that only some new technology, such as voice recognition or artificial intelligence will improve the user's experience. Ironically, the thing that will likely make the least improvement in the ease of use of software-based products is new technology. There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product. The problem is one of culture, training, and attitude of the people who make them, more than it is one of the chips and programming languages. We are deficient in our development process, not in our development tools.