Designing Technology to Enable our Lives

Note: If you’re reading this in a browser, having come to my main blog address (http://peopletech.wordpress.com), you need to click here to get to the blog entry in a mode where you can leave comments at the end of the entry. The need to do this is a great example of what I’m writing about below.

In considering what to name this blog (and not mildly hampered by the unavailability of names, like finding a good URL these days), I came back to first purposes: why had I finally felt compelled to write a blog in the first place?  I want to convey the core of my view of technology design (and by “my” view I of course don’t presume to have invented it; but I have embraced it and done a great deal of thinking and work with it), and of technology’s potential to profoundly improve our lives when it is designed correctly.  The more I think about it, the simpler, more obvious, profound, and especially useful this view becomes to me: just as enabling the lives of people was the origin of technology, it remains our most effective guide to its design.

Originally, “enabling the lives of people” simply meant survival: technology meant tools, and those with the tools (and the requisite brain evolution to create them) prevailed.  In many far more serious ways today, it unfortunately means the same thing.  I was reminded of this by a series of beautiful documentaries Discovery Science (SciHD) is running called “Discovery Project Earth.” It is all about very large ways to save our planet, remove carbon dioxide from the environment, and find alternatives to fossil fuels.  When I switched it on, a shot of Earth from space in HD literally made me gasp for breath.

Beyond the necessity of saving Earth from our own monumental and long-wrought short-sightedness, we also have the luxury of designing technology which enables us as human beings to make our visions into reality on a daily basis.  My home music studio now rests almost entirely inside a 15″ MacBook Pro.  Finally anything I can conceive of musically I can create in my studio to a certain point (and frequently beyond) – enough that it can be used to communicate the idea to “real” musicians who can breathe more life into it.  Smartphones (especially, of course, the much-lauded iPhone) let us do so much more than phones, that David Pogue was exactly right: “You’re witnessing the birth of a third major computer platform: Windows, Mac OS X, iPhone.”  And that platform is a joy to use (a phone?! a joy to use?!).  Technology design is finally yielding products which are beautiful and enjoyable, because designers (and their employers!) are understanding the power of user-centered design to create fantastic products.  And all we as lucky consumers of that technology need to do is reach out and enjoy it.

For those of us involved in technology design, as we pursue this slowly less elusive field, let’s not forget that what we are actually designing is the experience that a human being has when interacting with their environment, and with the product we are designing as a part of that environment.  There is a living, breathing person who will learn how to use our product, come to a (hopefully) comfortable and enjoyable day-to-day use experience with it, and perhaps become a creative “power user”.  Most importantly, that human being will be experiencing the product during all of that time.  That’s the key.  If you design as if you were the person experiencing your product (which is not by any means an easy thing to do, and usually requires data collection, synthesis, and a “letting go” of being you as the person using the product) you will be that much closer to the mindset of the person whose life you hope to make just a little bit better.

People first, technology second.

~ by dcrumbine on September 4, 2008.