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The ah, technology of cooking, which really began in the Neanderthal era of
the evolution of the human species is seen
today as the development of an external “stomach”.
The technology of cooking is a way of taking nutrition
that we can’t digest in our bodies, and
“predigesting” it in some sort of cooking technology
that allows us to store food, to preserve food, and also to eat
certain kinds of foods that would be unavailable to us otherwise. And
so, in many ways, technology IS the narrative
of human evolution. For those of you who are waiting to develop
spontaneously some sort of jet pack on your back as a sign of human evolution,
or maybe get webbed fingers or something like that, to help you swim faster,
or develop, like, a third eye, or...a, a third arm,
um, this is really not the narrative of human evolution. The narrative of evolution
is our relationship and our *intimate*, *individual* development
of the relationship with technology. And you go into the brains of human beings,
and one of the reasons why development of prosthetic
arms is *such* a significant technological issue is that
so much of our brain is devoted to carrying
the sort of evolutionary burden of...of how our *hands*
have interacted with the various technologies in
the world that have developed, with the tools that have created
first, humanity, and then, civilization. And...and so, World
Usability Day is not simply about...a, a kind of
of ah, annoyance with the customer service hotlines
of the ah, technological devices around the world.
World Usability Day is...is
is a *declaration* that we humans are in the
business of controlling and mastering
and being the *authors*
of our evolutionary narrative. And technology is not
something that gets dropped on us. Technology is something
that is derived from the ingenuity of each one of us.
And that, ah, the people who produce technology
and produce devices should not be allowed to simply
drop stuff on humans, and see what sort of works,
and...and “if humans adapt to the technology,
then good for them. And if they don’t, we just put it in the landfill”.
We’ve...we’ve lived through that period of time, and it’s created
some fantastic miracles, but...there’s no question
that the technological -sort of- strategies going forward can’t
possibly work with a pure sort of market structure. There has to be
much more intentionality about technology. Technology
that brings everyone together. Technology that is usable
on a universal kind of level, where the strategy of
“who’s gonna use this, how, and why”, is really a part of the whole
design process. My dad was an industrial
designer. He actually is still alive today, he’s more of a musician and a kind of a
retired lecturer on what I do
wrong. (audience laughter) That’s sort of his hobby these days.
But, ah..and he listens to my radio show, and calls me up
and, and says, “that was ridiculous, what you were saying”, and
ah, he’ll embarrass me completely...but he, but he
...in his, ah, professional life, he was an industrial designer. He worked for IBM,
he worked for Steelcase, he worked for Eastman Kodak,
and, and I grew up in a designer’s household.
And...and growing up with an industrial designer is kind of a strange
thing, because, you go into his home
office, -and all designers *had* home offices, I don’t know if any of you
know industrial designers, but-well, today we *all* have home offices- but,
when I grew up, my dad had a home office. Because designers, of course, come home,
and...you know, they spent the day being told “you can’t do
that, we have no money to do that”, and “that’s ridiculous”, and
you know, “someday”. And...and designers come home,
and they take this -sort of- collective sense of
“I’m a complete failure.” And they go into
a little room, on their own, ah, which evolved into the home
office that all of you understand today, and they try to -sort of- figure out, “well, wait
a minute...how can I convince people that the ideas that I have
about the way humans interact with machines
is actually valuable? -Can actually work?” And so,
*designer’s* homes are filled with...you know, desks
with sketch pads. And...and...and prototypes.
And models. And *weird* sort of things that -“Dad, what’s this?” “Well,
it was a” (distracted by offstage activity) “Isn’t that great?” (referring to giant cockroach that had roamed onto the stage behind him).
“World Usability Day” - that’s, that’s like, 700
million years’ worth of evolution right there (indicating the cockroach). That is some serious usability.
(giggling from front rows of the audience as stage hands corner the bug) Lookit, that’s great!
Ah...but ah, my dad’s- my dad's
home office was filled with tons and tons of little prototypes
of things. And he worked for um, for IBM, and one of his great
projects -and one of his great inventions- was something called the
“Anat-O-Meter”. And it was basically something he came up with. Because designers
didn’t necessarily intuitively understand
the...the dimensions of human bodies. They would create things
on intuition, and they would sort of...ah...you know,
try them out with a couple of people, and *hope* that they worked in the marketplace. And my dad’s
idea was, well, what if (audience laughter) it was this kind of like, slide rule thing,
that people had, where they could like, figure out what the sort of
99th percentile of the dimensions of the human hand were. Or
the dimensions of the wrist to the elbow. Or the dimensions of
the neck to the, ah, ah, to the hip. And he created
this thing called the Anat-O-Meter, and, and...there were like, you know,
thousands of them in boxes in our basement. (audience laughter) They were, ah,
they-they were-uh...shall we say, generously...they were “ahead
of their time”. (low laughter) Um. ...But they were a fabulous
idea. And I thought to myself, “So...Dad,
people don’t...people are designing clothes, and they really don’t know the dimensions of human
beings?” And he said, (sadly) “Yeah, that’s, ah, really, the way it goes.” And, and I-
it-it-it just drives me insane. And...and as
my dad developed as a designer, one of his manifestos that he actually
presented at a design conference back in like, the late 1960’s
was something called “The Development of the User Bias”. You can actually
Google the, the words “user bias” and my
dad will probably come up, in some obscure paper from the 1960s
or the early 1970s. And he thought -his idea was-
that...designers had to develop a *bias*
towards the user. That what existed today was -or
what existed in *his* time- was a bias towards marketing, or a bias
towards the development of a device that would be plausibly
usable for the greatest number of people, to sell
enough of the devices so that you could actually introduce the next
device. Because you want the people to throw away the old device, and then buy
the new device. And so, the *biases* were all towards marketing,
and possibly towards engineering, in the sense that you could ah, ah
develop a device with the, the *fewest* and the *lowest* cost of raw
materials, et cetera. And my dad said, “There needs to be a USER
bias. A bias towards the user."
And so in a sense, when Elizabeth came to me and said, “You
want to be a part of World Usability Day?”, it was as though my dad sort of emerged
from the clouds and said, (God-like voice) “YOU MUST DO THIS.”
(audience laughter) “IT IS YOUR CALLING.”
And...and...and oddly, the
idea of “usability”, as a technological -sort of-
mission, as a...as a divine strategic mission for
everything that we create- ah, is...is absolutely
part of my DNA.