Question Technology

The Importance of User-Centered Design

CNET has a story about the growing importance of fields like human-computer interaction, usability, and human factors engineering.  As someone who has done work in this area, I heartily agree.

Wonder why YouTube skyrocketed in popularity in less than two years?

One obvious reason is that the video-sharing Web site has kept it simple. YouTube doesn't require a video player download or a special account just to watch a video. With just a click on a link, a video is up and running in a few seconds. It's a people-friendly design, and that attention to simplicity has paid off.

Experts in the field of so-called human-computer interaction, however, say good design like the YouTube interface is the exception, not the rule. For every slick Apple iPod, there are a dozen washing machines with a baffling array of buttons. And for every simple TiVo interface, there are umpteen TV remote controls that look like something out of NASA's Mission Control.

Now companies, universities and even government agencies like NASA are investing time and dollars as they take a hard look at how people interact with technology.

Link: The human factor in gadget, Web design | CNET News.com,

via Usability In The News: The human factor in gadget, Web design.

Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things is a great introduction to the ideas behind HCI.

GM's Robot Suicide Ad

I didn't watch the Super Bowl (the Puppy Bowl is more my style), so I missed the annual ad nonsense and the ensuing minor controversies.  The story of GM's robot suicide ad is interesting, though.  From USA Today:

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention has sent a letter to General Motors (GM) criticizing an ad that shows a perfectionist assembly line robot dreaming about jumping off a bridge after dropping a bolt. The group said the spot may encourage people to consider suicide as a solution to their problems. The group demanded that GM apologize, not air the spot again and remove it from its website.

Link: Suicide-prevention group criticizes GM ad - USATODAY.com.

This group has a point, but what's more tasteless, I think, is how the ad insults GM employees.  As Seth Stevenson wrote:

A robot in a GM assembly plant drops a screw. As a result, he's fired. He tries to make do with menial jobs, but he remains miserable. In the end, he jumps off a bridge. Thoughts: Haven't a lot of actual human auto workers been laid off lately? Are they meant to laugh when, at the end of the ad, the robot wakes up to realize this was just a bad dream, and that he still has his job so he doesn't need to commit suicide after all? Whew, thank goodness things worked out for you, robot!

Link: The best and worst Super Bowl ads (Slate)

Mark Graban makes a similar point.  CJR Daily has a roundup of other blogger reactions to the ad: Bloggers Debate GM Robot's Suicide.

The latest news is that GM has agreed to remove the suicide from the ad: GM Changing Robot Suicide Ad (CNN).

60 Minutes on the Geek Industry

60 Minutes recently aired a piece about how complicated technology is creating high demand for the "Geek Squad" and other tech support services.  Mostly the segment is about those businesses, but there's also a bit about why technology is needlessly complicated, featuring usability guru Don Norman and the NPR Car Talk guys.  The video and transcript are online.  From the intro:

It’s hard to say exactly when it happened, but sometime during the past ten years, most of us involuntarily surrendered a big chunk of our lives to computers, and to other networking devices that contain computer chips. We’re talking laptops, desk tops, cell phones, BlackBerrys, PDAs, and remote controls, anything that needs to be programmed, requires technical support, and can crash, die, or merely freeze.

As Steve Kroft reports, that always has a way of happening at the worst possible moment, and for most of us there is only one solution: get me the geeks!

We are becoming slaves to our own technology – addicted to and dependent upon all sorts of beeping, flashing gadgetry that is supposed to make our lives easier.

But it has become so complicated to set up, program and fix, that most of us don’t know how to do it, giving rise to a multi-billion dollar service industry populated by the very people who used to be shunned in the high school cafeteria: geeks, like Robert Stephens.

Link: Get Me The Geeks!, How Tricky Technology Is Giving Rise To The Geeks - CBS News.

(via Don Norman)

Latest in Future Schlock: Discovery's 2057

I caught a few minutes of the Discovery Channel's new techno docu-drama "2057" the other day.  It's quite an achievement in the future schlock genre.  Flying cars!  Wired clothing! ("the doctor is in your shirt!")  Urine-analyzing toilets!

A memorable moment was when the flying ambulance arrived to treat the guy who had just tripped over a Roomba and fallen out a three story window (to prove a point that such a fall would kill you today, but not in our glorious future).  Before treating him, a paramedic consults her screen which chirps "Platinum Class verified!"  Presumably they'd just fly off if he wasn't properly insured.  Thank the gods!  Flying cars is one thing, but universal health insurance in fifty years?  That's just not believable.

The show's main web page locks up my browser (I guess I need to update to Firefox 2057), but I could get to the about page, 2057: About the Show: Discovery Channel, and here's an excerpt of their description of the show:

What would you see and experience if the clocks rolled forward 50 years? In a unique blend of drama and science, this three-part series shows you the world of tomorrow. Will we have flying cars? Will advances in medicine help us stay young forever? What about "printing" custom-made vital organs? What will our cities look like? What will tomorrow's wars be about? Will we have robots helping around the house? Will solar power be the new oil?

Supported by the world's leading scientists and research institutes, we embark on a quest to answer some of society's most fundamental questions and reveal the dramas of tomorrow's world along the way. State-of-the-art computer graphics in combination with a dynamic story line will create a world usually only seen in feature films, but with the accuracy and relevance of a documentary. This series is all about opening the window of our future based on science fact, not science fiction.

Bush's Baby Einstein Gaffe (Slate)

Timothy Noah takes issue with Bush's state of the union shout-out to the creator of the Baby Einstein videos.  Excerpt:

What is Aigner-Clark's achievement? She got rich marketing videos to infants. No one told the president, I presume, that this profit-making scheme ignores advice from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under 2 years of age shouldn't watch TV. One recent study went so far as to suggest, plausibly, that too much TV at so early an age can be a risk factor for autism. [...]

Baby Einstein is part of what Alissa Quart, in an August 2006 piece in the Atlantic ("Extreme Parenting"), called the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex, an industry that preys on the status anxiety of neurotic parents who, until Aigner-Clark and others told them otherwise, didn't sweat the meritocratic rat race until it was time to place their pint-sized strivers in preschool. That changed in the mid-1990s, when Don Campbell, extrapolating wildly from earlier research involving college students that, Quart writes, has never been duplicated, trademarked the slogan "Mozart effect" and used it to market classical-music CDs for infants. Aigner-Clark followed suit with her Baby Einstein videos in 1997.

"Essentially," Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan Lynn told the Chicago Tribune "Media Mom" (and occasional Slate contributor) Nell Minow in December 2005,

"the baby video industry is a scam. There's no evidence that the videos are educational for babies, and a review of the research on babies and videos concludes that while older babies can imitate simple actions from a video they've seen several times, they learn much more rapidly from real life."

Link: Bush's Baby Einstein gaffe. - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine.

Camera Phones Bring out the Best and (Mostly) the Worst

Michael Agger has an excellent essay in Slate on the wonders of the camera-equipped cellphone.  Link: The Camera Phone: The gadget that perverts, vigilantes, and celebrity stalkers can all agree on - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine.

He also points to an interesting blog, PicturePhoning, which "covers the latest news on camera and videophones, their social impact and more recently, what's the latest on mobile socializing and user generated content going mobile."

The Deception Behind "Sense about Science"

The UK nonprofit group Sense About Science has made the press recently with a new initiative to fact-check celebrities who make controversial claims about science.  They've distributed a leaflet that purports to correct statements about topics including organic food, alternative medicine, and animal welfare made by the likes of Madonna, Jamie Oliver, and Heather McCartney.

It makes for a good story (aren't those celebrities dumb!  let's stamp out bad science!) and the media has dutifully eaten it up.  But here's the thing: Sense About Science is arguably a public relations front group for industry.  Fact checking for celebrities?  How about fact checking for journalists.  Aren't they supposed to be the professionals?

My primary source for telling you SAS is biased is the non-profit Source Watch's article on the group.  (I've written about Source Watch previously here.)  For more background on SAS, here's an article by George Monbiot from the Guardian: Invasion of the entryists.

I first read about the Sense About Science Celebrity campaign in the January 6 edition of New Scientist magazine (the article is also online here: Celebrities Should Watch What they Say).  It also got written up elsewhere:

• The Times: Celebrities told to embrace the facts, not bad science,
• BBC: Stars must 'check science facts', When celebrities speak on science,
• The Guardian: Neutralise radiation and stay off milk: The truth about celebrity health claims,
• Blogs: Instapundit, Slashdot, and lots more.

None of these articles mentions the industry connections of Sense About Science.  Whether celebrities speak the truth or not is beside the point and is hardly newsworthy.  It's plain as day that SAS is pushing certain pro-industry viewpoints in some of this material.

Of course this isn't a unique occurrence.  Companies and PR firms go to enormous lengths to spin science reporting and public opinion in their favor.  With a little knowledge it's really not that hard to spot.  One good book on this subject is Trust Us, We're Experts by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber.  I recommend educating yourself as the best defense -- especially if you're a journalist.

TiggerGate, YouTube, and Network News

Apparently the news shows just love the YouTube.  At least it's a step up from the "Cool Links" news segments from a decade ago.  From an article by Liz Cox Barrett at CJR:

Hey, TV news producers and reporters: Absurd amateur video footage does not a news story make.

All three networks (plus cable) recently aired a "story" -- we'll call it, for now, TiggerGate -- that has left us wondering: where's the news judgment? It's almost as if the only question television news producers ask nowadays before approving a "story" is, "Is there video we can run (ideally video that has appeared on YouTube, so we can say the word 'YouTube' in the story)?"

Now for some background on TiggerGate.

As you probably know by now, some guy is claiming that during a family visit to Disney World last week, a man dressed as Tigger (Winnie the Pooh's tiger friend) punched his 14-year-old son in the face as they posed for photos. And -- oh, happy day! -- this guy captured the "assault" on home video (or, as CNN's Betty Nguyen gleefully exclaimed while reporting this story on Sunday, "Ooh, it's on tape!").

Time was when footage like this might, best case, end up on America's Funniest Home Videos with Bob Saget. We no longer live in that time. Today, the once-wholesome Bob Saget is raunching it up. And television news judgment has gone to hell.

Link: CJR Daily: Have Video, Will Air It.

Gandhi's Problem -- Too Low Tech!

This is an award-winning commercial from Telecom Italia in which we see Gandhi sit himself down in front of a webcam, followed by his image projected onto all sorts of video screens.  The tagline: "Imagine the world today if he could have communicated like this."  Sigh.

Link to video: Epica Awards.

Of course this is not the first company to abuse Gandhi by using him in a TV commercial.  I believe that honor goes to Apple, back in the "Think Different" days.

Loneliness and Technology

From an article by Jenny Uechi in Adbusters magazine:

Forty year old Joyce Vincent had been lying dead in her London apartment for two straight years before the badly decomposed body was discovered by her landlord in April 2006. The story, quietly tucked away in British newspapers, profoundly upset readers around the world who saw her isolation as a failing of modern communities. As one outraged blogger put it, “Two years. She lay there. Alone, dead, unnoticed, and unmissed. How is it possible that in a city of about seven million, not one person noticed that a neighbor, sister, cousin or friend was missing?”

How, indeed: in an era of advanced communication technologies in which loved ones can be reached with a few clicks of a mouse or dial of a phone, it seems implausible that the number of solitary deaths have been on the rise in countries like the UK and Japan in recent years. Alienation, dubbed the “great emotional sickness of our era” by Italian filmmaker Michaelangelo Antonioni, remains a disease that even email, cell phones and online networking has been powerless to remedy. These days, some experts are even suggesting that our social bonds may be breaking down not in spite of these new technologies, but because of it.

Read the rest here: Adbusters : The Magazine - #69 The Big Ideas of 2007 / Loneliness and Technology.

CNN's Future Schlock

For the latest in techno gee-whiz propaganda be sure to check out CNN's "Welcome To The Future," airing this month.  I love the over-the-top graphic.  These things always border on self-parody, though I now prefer actual parodies like The Daily Show's recent Future Shock.

Of course, as a kid, I loved these shows... The one I remember best is What Will They Think of Next? hosted by Joseph Campanella and Tiiu Leek.  Bits & Bytes was another favorite (clips on YouTube).

Via BoingBoing.

Risks of Collecting Your Children's DNA Samples

Over at the Biopolitical Times blog, Osagie Obasogie has a good post about the privacy implications of a new fad that has "CSI parents" swabbing and storing their children's DNA in case of future kidnapping.  An excerpt:

[A] recent MSNBC news story suggests that pop forensic science is going beyond teaching would-be felons to wipe down crime scenes with Clorox and creating a new generation of “CSI parents.” Using kits that are available online, at police stations, or at doctors’ offices, parents are swabbing their children’s cheeks and banking their DNA on the off chance that it will help in their rescue or identification in the event of abduction. [...]

Keeping a copy of your daughter’s DNA with her fingerprints may ultimately end up being a benign gesture. But what’s troubling is that unlike the thumb prints I took as a kindergartener in the 80s, an increasing number of these genetic samples are centrally stored in FBI labs next to samples from sex offenders, murderers, and other convicted felons. It’s entirely unclear whether these children’s samples are scanned each time the databases are used to find a crime scene match. It’s even less clear what happens to the samples when these children become adults. What is clear, however, is that given governments’ inclination towards keeping DNA samples indefinitely, parents should be as vigilant of their children’s privacy as they are of their safety.

Link: Biopolitical Times: CSI Daycare?.

Monitor Kids' TV Time with BOB

BOB is a new gadget that you hook up to electronic devices to monitor and control the amount of time kids watch TV, play videogames, or whatever.  Of course, if you need a gadget to accomplish this, your parenting problems may not stop here.

I assume the marketing wizards who named this device never watched Twin Peaks.

Link: Bob, Media Time Management Device,
via Wired: Gear Factor.

Shopping Carts with TVs for Kids

NPR reports on shopping carts with built-in TVs for your kids to watch while you shop.  The story includes some comments from childcare experts about how these are likely to be unhealthy.

Link: NPR : Grocery-Cart TV for Kids of Shoppers.

Image from the manufacturer's site, www.tvkart.com.

Previously: Nightmare Store of the Future.

Daily Show's Future Shock

In case you haven't seen it already, I recommend checking out The Daily Show's funny new feature called "Future Shock" with Samantha Bee.  The first installment featured Ray Kurzweil and RFID-chip-implant do-it-yourselfer Mikey Sklar.  You can watch the videos on the Daily Show site (or you can find copied snippets on YouTube as well, if that makes you feel better).