The reality of interaction design..

A news article from the BBC's web site part of a series inviting some of the world's leading technologists to speculate about the future, Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems, calls for technology and design to be married to people's needs.

just a few key extracts that show I think can show how interaction design along with the aspect of user centered design techniques can move technology forward the way which is so clearly discussed by Greg Papadopoulos

As a technologist, when I look at the artefact's that we're thrusting onto the world they contain a lot of historical baggage and biases because we simply carry on the assumptions from the past. Things really could be a lot simpler.

All too often, it's like we're asked to care for these things that we really shouldn't care about - and that ranges from mobile phones to personal computers - rather than asking the technology designers to build tools with us in mind.

Think about the voicemail system on your cell phone. It's really bad.

You get the messages linearly, you are told that you have five new voicemails and you don't know what's from whom or the content of each message.

To organise your messages, you have to dial through with ridiculous key sequences. Making it worse, you can't choose a better system as you have to take voicemail from your mobile service provider.

But that's just one example of how the legacy of design holds us back. PCs are full of old designs.

He goes on to conclude..

Take a comparison between a Swiss army knife and a suite of kitchen tools as an example of something that's well designed.

If I really had to open a bottle of wine with a multitool, I would. But mostly, I'll have a corkscrew, a good chef's knife, scissors, and a nail file. Each one is a separate object, with incredibly simple interfaces. Each was designed for a specific purpose.

Rather than making our technologies increasingly complex to use, the same kind of design should be done on the technology we use.

There could be all kinds of computing behind something I use on a daily basis, but at basic level, that's not what I'm interested in. Instead I want an appliance that has a very well-defined and simple function.

Today we're asked to care about things that we really do not want to care about. I don't want the technology artefact or its management to be one of my objectives.

I would say that there has been laziness or a lack of courage by some technology developers, because we could go and redesign our entire system of computing.

But to do that upsets a whole bunch of assumptions and even more technological ecosystems, like the software makers who sell us software to run on PCs.

It is this that a reflection on what has been done with the design of technology, and so with this can question how technology can become closer and be able to integrate more fully with the actual requirements of the users.

the full article link - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6225398.stm