Jenna Wortham shares some fascinating stories in How New Yorkers Adjusted to Sudden Smartphone Withdrawal:

On the scale of hardships suffered in the storm and its aftermath, these were more like minor annoyances. But the experience of being suddenly smartphoneless caused some to realize just how dependent on the technology they had become. […]

“It’s strange, how in the end you feel like a prisoner to your device,” [Steve Juh] said. “It’s the one thing you wanted to work, more than anything.”

What most people find most disconcerting is the sudden lack (and unreliability) of information. As one person said, “You had to make plans and stick to them. It felt so old-school, like we were back in 1998.”

(link via The system that breaks is not the system that repairs)

In Bridging the gap between humans and computers Heather Kelly takes a look at some recent ethnographic research on our relationship with technology. It’s full of interesting stories like this one:

In one experiment, Ju’s group rigged automatic doors to open in different ways: Some would open slowly, then pause before fully opening; others would immediately jerk all the way open. The people walking by the doors assigned them different levels of intelligence, and thought the doors that opened in two steps just seemed smarter.

It turned out that adding the pause gave illusion of forethought, even though it was just an extra programming step. People thought the door was more intelligent because it appeared to think before carrying out an action.

One of my favorite books on this topic is Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. The first half of the book is all about our relationship with high tech “things” — what we find creepy vs. comforting, how different cultures behave differently, etc. Highly recommended.

The Flat Design Era by Allan Grinshtein for the LayerVault Blog made the rounds a week or so ago, but I haven’t had a chance to read it until now. It’s a really good discussion about what they call “honest design”:

Designing honestly means recognizing that things you can do with screens and input devices can’t be done with physical objects — more importantly that we shouldn’t try copying them. It takes too much for granted. Can you imagine your pristine iPhone built into the body of an antique telephone handset? Is that beautiful design? […]

It is laziness to not continue to refine. Remove the unnecessary embellishments and keep stripping until you’ve almost gone too far. We believe that elegant interfaces are ones that have the most impact with the fewest elements.

Nick Wingfield has a Windows 8 story in the New York times that provides a pretty good summary of everything we’ve heard on the tech blogs over the past few months. This passage from Fresh Windows, but Where’s the Start Button? stood out for me:

Many of the familiar signposts from PCs of yore are gone in Microsoft’s new software, Windows 8, like the Start button for getting to programs and the drop-down menus that list their functions.

It took Mr. McCarthy several minutes just to figure out how to compose an e-mail message in Windows 8, which has a stripped-down look and on-screen buttons that at times resemble the runic assembly instructions for Ikea furniture.

“It made me feel like the biggest amateur computer user ever,” said Mr. McCarthy, 59, a copywriter in New York.

If your software makes users feel stupid, you’re in big trouble. Quotes like Mr. McCarthy’s is a manifestation of the age-old legacy software dilemma that Microsoft faces with Windows: do you scrap the thing and start over, or evolve what’s already there? Microsoft chose to start over, and we’re about to see if the gamble is going to pay off for them.

My money is on the argument that Joel Spolsky made in April 2000 in Things You Should Never Do, Part I:

When you throw away code1 and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.

You are throwing away your market leadership. You are giving a gift of two or three years to your competitors, and believe me, that is a long time in software years.

You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists.

Or to bring it closer to design (and users) — as I argued in The Data-Pixel Approach To Improving User Experience:

The main problem with big redesigns is that, even though objectively the UX might have been improved, users are often left confused about what has happened and are unable to find their way. In most cases, making “steady, relentless, incremental progress” on a website (to borrow a phrase from John Gruber) is much more desirable. With this approach, users are pulled gently into a better experience, as opposed to being thrown into the deep end and forced to sink or swim.

I think we’re going to see a lot of sinking in the coming weeks…

---

1. I’m not implying that Microsoft is throwing out ALL THE CODE, but they are pretty adamant that this project is about “reimagining Windows from chips to experience”. ↩

In Living inside the Machine James Bridle writes about computers and data centres as aesthetic objects. It’s a very interesting idea and a great article. There’s one part in particular that stuck with me. James quotes William Gibson in an interview with the Paris Review from 2011, about his time in Vancouver in the late 70s/early 80s:

The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them.

Everyone is going to have one of these, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. How prophetic…

James sums it up nicely in his article:

We used to posit this space, the network, the notional space, as being elsewhere, the other side of the screen. But increasingly we have these images of the machine as something that surrounds us, that we live inside, within. As something that enfolds us.

I love Craig Mod’s writing, and Paris and the Data Mind is another great piece. It starts off as an article about Fitbit, and more broadly, the Quantified Self (“a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on most aspects of a person’s daily life”). But it quickly expands to an essay about memory in the age of data that never disappears:

I think of our check-ins, our food photos, our tagged friends. I think of our steps, our Fuel Points. I think of the myriad and nearly endless streams of data—data now actively collected but becoming increasingly passive. I think of all this and I can’t help but see a hologram projected somewhere off in the distance. A reconstitution of something, someone, miles away, years out. […]

How specific and formful our collections—these collections that constitute our selves—have become. Still not entirely whole, but closer than they’ve ever been. We play them back—literally, scrolling out timelines. A life of thoughts, granular GPS, and time-coded data. Holograms of ourselves, transparent and broken, from another time and place. They skip like a worn record, or a dusty movie reel, with pieces missing here and there. But they are us, however scratchy, and their resolution increases daily.

This theme has come up quite a bit recently — how the Internet prevents memories from fading. Craig ends up challenging the idea that unforgotten memories are necessarily a good thing.

At first it’s hard to figure out what the title of Nicholas Carr’s A post on the occasion of Facebook’s billionth member has to do with Facebook. Especially since he hardly even mentions Facebook. It appears to be an essay about boredom and computer intelligence:

We’ll know that computers are really smart when computers start getting bored. If you assign a computer a profoundly tedious task like spotting potential house numbers in video images, and then you come back a couple of hours later and find that the computer is checking its Facebook feed or surfing porn, then you’ll know that artificial intelligence has truly arrived.

But stick with it. It all makes sense once you get to the end and reflect on the words for a couple of hours. Also, full marks to Parampreet Singh for a comment that references Sisyphus, and compares his plight (“to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever”) with our tendency to check our Facebook feeds constantly.

Nicholas Carr wrote an excellent, balanced article on the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs1) like Coursera and Udacity, and the complex data mining required to make it work. From The Crisis in Higher Education:

The advances in tutoring programs promise to help many college, high-school, and even elementary students master basic concepts. One-on-one instruction has long been known to provide substantial educational benefits, but its high cost has constrained its use, particularly in public schools. It’s likely that if computers are used in place of teachers, many more students will be able to enjoy the benefits of tutoring. According to one recent study of undergraduates taking statistics courses at public universities, the latest of the online tutoring systems seem to produce roughly the same results as face-to-
> face instruction.

This is some really in-depth reporting, and it’s not all sunshine and roses. Nicholas went out of his way to seek out and report on legitimate counterarguments to this movement as well.

---

1. Yes, really. ↩

Make It So is a new book by Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff that tries to draw some design lessons from science fiction interfaces. It looks really interesting. From Nathan Hurst’s review in Wired:

Science fiction is the province of imagination, which, says Shedroff, is just like design.

“Everything that happens in the design process is fiction until it gets on the market,” he says. “We create prototypes; nobody ever sees them. They’re inspirational, we learn from them, but they don’t exist.”

“It doesn’t mean that everything you see in science fiction is right,” says Shedroff. “That’s why it’s a prototype, and it may or may not survive, like any other prototype in the real world.”

Elliot Jay Stocks in Made to measure:

Responsive web design isn’t about filling every available bit of whitespace — it’s about balancing the innate flexibility of the web with a designer’s desire to control the output.