Читать книгу Designing Agentive Technology - Christopher Noessel - Страница 9

Thanks for picking this book up to give it a read. But, seriously—how do you have the time?

I look at my should-read book stack and at the precious minutes of free-choice time I have, and I’m dismayed. With a little research, I find that there are around 1,500 books published in my mother tongue around the world every day. That’s one every 57.6 seconds. Even if only one in 10,000 of them is truly amazing, that means there’s a new one to add to the stack each week. There’s just no way to keep up.

It’s not just reading. We’re all under pressure to do more and more with the time we have. If it’s not an existential bony finger reminding us to carpe every diem, it’s just the nature of the world to tell you that you should be doing more. You should be flossing more, bonding with your sweetheart and children more, and taking longer to eat your meal that you should have homegrown and cooked yourself. You should be looking at your finances more, meditating more, getting outside and exercising more. Sleeping more.

If you look at actual studies like the annual American Time Use Survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there’s not a lot of wiggle room in our schedules. If you’re one of their mythical average Americans, you dedicate all of 16—count-em—16 minutes of time to relax and think each day.¹ Even if you try to carve time away from the optional activities like television and movies, it’s quite likely some of the non-optional activities like sleeping and household chores could easily expand to consume the excess.

External time pressures aren’t going away, and I doubt we’re going to lose the internal desire to maximize the precious little time we have.

Enter technology.

For decades, technology has helped us move faster. It used to take hours to get furniture off a carpet and then take the carpet outside, drape it over something, and beat it clean. The vacuum cleaner shrank that to minutes. It’s part of the point of this book to show that lately, some technological innovations are shrinking that time to nearly zero. Consider the Roomba and what it means to get back those minutes of time you used to spend beating your rugs clean. These technologies aren’t just helping you do things. They’ve begun to do things for you. And as you’ll see, faster isn’t the only benefit that these agentive technologies provide.

That’s an exciting development, but to the best of my knowledge, it’s happening in a haphazard way—product strategists, owners, designers, and developers doing smart work in their own organizational silos. But could we do it better if we got clear on what we’re talking about? Say if we took a big, broad look at what makes these things special and unique and saw what patterns and problems emerged? That’s what this book is about.

So thanks for making the time. I think what you invest here, and the technology that results with this new thinking, is going to make the future a brighter place.