Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 32

As a designer working with technology, one of the fundamental frames I (Stephen) struggle with is how to think about the “things” I help make. Are the digital apps and sites I’ve designed more like:

• People with whom we interact?

• Places where we do stuff?

• Tools that extend our abilities?

• Something else, altogether?

Steve Krug, author of the book Don’t Make Me Think, suggests that technology should function like a butler, a person with whom we converse and ask to do stuff for us. When we say “Let’s check with Google” or “Ask Siri,” we’re thinking of these services like a butler. This “technology as person” frame is the one I (Stephen) opted for in my first book Seductive Interaction Design where I asked “How do we get people to fall in love with our applications?” By looking at first-time user experiences through the lens of dating, I was able to highlight all the opportunities we have to make our software more humane, desirable, and—to be honest—a little less geeky! This technology-as-person association also expands to many other areas, from personal robotic vacuums such as the Neato and Roomba to the sentient, sometimes frightening, AIs portrayed in movies like Iron Man, 2001, or Ex Machina.

But now consider how we view something like Facebook or even the internet as a whole: our frame shifts to that of a place we visit. As author and consultant Jorge Arango comments: “We ‘go’ online. We meet with our friends ‘in’ Facebook. We visit ‘home’ pages. We log ‘in’ to our bank. If we change our mind, we can always ‘go back.’ These metaphors suggest that we subconsciously think of these experiences spatially.”³

This frame shifts once more when we turn our attention to mobile devices, which by their physical proximity seem more like personal tools, extending our limited capabilities. We don’t talk with our phone—it’s not a person with whom we converse. We use our phone to talk to others; it’s a device we use to do things, a tool that extends our capabilities. Notebooks let us hold onto thoughts. Robotic arms let us lift more than we could otherwise. Shoes let us run farther. Mobile apps let us do more and better. But even this “mobile device as tool” frame isn’t that straightforward. If we use our phones to visit the places above, don’t they become portals to places in addition to being tools?

These shifting associations suggest that we as humans don’t have a consistent frame for thinking about technologies. We’re all trying to use tangible terms to make sense of something fundamentally intangible. But person, place, or tool ... something else ... Why should all this matter?