Читать книгу Figure It Out - Stephen P. Anderson - Страница 33

Where this choice of technology frame shows up is certainly in detailed labeling decisions, such as when a product team building software must decide whether to label something as “My Stuff” or “Your Stuff”—the best answer depends upon this fundamental framing question, and broader brand, experience, and perhaps even legal considerations. If it’s “my stuff,” then this thing is a tool and an extension of myself—like my files in my file folder. If it’s “your stuff,” then there’s an actor or person with whom I interact, that I hand stuff over to hold things for me.

What about hardware products? When the Neato robotic vacuum gets stuck, the error message asks us to “Please remove stuff from my path” or “Help me,” invoking the frame of a subservient cleaning bot that needs help from time to time. Even the sounds on these robots are meant to suggest something juvenile and prone to making errors—all an intentional frame designed to help us be more forgiving of what is still an early stage technology with plenty of kinks to be worked out.

If we take a broad, rational view of information technology, this person, place, or tool concept is how we understand something that is neither person, place, nor tool. In his article “The Post-Mac Interface,” designer Adam Baker comments: “Metaphors in user interface are like sets in theatre. They convince us to believe that the thing we’re looking at is like something else.”⁴ But software is bits and bytes that can be anything. Indeed, while the desktop metaphor was a big leap forward and useful to make personal computers accessible to a generation—linking the unknown to what is already known—we’re now stuck trying to move beyond a metaphor that holds us back, often in subtle or invisible ways. Consider how difficult it’s been for most people to switch from a folder-based system to a more robust tagging and keyword-based system. It’s hard to set aside one frame and view something in a wholly different way.

Or consider the underlying conceptual shift embedded into something like Google Docs. Behind the document editor as a “writing tool,” is a more fundamental shift to writing as a shared, collaborative activity (technology as platform). While most of us have rationally made this transition, consider how often we’re still caught off guard when we see other people—in real time— editing a document that we’re also working on. This shift from solitary tools to a shared collaborative activity is a fundamental one that we’re seeing across multiple domains. But these shifts take a long time before they feel natural. What more could we do if we didn’t have to bridge these concepts from one generation to the next, or one major invention to the next?

Okay, maybe you’re thinking “Software labels. Robot sounds. Desktop metaphors. Our concepts for approaching technology aren’t that huge of a deal, right?” Let’s make this personal. Let’s extend this out to a critical conversation that is happening right now and will have serious legal implications for decades to come.