Like many averagely intelligent and moderately well-educated people of my age I find the products of information technology to be among the principal causes of stress in my life, resulting in much bad language and wasted time. Touch wood, it isn’t malevolent hackers that cause me the problems. It’s not even that systems crash with alarming regularity, like Spotify did yesterday and much of Google did today, or even that Windows 10 needs to update for a couple of hours every day or two (you’d think after all this time they would have got it right). No, it isn’t that, not entirely. While these examples reveal how – even without the impacts of malicious intent – our crucial information infrastructures are absurdly, crazily vulnerable, unreliable and flaky, the issue I want to address here is subtly different. From the perspective of an everyday user of computerised systems it’s the intrinsic design – one might say the underlying ambient assumptions – that forms the subject of my concern today. Just to be clear, I refer to those systems without which it is scarcely possible to continue to lead a civilised life – to find things out, to write, to buy stuff, to communicate with people, to take photographs, to play or listen to music, and so on. Important activities.
Design, in a word, is much to blame for this impoverishment of our collective quality of life. Simple activities never used to be complicated, and they don’t need to be. Being incomprehensible is not the same as being clever. “Smart” should never be a synonym for “stupid”, yet so often it is. Now, even attempting to switch on the telly or to answer the phone can be fraught, with no guarantee of success, without prior instruction. A lightbulb can take longer to fully illuminate than the time it takes to do whatever you needed it on for. Just lately I’ve noticed that some people on the other end of a phone line sound as though they are immersed in a polygonal steel tank full of soapy water while simultaneously inhaling helium. Since when was a flat piece of glass the ideal geometrical form connecting the mouth and the ear; has human anatomy really changed that much since the dawn of the telephone? Did a clever man with a clever algorithm work that one out? Yes, of course he did. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. QED. This is progress, and if you don’t like it I’ll warm up the lecture about making omelettes – yes, the same one they use for promoting driverless cars.
Many of the difficulties technology inflicts upon its users result from a perverse desire to design counter-intuitively, and from a failure to align what has to be done in order to get some device or function to work, with what common sense and intuition suggest should be done.
What ought to be user-friendliness so often appears as user hostility or user contempt. What should be the bleedin’ obvious is frequently baffling - and that is without the added strains imposed by age-related deficits concerning dexterity, hearing and eyesight. Just don’t get me started on the subject of packaging.
One needs to fight back. Recently, having had quite enough of G-mail altering the words I intended to use, and then telling me that my spelling and grammar were wrong, forcing me to go back through my message to unpick the consequences of this unwanted interference, I decided to do something about it. The crunch came on the day when it took me two attempts to get “Wombledon” to stick, in a silly piece I was writing about a trip to the alternative W villages of south Notts, including Wibberley, Wobberley, and Wallaby-with-the-Wind. That’s it, I thought, I’m not putting up with it any more. Actually, I was rather taken aback that Google knew of Wimbledon. Apparently there’s one (population 192) in North Dakota, so there’s your likely explanation. Mind you, Microsoft has never heard of Belsen, as you’ll discover, if you use their spellchecker. Enough’s enough, I fumed. I was determined to remove the unwanted idiotic “smart” intrusions, there solely – as far as I could see - to intimidate me into acknowledging the dumb omniscience of the onanistic oligarchs of Asperger Valley.
But how to go on the attack? Well, a resort to instinct and nebulous intuition is often a good idea. Over the preceding weeks I’d developed a sneaking suspicion that the symbol which I’d always taken to be a flower, or possibly the sun, or just an arbitrary piece of decoration, was in fact a cogwheel. I guessed – rightly as it turned out – that this tiny icon implied “settings”. It might, of course, have been a cue for the whirrings of considered mentation, for thought itself, but no, it was the sort of cog that could be vaguely symbolic of machinery as we used to picture it, in that dreamily long-ago era before nail parlours provided the principal contribution to our economy. Perhaps it was a nod in the direction of the clattering computations of Charles Babbage. Holding my breath, I clicked on this little symbol and then - refusing to be fobbed off with cosmetic, geek-pleasing banalities - I found a link where I could deal with the unasked for “preferences” responsible for screwing up my e-mails. Now I could disable all these irritating “smart” reflexes, and take charge of writing what I intended, not what some pre-set algorithm had decided was best for me. Best of all, I could be British again.
Oh yes, British, as in British government. We’ve heard quite a lot about algorithms this week, haven’t we. Algorithms are clearly bad news; they’re not designed for you or me, but for someone else, someone who wants to cut corners in the interests of making their own life easier and more profitable, but yours or mine more difficult and lowly. Algorithms work to the lowest common denominator; they democratise mediocrity. As we have seen, they are designed in their quasi-mathematical pseudo-objective faux-scientific thuggery to impress the likes of our esteemed heart-warming education secretary, William Gaviscon Jnr. While I tend to visualise young Gaviscon in short trousers, at this point I should emphasise strongly that he is not a major participant in my erotic fantasy life. Although I admit that when he bleated at the Russian leader to “shut up and go away”, at the time of the Salisbury poisonings, I felt a quiet thrill of submission-by-proxy, at the same time hoping that Vladimir Vladimirovich was able to enjoy a more direct and robust physiological response.
However, ugh, shudder, I digress. Following my sussing out of the cog symbol and my subsequent smug victory over Google - fooling it into writing the words of my choice, beating it down, one-nil to the human race - I realised that, as regards most of the symbols that are sprayed round the edge of the computer screen, on phones and tablets, and all over the place, I haven’t a clue what they mean. I wouldn’t dare touch them. Does anyone know what they all mean? I’ve just noticed one of them which as far as I can tell, with the aid of a magnifying glass, features a man in a pale blue pullover with an unnaturally extended right arm. I’ve been hovering over this symbol, cautiously, with mouse in retracted pounce mode. A box has popped up, saying “Welcome Center”. Well, thanks but no thanks, for it has something of the aura of a touchy-feely religious cult, something best left in the bleak suburbs of middle America, in an endless desolate prairie of the soul, where everything from pecan pie to the clear night sky is omigod awesome. Pale blue pullovers, that’s the giveaway. I can visualise the plate glass, the A-frame in pale brick. [Can we please get back on track? We left Wimbledon, North Dakota, some time ago. - Ed].
Anyway, those few icons that I (sort of) understand, I do so because they operate metaphorically to suggest physical items from my past, like the dustbin symbol for getting rid of rubbish, and the floppy disc icon meaning ‘save’ or ‘store’. They remind me of real things and therefore they mean something to me, though not necessarily what is intended. The dustbin is quite like one that my grandmother had. I think bin day was on a Friday. Yes, I can relate to that, just the thought makes me feel happy, and I can imagine other rewarding possibilities for on-screen iconography. I so wish that computers had something like a bus conductor function. Or a chocolate application..
But then again, your average enthusiast is too young to remember floppy discs, or bus conductors, or decent non-greasy chocolate made in Birmingham in satisfyingly large chunks at half a crown a slab. His real-world bin, if he has one, is a wheelie bin, quite different in form and profile from the much beloved fluted variety with ill-fitting lid that would bang around cheerfully in a strong wind. If analogy is perception, as Douglas Hofstadter would have us believe, it will rattle and clang its way up the garden path, and leave you there, gripping a hovering mouse without a paddle. The use of skeuomorphic imagery – the fancy name for stylised bins, cogs, floppies and the like, inspired by associations now anachronistic or redundant - has to keep pace with the mental associations of users. Otherwise it merely confuses.
Thoughtfully employed, digitally or otherwise, skeumorphy can be useful, innovative and inspired. For instance, I like the reassurance of the soft scrunching sound made by some digital cameras to indicate that a picture has “taken” – referencing the shutter clicking on a photographic camera. However, for the young digerati, unused to “analogue”, I fear that all it tells them is that anyone nearby can hear them taking a photograph, and so they had better be careful, since their voyeurism or breach of performance copyright is audible. The archaic metaphor may be lost on them. Tough. Technology grinds on mercilessly.
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