Computer Interface Design and the Philosophy of Technology

Humans interact with computer technology in more ways than just through the keyboard and the screen. Computers shape our way of seeing the world and our place in it. They can be powerful tools or dehumanizing sources of frustration depending on how they are designed. And through the use of metaphor we can shape how we see them and how they lead us to see ourselves.

Philosophical Critiques of Technology

When Heidegger wrote in the 1950's the paradigm case he had in mind for demonstrating the technological mode of being was the electrical grid. Hydroelectric dams convert rivers to a resource for energy, that energy is distributed across the population, and everyone in the population is reliant upon the distribution system. (Dreyfus, 1997) But the new era of networked computers fits Heidegger's model even better. Information is the ultimate resource. It can be endlessly disaggregated, and redistributed. The network enframes our entire world, because information about anything can be sent over the network. And human individuals are reduced to resources, or "eyeballs" in the terminology of internet advertising agents.

Albert Borgmann builds upon Heidegger's work in his books "Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life" and " Crossing the Postmodern Divide." (Borgmann, 1984 and 1992) Borgmann sees technology as providing the promise of a better, easier life, but that it seduces us into substituting the collection of material objects for a focus on what makes the good life. He distinguishes two types of technological artifacts: focal things and devices. Focal Things form the place for a set of activities that defines a form of life, such as a hearth provided a setting for much of family life. Devices, on the other hand, hide much of the activity associated with them, and so encourage us to think of the good they produce as a commodity to be maximized. The device paradigm replacement for the hearth might be a central heating unit. It provides heat, but its operation is usually hidden, so we think of the heat merely as a commodity, not as the focus of a way of life. (Borgmann, 1984, pp. 41-42)

In his later book, Borgmann differentiates between "modern, hard" technology, which through rigidity and control overcame the resistance of nature to fabricate durable devices, and "postmodern, soft" technology, which through flexibility and adaptiveness produces a diverse array of goods for particular activities. Postmodern technology uses the hyper-reality of simulations to get rid of the limitations imposed by reality. The limit of postmodern reality is not the total objectification of nature, but the replacement of reality by virtual reality totally under our control. The objects of reality disappear to the extent that we as subjects gain control over them, but we are similarly reduced to "a point of arbitrary desires." (Borgmann, 1992, p. 108) Computer technology allows us the freedom to do many things, but in so doing we risk our intelligence becoming diffuse, our memory lost without our electronic aids.

Borgmann's antidote for losing our personality to the shallowness and superficiality of hyper-reality is to return to focal activities. Focal activities are practices which center our attention on the richness of life. For example, the preparation of a well cooked meal calls upon our skill, focuses our attention on the necessities of life, and can be an aesthtic or sacramental communal activity, where as frozen dinners commodify the process of eating. Technology can assist in the performance of focal activities - witness the wide array of kitchen implements available - as long as the technology does not become the focus instead of the activity. It takes commitment on our part to engage in focal activities, but the effort affords us a chance to maintain some sense of self in the technological world. (Borgmann, 1992, p. 116-122)

Marcuse and the critical theorists harshly criticize the technological way of life. Technological thinking, by measuring everything in quantifiable terms, leads us to think in abstract and decontextulized ways. By quantifying everything we separate the ethical from the true, and values are relegated to the subjective. Thus technological rationality can claim that technologies are value neutral, and only uses are good or evil, despite the fact that the uses are shaped by the technologies. And technology leads to new forms of domination. For the critical theorists history has always had domination, but in our time domination has changed from master over slave or lord over serf to the domination of humanity by economics and the market. We are given the illusion of freedom, but that is simply the freedom to choose between brands of mass-produced products. (Ihde, 1993, p. 34-35) Computer technology further decontextualizes human experience by emphasizing information over understanding. And computers further domination by providing new means of tracking the productivity of workers to the corporation and depersonalizing supervision. (Coyne, 1995, pp. 75-82)

While Marcuse concentrates on the domination of technology, it is not clear who is dominating whom; we are all caught up in the web of technological society. Foucault speaks of power instead of domination. Power is evident in all human activities, whether they are oppressive or benign. Power can be used to dominate, but it can also be used to transform. Technologies, social institutions and practices are all interconnected in the applications of power, and so new technologies can bring about a change in the power structure within society. Foucault's view allows for the possibility that information technology could be used to put people in more direct communication with each other and spread the concentration of power over society. (Coyne, 1995, pp. 90-98)

How Do We Interact With Computer Technology?

As the nature of writing changed from fountain pen, to typewritten, to word processor, so has changed interpersonal communications from letters, to telephone, to e-mail and instant messaging. So has the nature of work changed from crafts, to factory production, to the new information economy. Our relationship to information has changed from the library model of careful selection, classification, and permanent collections to the information retrieval model of access to everything, diversification, and dynamic collections. (Dreyfus, 1994) All of these changes are disruptive, they foreclose old practices and provide new opportunities. Some people are always hurt by these shifts, while others find unseen chances to thrive.

The new technologies have brought new opportunities to affect social change. In the manner of Foucault's philosophy we have the chance to redistribute the power within society. E-mail was used by students during the Russian coup; by relaying messages through an intermediary in the U.S. the students were able to respond to changes faster than the Army. Desktop publishing and the World Wide Web offer the possibility for marginalized voices to reach a wide audience. Basic HTML code is easy to learn and use, and web authoring tools make the process even easier. So anyone can post information to the web with a small amount of effort. Such self broadcasting was not practical with television, where larger amounts of investment and knowledge are necessary. Of course, it is up to us to avail ourselves of these opportunities. The entrenched power structures are also trying to control as much of the new media as possible to maintain their positions of power. The issue has not been decided yet, but the internet is not as free as it was just a few years ago.

Computer technology can assist us in pursuit of Borgmann's focal activities, despite Borgmann's reservations. If writing is a focal activity for us, word processors can make the job easier even though we have seen that they alter the process. Maintaining contact with friends is facilitated by e-mail. Even if it predisposes us to short note rather than long heartfelt letters, e-mail is useful for organizing face-to-face meetings. Cooking, Borgmann's exemplary focal activity, can be aided by accessing new recipes online. And all sorts of activities have online interest groups where people around the world can meet to discuss their common passions. Some activities were solitary activities, pursued by lone individuals as their individual means of artistic expression, until the internet allowed them to realize that others shared their interest (see the conlang list for one such activity).

Often the overwhelming experience when dealing with computer technology is one of frustration. Computer interfaces are often confusing and arbitrary. Simple, routine tasks take great effort to do. Programs crash causing the loss of laboriously produced work. Incompatible versions will not read old data. And rapidly advancing technology leaves our equipment outdated in a short time, leading to feelings of inadequacy as the manufacturers try to convince us we need the latest models. Any benefits to our practices can be lost through frustration over difficulty using the technology to accomplish the tasks. The computer becomes the focus of our attention rather than the focal practice we my be trying to pursue through it.

Good Design to Lessen the Disruptive Force of Technology

The creators of computer technology can lessen the disruptive force of the technology by practicing good design. Well designed computer systems should be useful, usable, easily learned, and perform functions that let people do the things they want to do. (Gould, 1988) Good design can lessen the frustration user feel when they use computers. The sum of all the small frustrations with everyday life add up to the feelings of powerlessness and despair felt by many in the modern world. Alleviating those frustrations leads to an improved quality of life. By making the system easier to use and more reliable users can get on with the tasks they wish to accomplish rather than worrying about the computer. When systems help users realize their goals and intentions they promote the human value of autonomy.(Friedman, 1988, p. 5)

Systems that are easy to learn reduce the disruption caused by new technologies. Technological society may force new methods and practices upon us, but if they are easier to learn, then at least the people adept at the old practices can learn to operate in the new manner. While the philosophical issues remain, the impact of new technology on individuals can be softened. Technology can be made easier to learn by making the choices of acts you can perform obvious and by providing appropriate mental maps of the operation to the user. Computer technology, by virtue of its interface being flexible, could be made very easy to learn. But, alas, most systems are not designed to realize this possibility. (Norman, 1990)

Good designs make possible the benefits of computer technology. Use of a computer as an instrument in pursuit of a focal practice is only possible if the computer does not crowd ones focus of attention. The computer interface should fade into the background so that we may concentrate on our human affirming activities. If the difficulties experienced mount, then any benefit is canceled out by the trouble with the instrument. In such a case it would be better to do without the new technology. In order for technology to fade from our focus while we use it to perform a task, it should operate reliably and consistently so that after a brief learning period we can form habits of use and then use the technology without thought. Computers, once again by virtue of their flexible structure, could be designed to operate consistently and appropriately, more so than material technology which must obey mechanical constraints, but, once again, it often is not so designed. (Norman, 1990)

Anatomy of Good Design

So we see the importance of good interface design, and we know from experience that technology often fails to meet standards of good design. But what constitutes good design? Donald Norman examined the qualities of good and bad design of common technologies in his book "The Design of Everyday Things." (Norman, 1990) His advice boils down to: make sure the user can figure out what to do, and that the user can can tell what is going on. Good design should use the natural properties of people and the world to produce systems whose operation is obvious. Different features offer different affordances, or operations that they suggest to the user. For example, buttons are made for pushing, and knobs are made for turning; we naturally know what to do, unless they are built to work in some other way which will be hard to use. If everything in the design has its proper place and obvious function, then only a short amount of instruction is necessary to begin use. If the design is made such that common activities have a simple and intuitive action to perform, then users will quickly become habituated and can perform the tasks rapidly and comfortably. If the instructions are so complicated or non-intuitive to prompt the user to wonder "How am I going to remember that?" or if simple actions can lead to catastrophic failures then the design has failed and should be re-worked.

The same principles apply to design of computer hardware and software as apply to other technologies. The use of visibility, constraints, affordances, natural mappings and feedback will make a computer easier to use just as they will improve the usability of other objects. But computers offer special challenges as well as special advantages. The inner workings of a computer are electronic and invisible, giving no sign of what it is doing. Computers operate in their own abstract language, suited to processing streams of information but not well suited to communicating with non-specialist humans. And computers can perform a multitude of tasks, increasing the number of controls needed to direct those tasks. However, the programmable nature of the computer allows for great flexibility in how the controls are presented. Just about any interface we can envision could be built into a computer with the proper engineering. This means computers could be among the easiest to operate machines. Designers must just put in the effort to build better interfaces.

The mouse/menu/windowed interface of Xerox Star, further developed by the Apple Macintosh, and spread wide by Microsoft Windows was heralded as a breakthrough in ease of use. And indeed, it was a vast improvement over what had come before. It applied many of Norman's principles, by making visible possible actions on the menus, by mapping actions to results, and by providing commands that responded consistently across many (but notably not all) programs. The interface proved easy enough to use by non-specialists that it facilitated the spread of computers to most workspaces across the country.

However, this interface is not without problems. (Norman, 1990, p. 182; Raskin, 1999) The keypress combinations are often confusing and arbitrary (Control+V stands for paste ?). And despite published design standards key combinations are not always consistent across applications. Notoriously, the widely used word processor Microsoft Word for Macintosh changed its key-mappings from the Macintosh standard. There is no universal way to undo operations in the graphical interface, so certain mistakes can be unrecoverable. The motion of the user's hand from the keyboard to mouse or back takes time not needed by single input interfaces, like command line or pen based systems. This time results in more time needed to perform simple tasks, and breaking the flow of action by the user. Positioning the cursor over small buttons with the mouse also can take time and is difficult for some users with poor vision or motor skills to preform. Interface design experts estimate the time necessary to position the cursor with an equation called Fitts' Law which relates time needed to the log of distance moved over size of the target. Microsoft accentuated problems with cursor movement in the Windows operating system by moving menus from the top of the screen, where they are on Macintosh systems, to the top of each window, a move that makes an effectively smaller target and requires positioning in two dimensions rather than just one. Also, many of these systems are notoriously unstable, prone to crashes which lose much of the user's recent data.

A problem with the Macintosh/Windows system is that it was a vast improvement for its time, and so it became widely used. Now designers' expectations are to think in its terms. But it has been 20 years since Xerox first introduced the system and few changes other than cosmetic ones have been made in that time. There are other ideas for how computer systems could operate. Traditional network navigation works something like the Cretan Labyrinth: a vast array of rooms, some of which are connected by tangled passages through which you cannot see where you are headed until you go through. An alternative is the "Zooming Interface Paradigm" which shows the entire structure of the network and the user can navigate by zooming in to see the details or zooming out to see a wider area. (Raskin, 1999, pp. 149-168) Also under development are natural language operated, voice driven systems. Ideally, users could talk to their computer in human language and delegate the task of translating between human and computer terms to the machine. (White, 1990; Wang, 2001) However, speech recognition systems can still be poorly designed, as anyone who has tried to navigate a voice activated corporate phone system can attest. These and many other ideas are available, and clever designers could come up with more if faced with a problem to solve. Some of these ideas could prove to be far more efficient and easier for the user, we just have to be willing to give them the chance.

People are often resistant to change, even change for the better. Corporations are especially resistant to change, because of their large investment in equipment and training. Therefore, once one computing paradigm becomes established it is hard to bring in another. The system produces its own force, resistant to change. But Raskin argues that change can be easier than is commonly thought. For systems that are used regularly by the same people for extended length of time, most of their time is spent in routine operations as experienced users, and only a relatively short period is spent in learning the system. Therefore if a new system gives a reasonable improvement of operation for experienced users it is worth the investment to retrain on new ways of operating. The return in being able to operate in a well designed system will be greater than the difficulty learning new systems. Especially if the system is also designed to be easy to learn in the first place. (Raskin, 1999, pp. 4-5)

A common myth is that users can be divided into beginners and experts, software which is easy for one group is difficult or limiting for the other. This myth results in some strange responses. Some people feel that programs that are easy to use must therefore be "dumbed down" and not powerful enough for experienced users. Some designers try to write software that changes in response to what it perceives the user's experience level to be. But the act of changing how the software responds will ruin any learning that has already taken place. Designers must think not of beginners and expert, but of individuals. People learning a system must pay conscious attention to everything they do, so they need simplicity, clarity, and visibility. Experienced users should be able to use the system unconsciously and focus on the result they wish to achieve, so they need tools appropriate to the task, modelessness, and monotony so that they may rely on formed habit of use. These two set of requirements are not in conflict. It should be possible to write software that meets all criteria on both lists. (Raskin, 1999, pp. 68-70 )

Good, usable computer systems should be designed to be responsive to human needs and considerate to human frailties. (Raskin, 1999, p. 6) The design should consider the abilities of both the user and the machine. To do this software designers, who are often engineers or mathematicians, need to pay attention to the findings of cognitive psychology. People have one locus of attention. They attend to the items in the locus of attention and tend to screen out other information. If something outside the locus of attention demands attention, then the concentration on the first item is broken. For a computer system to serve human needs the locus of attention should be the work we are trying to accomplish with the machine. If we are forced to shift attention away, for instance to respond to a system prompt, then the computer intrudes onto the practice it was meant to facilitate.

Another issue is our ability to form habits from often performed tasks. This creates both opportunities and challenges to good design. Once we habituate an action then we can perform it without thinking of it consciously, a step to our goal of a system that does not intrude upon our pursuit of focal practices. Designers can facilitate the formation of habits by providing a consistent method for performing a commonly used tasks. The command keys on the Macintosh were an attempt at achieving this. The same combination should perform an action, like copying or pasting text, in every program one uses. But when commands perform differently in different environments, a condition called different modes of operation, then habits are harder to form because the user must attend to the current mode, and ingrained habits can lead to mistakes when a learned action is performed in the wrong environment. Habituation can also cause problems with actions that can damage the system. For instance, many systems ask the user to confirm the command when they wish to delete a file. Since this is performed often the confirmation step becomes habitual, a part of the process. Then when the wrong file is accidentally listed for deletion the habituated confirmation does no good. Better than a useless step that takes extra effort in most cases and becomes habituated so that it does not work when needed, the system should be designed so that all actions are reversible. (Liam, 1991; Raskin, 1999, pp. 17-32)

Methods and Metaphors

In order to design good computer systems that support people in their endeavors, designers must observe how real people use their computers and design accordingly. Too many programmers are trained in the logic of computer languages, but not in the needs of computer users. While in some computer projects the user interface is the last part of the program to be designed, it should be the first. For most users the interface is what they see as the computer. Some designers of computer interfaces have come to realize this. John Gould wrote an important paper "How to Design Usable Systems" to explain simple but important design principles to other programmers. He sought to have programmers focus on the needs of users from the very start of the project. He offers four simple principles to be followed: an early and continuous focus on users, early and continual testing, iterative design revising for the results of testing, and integrated design where all the elements develop constantly and in coordination. (Gould, 1988) Gould suggests that these principles are easy to implement, even by those not trained in psychological or human factors studies, it just takes a commitment on the part of the programmers and managers to create a good, useful product.

Gould's attitude towards design finds philosophical support in pragmatism. Pragmatism recognizes that everyone is socially situated. Dewey taught that scientific theories or methods of logic are tools used in a certain social practice. Attention to the practices surrounding an object are important to understanding it. Since he viewed knowledge as participatory he argued that learning must come about by doing. Coyne argues that Dewey's attitudes resonates with the methods of computer system designers such as Gould. (Coyne, 1995, pp. 36-51) Dewey's pragmatism provides a better philosophical basis for computer science education than the rationalism that underlies most training. The rationalist attitudes are responsible for a concentration on logic and theory in the education of programmers rather than attention to the needs of computer users. However, projects to produce user centered design, like Gould's, reflect the same concern for practice that bases Dewey's philosophy. Gould even suggests programmers learn through doing by actually spending time at the job sites where the programs will be used, following exactly Dewey's prescriptions for education.(Gould, 1988)

Metaphor is an important concept in computer system design as well as in language. Metaphor is more than just a literary device used for poetic effect, it is an integral part of our language and thought. Lakoff and Johnson showed in their book "Metaphors We Live By" the ubiquity of metaphor in our language, often being used without our even noticing. (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) Metaphors provide us a way of understanding the world, by associating one thing with another. Powerful metaphors inform how we think of the objects described, revealing hidden aspects of the thing described. New metaphors for the forces in our lives will suggest new ways of living. Metaphors interact with technology in several ways: technology serves as a source of metaphors, new technologies are understood metaphorically, and our metaphors in life pose problems to be solved technologically. (Coyne, 1995, pp. 249-301)

For devices that work in an abstract language like computers, metaphors provide a way for the user to understand the operation of the machine. The Apple Macintosh desktop metaphor is famous. It provides a way of understanding the file structure of the machine in terms of a physical space that most people understand. By developing new metaphors, interface designers can suggest new ways of working with computers. If these metaphors are carefully chosen then they will provide a natural model which makes operation of the machine easy. (Erickson, 1990)

Just as metaphors can help us understand computers, computers can provide new metaphors for life. Postmodern theories of psychology suggest that there is no single unified "ego", but that each of us is made up of a multiplicity of parts. Philip Bromberg claims that a healthy personality is one in which different aspects of the self can come to know one another and reflect upon each other. This fluid multiplicity of personality is what gives us our flexibility and resilience. A popular activity on the internet is participation in Multi-User Domains (MUDs). In these MUDs participants create a character within a virtual world. They interact with the other participants through their online persona. Players are not restricted by their biological gender, or sometimes even species. MUDs allow participants to explore different aspects of their personality. Many regulars sometimes play several characters in different worlds at the same time, cycling through their online personalities. While some observers might see this activity as evidence of Heidegger's disaggregation of the subject by technology, It can also be seen as a model for Bromberg's self as being one while being many. (Turkle, 1995) This is just one way in which computer technology can show us a new way of understanding ourselves.