User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

by Cliff Kuang

“You’re living in the year 2951. Space travel is well established and there is a good deal of trade in the galaxy,” he told the students. Arnold explained that the Terran trade agency, scouring the galaxy for commerce partners, had found the Methanians, thirty-three light-years away on a planet called Arcturus IV.6 The goal was to make something these Methanians wanted to buy. Arnold had crafted the limitations of the Methanians to force the students to imagine a life other than their own, and what that might entail. (“Do you think that the average present-day Terran designer gives as much thought to human limitations?” Arnold asked.) Arcturus IV was an unplowed field of consumer desire, primed for inventions. Its inhabitants were friendly and naive, but stuck with nineteenth-century technology. Their planet itself was an enormous hunk of the most valuable resources anyone could imagine during the nuclear age: uranium and platinum. But their needs were hyperbolically foreign. The Methanians were humanoid, but gangly and birdlike with egg-shaped bodies. They were physically weak and extraordinary slow.7 As the weeks went on, the students got into debates about whether the Methanians, who hatched from eggs, would find an egg-shaped car to be vulgar; whether the Methanians, with their slow reflexes, should be asked to adapt to the speed of new technologies.8 The students invented ingenious things: a drill that required two hands to turn on, so that slow-moving Methanians coul...