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

by Cliff Kuang

Instead, the machine and the human couldn’t speak to each other in a language that each could understand. They were opposed in ways that no one in the moment could appreciate. The story of that opposition carries on today.

The problems that caused Three Mile Island are similar to the ones that frustrate you when you’re trying to turn off the notifications on your smartphone;

In fact, the importance of feedback for both mankind and machines was a founding insight of both neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

In the United States, doctors rarely track what happens after they’ve prescribed a drug or procedure, and so they just keep prescribing both to new patients, aiming to try everything since they can’t see if any one thing actually works. And so we spend more and more each year on medical costs.

As the economist Tim Harford has mused, without feedback, internet commerce might not be like it is now, with strangers trusting one another. It might be more like hitchhiking, something done only by people willing to take a risk.

Who knows how much easier, how much more satisfying, our digital lives might be if the governing metaphor for smartphones were one of human connection, rather than programs.

If metaphors are rooted in the ways our bodies interact with the world around us, and if our bodies are represented and mediated by different parts of our brains, then wouldn’t metaphors be represented in the structure of our brains as well?

Part of the reason that we can’t seem to think without resorting to metaphors of some kind is that ideas themselves, when they emerge from our brains, emerge from the same neural pathways in which our bodies are represented.

From the beginnings of the design profession in the 1920s, there were always two competing strands of thought. On one hand, the ideal of making people’s lives better by solving their problems; on the other, the drive to simply stoke consumer lust and keep the furnace of capitalism well fed.

No doubt this is true. But empathy, next to language and opposable thumbs, may be the most powerful tool that evolution has given us. It allows us not to be bound by personal experience.

You can fail to understand people well enough to know their real problems. There are two basic models for overcoming this, for learning with whom we should empathize. You might seek opportunities in widespread behaviors that can be reapplied elsewhere, hoping these patterns express some deeper truth about people. Or you might instead seek out the fringes, the so-called edge cases where the future might currently exist as a rare mutation, ready to take over the world.

Today, we are drowning in interactions with smartphones and smart devices, such as our cars and homes—all of which suddenly want to talk to our phones as well. We live in a world of countless transitions. Instead of there being one device, there is actually an infinite number of handoffs between devices.