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Unit twenty-seven One gizmo, one chore Heres my simple test for a product of todays technology: I go to the bookstore and check the shelves for remedial books. The more books, the more my suspicions are raised. If computers and computer programs supposedly are getting easier to use, why are so many companies still making a nice living publishing books on how to use them? Computers manipulate information, but information is invisible. Theres nothing to see or touch. The programmer decides what you see on the screen. Computers dont have knobs like old radios. They dont have buttons, not real buttons. Instead, more and more programs display pictures of buttons, moving even further into abstraction and arbitrariness. I like computers, but I hope they will disappear, that they will seem as strange to our descendants as the technologies of our grandparents appear to us. Computers have the power to allow people within a company, across a nation or even around the world, to work together. But this power will be wasted if tomorrows computers arent designed around the needs and capabilities of the human beings who must use them. That means retooling computers to mesh with human strengthsobserving, communicating and innovatinginstead of asking people to conform to the unnatural behavior computers demand. That just leads to error. Many of todays machines try to do too much. When a complicated word processor attempts to double as a desktop publishing program or a kitchen appliance comes with half a dozen attachments, the product is bound to be unwieldy and burdensome. My favorite example of a technological product on just the right scale is an electronic dictionary. It can be made smaller, lighter and far easier to use than a print version, not only giving meanings but even pronouncing the words. Todays electronic dictionaries, with their tiny keys and barely legible displays, are primitive but theyre on the right track. | 
