Sony G90 - Manual (Page 13)

recall as a seven-year-old switching
on the system that my father had
designed, made, and housed in a
meticulously crafted and veneered cabi-
net. One satisfyingly large circular knob
served as on/off switch and volume con-
trol, another selected between radio
(wireless!) wavebands, and a third tuned
the radio. All immediately obvious to me
and everybody else in the household,
and as a result, the radiogram received
constant use. A similar state of affairs
existed at school, where from my earli-
est days our teachers’ efforts were com-
plemented daily by BBC schools broad-
casts. What concerns me here is the
immediate accessibility of programming
– to anyone with the wit to turn a knob.
Now let us travel forward in time to
the advent of remote control of these
same functions, and let me give you an
example of the problems we have
encountered.
I know an intelligent woman who
holds a degree from a solid university;
she has a good position with a large
company; she is responsible for a num-
ber of subordinate employees and sev-
eral large accounts whose annual
billings run into several millions. And
yet on several occasions she has been
unable to receive the television program
of her choice because of the perceived
complexity of her system. This televi-
sion is connected to a cable feed and a
VCR with their own separate controls,
both remote and otherwise – fewer
inputs than my father’s radiogram. And
yet she tells me that sometimes a week
has passed before she could coax pic-
ture and sound from the thing.
This is clearly bad design. For good
design by its very nature is all encom-
passing, while bad design is exclusion-
ary. If you cannot see the emperor’s
new clothes, the fault does not lie in
you. Some manufacturers have tried to
address this problem by using analog
reproductions of those vintage controls
on their remote control handsets, but
even those suffer from a cognitive dis-
connection.
When we communicate with each
other, we unconsciously use the teach-
ing model – we say what we’re going to
say, then we say it, then we say what
we’ve said. We do this using implicit
languages; if we can see each other, we
use body language and timbre of voice
to confirm reception; when we cannot
see each other we use semantic redun-
dancy – “Did I tell you I spoke to Larry?
He said he’s doing well – he sounded
well – did he speak to you? Did you
think he sounded well?”
And so we find that our better com-
munication channels contain 100 per-
cent redundancy. Writing may contain
only 80 percent redundancy, or less – a
good example is the use of irony. When
Swift proposed that the problem of
famine in Ireland might best be solved by
urging the populace to eat their babies,
he relied upon the contextual cognitive
disconnection between his public posi-
tion as a vehemently pro-Irish represen-
tative to the English Parliament, together
with his reputation as a humanitarian, to
provide a key with which to decode the
real message: that we are all one; there-
fore allowing harm to come to another is
to visit violence upon ourselves – all this
reliant upon context, a questionable
assumption founded upon the premise of
a common culture.
This may explain why irony is
emerging today in American culture to
the degree it has long been apparent in
the older, more homogenous European
cultures.
N o w, if you are not sure of the con-
text within which your recipient will
receive the message, you can build into
the message another layer of redundan-
cy geared to the recipient’s reception.
This is called m i r r o r i n g by psycholo-
gists; the rest of us know it from “When
in Rome, do as Rome does.” It is perhaps
the greatest politeness to adopt the
mores of your recipient, even if you con-
sider those mores abhorrent, because
the common context thus formed will
lead to better communication.
And that’s my agenda for remote
control. When I first use the equipment,
I want to use a large rotary switch with
an audible “click” to turn it on, and I
want both the remote and the system to
confirm that command to my senses –
without having to turn on a separate
d i s p l a y, which will simply introduce
another variable to the equation. I want
next to be informed of the signal chain
I have invoked – and I’m quite happy to
have system memory reinstate whatev-
er I was using when I switched the sys-
tem off – anything rather than a baffling
lack of activity.
Next I may wish to select a differ-
ent source; again I’ll choose a large
rotary control that satisfyingly clicks as
it moves between clearly labeled, illu-
minated positions. And now I may wish
to connect other monitors, video or
audio, in various ways dependent on
the source programming format and, of
course, my whim.
You can see that by allowing the
on/off knob to also control volume, I’ve
arrived back at my father’s radiogram
control panel: three rotary switches
scaled for human hands, with back-lit
labels illuminated as the knobs are
turned.
By now you may have decided that
I’m a reactionary Luddite, and you may
infer that I can’t cope with the micro-
processor age. You would be partially
correct, but only in the first assumption.
My point is to make the experience as
comfortingly familiar as Linus’ blanket.
So where do we go from here? No,
I’m not suggesting that we should all have
remotes styled after 1950s illuminated
fascia panels. I suggest that we are miss-
ing the tactile interface with these com-
plex devices, the subconscious feedback
that adds to the richness of our environ-
ment. Although it may seem grandiose, I
am going to draw a parallel between this
feedback and body language, which con-
veys a surprisingly high proportion of our
communications and adds to the redun-
dancy that is so vital to consistent com-
munication. This is the missing element
from our connection to the machine, and
no box of M&Ms can supply it.
I don’t know the solution: That’s
going to take a serious investigation to
define. But I know this problem is being
vigorously addressed elsewhere – have
you noticed the eagerness of the voice
that greets AOL users? And the resigned
tone of its “Goodbye”? Or that the GUI
(graphic user interface) of current com-
puters includes a satisfying snick every
time you click the mouse?…
B A R R Y R A W L I N S O N
The Human Interface
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
D E S I G N C O N C E P T S
I