Book Reading #7: Design of Future Things

Design of Future Things
Donald A. Norman
Designed and Edited by Donald A. Norman

Chapter 4: Servants of Our Machines

In this chapter Norman discusses the idea of what would happen if we became slaves to our machines, or have we already? He starts by giving a big example of how the user of a self correcting care was once caught in a street circle for nearly fourteen hours because the self correcting mechanism on his car kept detecting other cars nearby and then would adjust to help him to avoid them. After consulting with manufacturers, auto dealers, and even government officials who are supposed to be monitoring this kind of thing the only thing he was able to get out of them is that the automobile is clearly not supposed to act that way and was built so that the driver would be able to overtake the mechanism quite easily.  He then leads this into the idea of are we simply slaves of the tools we have developed. He claims that we would not be able to function and do many of the things we do everyday without the assistance of computers and other machines and essentially just as we are able to program a machine it is quite able to program us. He discusses, among his standard ideas of kitchens, cars, and other gadgets, the idea of a car that communicates with all other cars on the road. These vehicles would not only know where their destination was but also would tell other cars and be able to plan routes and organizational patterns very quickly so that they can get to the destination efficiently. He then took it further and talked about how if the car was able to communication all its information why would it not be a good witness for a trial and gives an example of a car being called to testify on a witness stand. He talks in the middle of the chapter about how these devices are being fed money and that there is a lot of research and much of it comes out at conferences. However he continues with the idea of the self-driving cars in the end of the chapter talking about how these would be practically programed. How would these cars drive themselves? One way he suggests is similar to animals who organize themselves into swarms and other groups cars might be able to imitate this behavior communicating their purpose in the group and then joining as a part of it. He also suggested that cars might form platoons and have a line of cars who are all going to the same place so that they would be able to plan a route together and then only have to communicate how many are in the platoon. He ends the chapter on almost a warning naming the dangers of what could come about and even defined the idea of overautomation. He gives some funny examples such as when people too much trust their GPS and wind up in a lake.

I think the most interesting part of this chapter is that he actually gives us a practical example of what something like this would look like. The idea that we would have to come up with some kind of scheme to organize cars on the road and what that scheme could look like is inherently interesting and the idea that we would take the queue from nature as far as forming groups is thought provoking. I seem to hearken back to Minority Report when I think about this where a very complex system of cars is established and people don't own cars they simply request one, it arrives, they tell it where to go and then its off. There is enough of them that a single person can request one and no one has to drive at all. The movie doesn't get into a lot of detail but it does have these notions of the cars being organized and being able to communicate where they want to go and figure out how to make everyone fit and get to their destination. Maybe it is my natural tendency to want to organize things but it seems to me, that organizational systems where the scheme is "just be in a group" is a bad idea. I think the platoon option sounds more concrete where if cars detect that they need to go somewhere they form a group and then they only need to pass their information and how many cars, this would also help to reduce traffic in the giant ad-hoc network that the cars would be creating. As I have learned this kind of study would not be a computer or technology issue more than it would be a wireless networking issue, of which, we have very little study in and only barely understand what all is capable. I think this chapter was very interesting and for the most part a lot of the ideas actually seemed rather practical. I don't want to go so far as to say they will happen soon but if we had the money and the people we would be looking at it not too far from now.