Greenfield interview excerpt
“Arthur C. Clarke said «any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic». Do you think [everyware] can lead to that kind of impression? Perhaps to visitors from the past…?
I’ve described the signature interaction pattern of everyware as “information processing dissolving in behavior,” where there isn’t any visible token of the elaborate transaction that is taking place between a user and one or more technical systems. And it’s true that - when everything works properly, anyway - there’s undeniably something magical about this, something effortless. In fact, that’s a large part of why you’d want to deploy ubiquitous systems in the first place, that quality of lightness they’d impart to everyday interactions.
So to a certain degree it makes sense that interaction designers are resorting to metaphors of magic, animism, ensoulment and so on, in their attempt to render the inherent complexity of these systems comprehensible to their users - see, particularly, the work of my friend Mike Kuniavsky. The trouble with this line of thinking, as far as I am concerned, is that it tends to be disempowering. It turns something which can and should be understood by the people using it into something more closely resembling “spooky action at a distance,” and leads to a belief on the part of users that the systems around them are “black boxes” whose inner workings are both occult and bound to remain that way.
Put bluntly, I don’t think this mystification is an acceptable outcome.”
http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/chronicart-interview-annotated/
