Consciousness
I’m a very happy Mac user. I’m a very happy iPhone user. One of the reasons I’m happy is that Apple designs its products to anticipate natural ways of doing things and then builds those natural ways into its design. The reason it’s so hard to go back from a Mac to a PC is that it’s hard to go from effortlessness to trying to figure out how to make the PC do what you want it to do. The PC forces you to adapt to it, to think like its programmers and designers. The Mac just does what you want it to do.
I have a friend who has just switched to a Mac. I got an exasperated text from him yesterday saying “so frustrating, how the hell do I remove an application from my Mac?” He’s still thinking PC-style where there’s a several-click uninstall process you have to go through. It’s just not obvious to him (yet) that it should be as simple as dropping the application in the waste basket. The computer can handle the process behind the scenes, process is what they are good at. Which is why anyone interested in reforming government bureaucracy and citizen services could start just by issuing all civil servants with a Mac. It changes your basic assumptions about how things should be.
There’s a school of thought I’m half-convinced by and half-worried about, which is that knowledge and information management should work like the Mac. That is, that the systems should make knowledge and information management effortless. Let the design work out how it is done, just make it so that people don’t have to think too hard about it. It’s called “reducing the cognitive load”.
The reason I’m worried is that “black-boxing” KM as Apple black-boxes its internal workings removes the need for us to be conscious of the inner workings of what we’re doing, and if we don’t understand the inner workings, we can’t tinker or improvise around them (this, by the way, seems to be the argument of that small minority who don’t like Macs and return to PCs that they can tinker with more easily). We’d better be sure we have anticipated all the key needs, because we’ll grow a passive consumer generation who can’t redesign or modify our design.
And while there are clearly anticipatable areas of KM that could very easily be black-boxed and automated, there are also areas where consciousness is important. One of the reasons why KM and IM are so difficult is that people are often simply unaware of the needs of others further afield, or unaware of the resources available further afield, or unaware of the wider implications of what they do. There’s a whole lot of unanticipatable tinkering and adaptation to be done, and very little indication that it will ever stabilise in our lifetime. We need to see into the infrastructure we’re building and become literate in it. Mac-magic breeds illiteracy about the inner engine that makes it work.
And this is also why working on publicly negotiated policy around knowledge and information management practices is just as important as providing environment, tools and processes for what we want to achieve. Consciousness counts.
6 Comments so far
Excellent blog. I would equate your concepts to the changes we have seen in the auto industry. 30 years ago it was quite common for the average guy to tinker with his car extensively. With all the technological advances though, it has been relinquished to a much smaller realm and everyone else is left making primarly useless cosmetic changes. Kind of like just changing the screen saver on my MAC as opposed to modifying the boot.ini in my Windows Server/XP dual boot machine.
- olivier amprimo
Hi Patrick,
Here is a couple of book reference that meets both this post and our conversation last week:
* http://tinyurl.com/2pq5dk
* http://tinyurl.com/ouegwcNow on “The reason I’m worried is that “black-boxing” KM as Apple black-boxes its internal workings removes the need for us to be conscious of the inner workings of what we’re doing, and if we don’t understand the inner workings, we can’t tinker or improvise around them”, it’s funny that you put yourself in a spectator / passive user role. This is not the position I’m used to seeing you
One has to make the difference between simplicity of use and “black-boxing”.
1 - The End-user does not really care how things are working in details, as long as the system supports simply its activity.
2 - Your concern is the ability to reproduce or amend, which means going behind the scene to manage. This calls for documenting and potentially open-source (transparency). Truth is that all this is officially documented. Apple is not NASA (who is said to have lost its knowledge to land on the Moon).
- Patrick Lambe
The reason I’m torn on this is because I can see merits in great design of complicated things (ie simplification for ease of use) and in transparency so you can improvise and tinker.
The Apple (or any open source) codes may be accessible to people proficient in working with such code, but they are not transparent or especially accessible to general users in the way car engines used to be - you could take them apart, figure out how they worked, and play around with them.
There’s a whole complex knowledge base around improvisation which makes these in-practice-or-in-principle black boxes effectively impermeable to the general user. This creates problems of literacy if you need to have literacy (and I think the lack of literacy about the workings of KM is a big problem in managerial decision making around KM).
I still haven’t sorted out this puzzle in my own head, but I suspect that there is a time in the evolution of a complicated system for great design, and there is a time for rough design that gives insight into the inner workings and encourages literacy.
- Ivan Chew
>>>
He’s still thinking PC-style where there’s a several-click uninstall process you have to go through. It’s just not obvious to him (yet) that it should be as simple as dropping the application in the waste basket.
>>>Absolutely! That’s what I went through when I was teaching myself how to use a Mac. I had to “unlearn” the way I interacted with a PC. So now I consider myself able to “code switch” between Macs and PCs.
Now maybe I should find some excuse to try an iphone!
- Patrick Lambe
No excuse needed… it’s almost a duty to oneself!
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And the real challenge comes when the people who control budgets and other organizational levers only consider KM that can be “black boxed” (dare I say DM/RM/WCM/ECM) and use “reducing the cognitive load” or “we only have enough attention available to focus on the “black box"” as the rationale. Under these circumstances making a case for an alternate approach becomes a bit ... difficult.
Posted on April 16, 2009 at 07:59 PM | Comment permalink