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Gizmo geeks on trial

By Joseph Brean

Originally appeared in The National Post

It is a fundamental misstep of our techno-culture that my cellphone claims to know my "biorhythm" and yet has an alarm clock that is impossible to program.

This is no joke. On the screen, under the "special" menu (where else?), clicking on the biorhythm option delivers up a bar graph, five numbers and three letters. Today, I have an overall score of 37,890, the letters PEI, and no idea what it all means. I think it's astrology.

On any other device, this utterly useless flourish of design might be tolerable, if a bit flaky. On this shiny gray wafer of a telephone, though, the very fact that the "biorhythm" meter seems to function properly makes me resent it. Why? Because the alarm clock — a function I have use for — cannot be programmed to go off at the time of my choosing, since it will only let me adjust the hour, not the minutes.

Kim Vicente, a University of Toronto engineer and holder of the prestigious Steacie fellowship, sees my phone, with its incomprehensible and unuseable functions, as more than a mere annoyance. Rather, he believes it is symptomatic of a vast epidemic of poorly designed technology that is costing billions of dollars and millions of lives.

In a new book, he argues that, at the heart of the problem, sits the geeky engineer. Cooped up in high-tech design labs, surrounded by the latest in computing gadgetry and soft drink machines, the men and women who design the world's most important devices — from medical equipment, airplane cockpits and nuclear plant control rooms to more mundane gizmos like cellphones and VCRs — give little thought to the people who will use their creations, Vicente says.

As long as the technology is sound, their teachers tell them, users will find a way to muddle through. What other choice do we have?

The result is technology that performs precisely as it was designed — poorly, with no heed paid to how people might actually use it. In the case of my phone, the wizards who cooked up the biorhythm readings did not realize I would far prefer a working alarm.

In the book, The Human Factor, Vicente shows how a similar design flaw helped bring about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Chernobyl's safety alarms and pressure gauges functioned flawlessly until the end, giving staff endless data (numbers, letters, etc.) about the coming disaster, but very little useful information about what they could do. The control room was so poorly designed, Vicente says, that the technicians who watched the dials run out of control were flummoxed.

The story is the same in countless plane crashes and near-crashes, where pilots have battled with computerized autopilots for control of the plane, or misread a complicated display. In each case, the designer of the technology did not fully consider how it would be used, nor how a more thoughtful design could avert problems.

To fix technology, Vicente says we first have to get rid of the outdated concept of "human error." The expression usually means that the human controlling the technology accidentally did something the technology was not intended to do, such as crash the plane. But if the same human errors keep happening in the same way with the same technology, which human is really at fault, the user or the designer?

"I don't think they're stupid," Vicente says of design engineers and the whiz-kids in his "human factors engineering" classes at UofT.

"I just think they're different. They're special.... If you have all this knowledge, it's very difficult to pretend you don't have it . How to work things is totally obvious to them," he says. "They just think that the users are stupid, that they can't figure out how to work their perfectly designed device."

Vicente observes that if designers of technology misjudged the workings of the physical world (the stopping power of car brakes, for example) we would be outraged and sue, but when they misjudge the human we shrug it off as mere folly (such as in the overly complicated dashboard computers on luxury cars). Then, when distraction leads to accidents, we blame the driver, not the designer.

The problem with this thinking is that good human design, what Vicente calls Human-tech, is just as important to safe and effective technology as good physical design.

Medical devices used in anaesthesia or surgery can kill people if their users make simple and predictable mistakes, such as accidentally inserting a medication tube into the wrong valve. Planes can crash if pilots twist the wrong knob or pull the wrong lever.

Vicente, who has consulted on medical devices for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, says sometimes all it takes to offset a tragedy is a well-lit screen, an audible alarm, or a tube that fits only into its proper hole.

As new technologies become commonplace, the nature of work changes, he says, "which means that our technologies must mesh with our human needs at more complex, sophisticated levels."

Vicente's book spends a great deal of time documenting design missteps as evidence of the need for a change in how designers of technology are taught.

For example, a certain type of airplane was involved in several near-crashes because two levers in the cockpit felt the same to pilots, who repeatedly confused them while their eyes were on the sky. One can never change the human tendency to make simple mistakes, the book argues, but changing the shape of the knobs eliminated these near-accidents completely.

Most design engineers are not willfully trying to torment the uninitiated. When shown videos of people suffering through frustrations with their products, Vicente says their reaction is usually not scorn but rather a flabbergasted, "Oh my god!"

There is hope for progress. Consider the Fender Stratocaster, the Corvette of electric guitars. When Leo Fender designed it in the 1950s, he undertook an extensive consultation process, asking guitarists what they liked and disliked about their instruments — learning, for instance, that the square edges on most guitars irritated the ribcage. Then, he stayed in contact after he sold his early models so he could improve later ones.

The result was a guitar that was so comfortable and user-friendly that it fostered an artistic revolution, influencing rock from Buddy Holly to Jimi Hendrix, and culminating in Eric Clapton's blistering solo on Layla, played on a 1956 Strat he called "Brownie."

Still, most design engineers are not Leo Fender and most companies are unlikely to embark on a similar consultation process before launching a new generation of cellphones. Instead, engineers must become more sensitive to human nature.

This, says Vicente, will require nothing short of a "conceptual revolution," comparable to the Copernican revolution, in which scientists realized the Earth is not the centre of the universe.

"We need to change the nature of engineering education so that people get exposed to these sort of human and social issues as a part of engineering," he says.

In many schools, the change is starting to be seen, but a revolution is still far off.

"We've now reached that point of intolerable but fertile transitional instability," he writes, and predicts that this climax of frustration will herald a new age in which technology is made for people, not in spite of them — what he calls the Human-tech Revolution.