Norman: The Design of Future Things Chapter 4
"People have become slaves to their technology, servants of their tools" (p. 94).
Five years ago our school was involved in a one-to-one laptop project study with the University of Calgary. Our principal applied for a significant grant to invest in this technology, spending the majority of it on the hardware itself and setting aside a smaller amount for maintenance costs. Now these laptops are showing their age. The batteries are dying, hard drives crashing, and the grant money has long been spent.
The money needed to maintain technology sums up Norman's quote beautifully. Once the investment has been made, in order to keep it up and running, we become subservient to the technology and either continue inject it with cash or abandon it altogether. Consider the opportunity cost of allocating a shrinking educational budget toward maintaining technology. It is in these circumstances that it seems as though we have become slaves to technology.
"Imagine a billboard or store checking with the navigation system to see just what the car's destination is, perhaps to suggest a restaurant, hotel, or shopping centre" (p. 98).
This quote troubles me because I can see this becoming a reality. The sheer number of advertisements we encounter on a daily basis is staggering, from radio to internet to billboards. I can extend Norman's idea to the work the Sprywerx group has done on QR codes. What if your car was out scanning for codes on billboards that would be displayed on your navigation screen? Would you have a choice of whether to disable this feature? Or would it be like the iphone app model where you can have free versions of games with ads and pay for versions without the ad content?
No comments:
Post a Comment