Living With Complexity

Stanford University here to share insights from his new book living with complexity welcome done here speaking of complexity shouldn't there be a red light oh you don't know this not sure this is the room this like this is just for the recording so you can't tell so I just finished a book living with complexity and I'm here to tell you why complexity is good this is the book and the cover is two very simple things a salt and pepper shaker so why am I having a saw a simple thing on a book about complexity because they're not so simple so I've tried this question all over the world and let me ask you which is the salt and which is the pepper how many of you think that the salt is this one on the left now raise your hand the roughly half or so how many people think the salt is on the right many more people so if I ask you why you thought the salt was on the left I get a whole bunch of answers and I've tried this all over the place so I won't bother to ask you but let me tell you a standard answer the salt is on the left because it has more holes why is the pepper on the Left if peppers on the left because it has more holes now I'm here to tell you that it doesn't matter what you think what matters is what the person who filled it thinks and you all realize that even if subconsciously because usually when you're in a restaurant that has things that look like this you pick one up and you put shake it on your hand or on the plate to see what it is and so part of what I want to talk about is the fact that complexity occurs in all sorts of settings including with things that look simple and things that appear simple Earth's orphans complex and things that are actually quite complex looking are often quite simple and in fact the first thing I want to do is say let's not use the word simple anymore people say oh I want things to be simple and I'm saying no we need complexity if we actually build simple devices people won't buy them because they buy them or they'll look at them and they'll say well that's wonderful is really nice and simple but it doesn't do this and it doesn't do that why can't you make me a cell phone that just makes phone calls that's all I want we do that well I miss some phone calls I can't find out who I missed them from or I can't remember the numbers can I store the numbers of people or can take pictures with it or what about text messaging or complexity is necessary why because life is complex and the tools that we build have to match life and I believe that what people are really asking for when they say I want simple things they really want things they understand so the first part of this talk is to demonstrate that to you to demonstrate with a bunch of examples of complex things that are actually quite understandable and quite pleasant and simple things that can be very confusing so I like to contrast complicated and complex but I define complicated as confusing and complex is just the way the world is with many many different parts and the difference of being complicated and confusing is in the head it's when you come to understand something it's understandable workable otherwise it can be confusing so for example here's something that is the complex but enjoyable for the several Koreans in the audience you will recognize this is a typical Korean meal it's not even a special meal is very typical and is filled with things in the first time you encounter it you have no idea what all that is and what to do with it and so on but it's very enjoyable um here's something that's complex but understandable to the people who work there and even you you can understand it you may have to sit there and work through it but it's all visible and you can kind of figure out what the tracks are and what they're doing life is complex so here's a typical street sign street scene this is in Hong Kong but actually I can take this kind of a picture in almost in probably every major city of the world it just is thriving and it builds up the way it builds up and there's no structure and there's no organization but we learn to live with it and we learn to enjoy it in fact lots of people complain about the need orderly buildings that architects and city planners like to impose upon us so those are complex things that are understandable or workable or enjoyable and here's a simple thing that is confusing what could be simpler than a light switch well a row of light switches which one is which and the either you sit there trying every single one or you just say to hell with it and flip them all on and then flip them all off the world even simple things in the world are confusing so here's a photograph from outside my apartment in Evanston think of it as Chicago Illinois which way is the wind blowing this is a real photograph I did not Photoshop it and these flag poles are across the street it happens with reasonable frequency enough that after I noticed it I had I could go get my camera set it up and I waited it as I actually took the picture another week in a different week it occurs with regularity and that's Chicago wind or here's you know I'm famous for doors that you can't work so here's another example of a door you can't work is the doorjamb the dean's office at Northwestern and it's just obvious you push the left but left door it's got the correct kind of affordances as a flat plate what can you do except push so you push it in it's locked and then it has a handle on the right to grab so you grab it and pull and it doesn't work and in fact it has to be pushed turned and push so when I showed this to the deans assistant she said oh no wonder everybody has trouble what locks take a simple lock what is hard about a lock you you put the key and return it to the left or to the right and if we only had one lock in our life it would be simple but we have many many many and they're arbitrary and they're different than how can you remember which is which so standard design principles we put in what I'm pulling now signifiers so I made a mistake 15 years ago in introducing the word affordances to the design community affordances are important but what the designer really cares about is what is visible and what are the clues to operation and so they the word affordance has been badly misused in the design community and so now I'm trying to back off and see if I can make remedy and say look affordance talks about the relationship between a person and an object here's an object and it affords throwing and catching or not and so on but what it's important from the design point of view with the signals that said is about what is possible and so I want to call those signifiers so so there's a signifier on the top someone is painted an arrow saying turn it to the left turn it counterclockwise or this is actually in my own apartment I can never remember when you whether you should lock it by having the the knob the horizontal or vertical at so I I've learned this trick from one of my former graduate students Hank Straub so I always own a big package of colored sticky dots and if you go around where I live you'll see all the doors have little colored sticky dots on them and my automobile has little sticky dots here and there and the sticky dots are reminding me of what the standard position is in this case that yellow sticky dot says that's the locked position well here's another one in this is the Palo Alto Medical Foundation when you go in to give it your example how do you know if you've locked the door or not so they'd mark them locked or here is the Rhode Island School of Design so I put the key down or up well the left one you put it down the right one you put it up so these are all very simple things but they become come complicated confusing because they're arbitrary you never know which state which one you are working with and so the solution is signifiers now culture is also critically important in what is complex and there are lots of myths about complexity and culture one of the myths is that Asian societies prefer complex and Western societies like them simple and elegant the Bang & Olufsen audio system that's a traditional simple elegant Western design and there's some truth to that so for example take a look at Google very very simple or now let's go to Asia and there's two three india calm or let's go to korea there's never well let's go to what well let's look at appliances that's a korean washing machine made by LG there's the control panel and I actually asked by Korean friends why the appliances were so complicated confusing in Korea because when you go to a department store around the world they all look the same I actually one of the things I love to do is take pictures of department stores from around the world and show them the people and say what country is this in and you cannot tell you can't tell whether it is Korea or Japan or China or Milan or Paris or London or New York or San Francisco they all really look the same they're selling the same things the appliances are made by LG in samsung but also by General Electric in Siemens Westinghouse same brands but the Korean ones are more complex they have more decorations and many many many more controls they told me all nobody understands them but it's a it's a mark of prestige to have something that looks big and complex that's not Asian in the early days of technology here in the United States it was the same thing we did some studies years and years ago decades ago of the early copiers the big Xerox copiers that were big and expensive and had million controls and flashing lights we discovered my students in AI that a lot of them were bought by law companies and they put them up and put them in the front offices or near where you could see it from where people were waiting they never used them they were impressive signs that this law office was up to date forefront of technology so again this is not this is culture but not necessarily East versus West so I mean continue that's that's a complex Asian machine that's a complex Asian website complex Asian control panel here's a complex vacuum cleaner it's the way the Asians do seem to like complexity up except this is British so this is the dyson vacuum cleaner from britain so oh well maybe not or complex websites oh well that's Yahoo or my dot Yahoo or simple websites well hmm that's the Chinese website so actually the difference is not there are cultural differences but surprisingly small in many ways so if you take a look sick and look at what we mean when we say simple this is Google nice and simple right so what can you do with it basically is if all you want to do is search it's fine you don't do anything else yeah but on top of that is it as simple as it looks there are 20 things to click and if you click one of them up there now is give you a list of other things but the bottom list is even more so the menu is labeled more and the last item on the menu is even more so is Google so simple so in other words to get anything beyond search you have to go into those long complex menus and figure out which one you want and that opens up the pages which you can't figure out either so if the simplicity is deceptive or take a look at Bing which is much more elegant and attractive than the Google page and looks simple but actually it has 28 places to click and some of them you can't even see they're hidden if you move your mouse over the fish little spots will show up and you can click on them and learn about the fish and about other things now actually that's that's deliberately difficult because they want that part to be a game so the parts that's functionally useful are all labeled and the rest is meant to be kind of fun in a game and it's fun to discover the hotspots now it's actually a bit difficult to talk about it's a bit difficult to talk about Google and Bing because it's an ever-changing target so I this slide says there were 28 places to click or this morning and preparing for this talk I decided I would count again and this morning it was 38 and Google I said there were 20 places to click well now there are 13 verse where are those menus remember eyes you click on the more and get more choices so this is this is Google beta by the way they went back to beta and I don't have any idea how to get to Google Scholar or Google Docs or it used to be you could get to YouTube from Google photos or Google list or Google that now I have no idea how to do it but it certainly is simpler looking the simplicity is a very complex topic and even if you go back and compare the websites in theory Asia versus Western but actually not because I've shown you that both Asia and the West have both simple and complex things which is simpler well the answer is what are you trying to do so if you're just searching then the one on the left is great you just go and you type in and you got it if you want to explore you want to know quickly you hey what's happening in the world today or what are some of my choices or what movie is nearby or what's the weather or whatever it's all there on the page on the right and so the stuff with war is often much better and easier and faster so again the notion of simplicity is difficult in the world we often tap together things we don't make no sense but they make good sense of the person who puts it all together and so we have complex things that might be confusing to the bystander but to the person working they're complex but it's understandable this is a taxi in Korea and I was just taken by the amount of infrastructure in this taxi so that there's all our ID chip readers to pay and there's a taxi meter of course and there's a credit card reader and there's a receipt printer and there's a navigation system and there's a bunch of other things that are visible in this particular picture that makes good sense to the taxi cab driver there are multiple ways of paying you can pay with your cell phone or your credit card or different kinds of credit cards or with an L rfid credit card or cell phone or now in your field reception and you can get a printed receipt and you can even pay with money then sometimes things are really complex but it doesn't bother you because you don't have to pay attention so here's a street scene in London this is near the Royal College of Art and just look at the wide variety of things on the street they're signifiers of all sorts but signifiers don't signify unless you're part of the culture so three different kinds of pavement so the blind can actually tell where they are by the feel and their feet and the sign for people who are coming from places that drive on the other side of the road it says look to the right look to the right and dotted lines but three different kinds of dashed lines narrowly spaced broadly spaced Beryl double and zebra stripes or they call them zigzag lines and traffic signals and what's best of all is the person is walking across the street ignoring at all and so the complexity doesn't even matter unless it really constrains your behavior or controls or you have to understand it in many cases you just can't ignore it another scene which is again a favour - and street scene in Korea and what I like about this particular complexity is all artificial every single thing in this picture it was put in artificially constructed put in its place so obviously the dashed lines indicate that's where you walk across the street or the curb which is to help divide the street from the sidewalk or the light pole those are all artificial or the Korean flag or the windmill of the Winn vein the sign the traffic controller even the tree is artificial in the sense that yeah it's a real growing tree but it was placed there by a designer and trimmed in that particular way that's not the normal way it grows and that's not the normal place that would have grown and there's a wind vane and there that's artificial - that's a bird's nest it's a magpie nest and it was constructed by nag pi so the - is artificial and in fact in this entire picture there's only one thing that is absolutely real and natural and that's the magpie now one more thing about complexity there were a large number of psychological studies of complexity a lot of them dealing with people's preference for complexity and the standard finding is that people's preference of a complexity follows some kind of curve like this that is we don't like things that are too simple music food games if it's too simple it's dull boring bland uninteresting if it's too complex it's confusing frustrating we like an intermediate state now the problem is that intermediate state is a moving target so that when you first start out you like things that are relatively simple you like sweet red wines to start off with and you like simple games and you like simple folk music nursery rhymes and simple toys with simple colors and simple art but as you get more experienced you move from that novice state to an expert say it as you learn more and more you like complexity more and more complexity so the sweet spot is going to change with time and film designers are fully aware of that because a game designer want a game that will last a long time weeks perhaps and it has to be attracted to people who have never played a game before or somebody who might be good at games but this is maybe the first experience with this game and so what it has to do is track their complexity preference so it has to get harder and harder and harder as you get better and better and better that's the only way to maintain the interest to keep tracking that and this this shift gives rise to interesting design problems because you have to follow the person and good the game designers know how to do that we also see that this difference between what appears simple and complex you see that in everyday life by experts if you look at say the painters desk to the painter that's not confusing at all everything there is the painters own the the painter is put each brush there each tube of paint there all the cleaners there it actually has some structure and the painter knows it the rest of us don't know it so to us it's confusing and complicated but not to the person the music the someone who doesn't understand music at all this is complicated but to a musician this is quite understandable cockpit of an airplane one hopes that the pilots do not think it's complicated and confusing and it's actually very well designed so things are actually ordered and structured and I could actually give you a better four or five minute description of the ordering and the structuring that what you would start to understand that it's really not that complex a lot of duplication all this is radio transmission equipment and the some of that super catered and okay this is the first officer and this is the captain and so they have controls duplicated left this is a two engine plane so there were two throttles and if you look at the instrumentation there's the same instrumentation for the left engine of the right engine and so it's very well-structured Burgo organized and people who have spent years learning the structure you don't get to be a captain on these airplanes until you've flown four if it's a large airplane and this is actually in the 787 so it's that's the newest from Boeing you probably are not allowed to be captain until you've you're probably about 55 years old when you finally reach that level you're about ready for retirement it takes a long time to get up there well considerable stated messy desk this is Al Gore's office but the rule is people who authors that look messy the people who live in them usually are very effective at finding things they know where the files are they know where they put things they know that each pile is ordered in time so they also know when they go to that pile they know they're looking near the top near the middle near the bottom and people with neat offices are often the ones you can't find anything they put everything away now they have to remember where they put it so there's a basically there's a hotspot for preferences which is in the middle of the complexity range and it's the part that we find engaging and check links and Holly of course has talked about flow the concept that what you want to do is you want to stay at this complexity level that's just slightly above your ability because if it's too easy you'll give up it's boring not interesting if it's too difficult you get really frustrated you need it to be challenging and as I said you can see that it's a proper look level is a function of skill and skill as a matter of expertise and practice and learning so it's a moving target music again community front of you there's an interesting rule about complexity there's an oversimplification but it's a neat one it was created by Larry Tesler who at that time was a was at Apple Computer and it's been called the law of the conservation of complexity so Tesla's law says that complexity is constant that when you make something that's easy for somebody to use you may be you've reduced the complexity to the person but you've increased it behind the scenes the automatic transmission is easier to drive that a car with manual shift but the transmission now is much more complex underneath the hood of a car so I love to give this example of coffee this is a espresso machine all the complexities in your face you have to learn about each of the knobs in them with the pressure and the temperature and how to grind the coffee properly in Tampa later make good espresso the complexity is all external this is how I make my coffee every morning it's a Gazza italian special maker i just push the button there are six buttons you can see and the the upper right button turns it on and below it there are three buttons and i get to choose one the one on the right is a standard espresso the one in the middle was a medium sized espresso the quota a long in Italy longer and on the left is what's called a americano that was all the same it's all the same coffee is how much water do you want in it and simple easy but inside it's very complex as a microprocessor has motors as gears as grinders you push the button Shore and it grinds the coffee which is on the upper right container and then it moves it down to this place here where it's going to make the coffee that it camps it and then it heats up the water the right temperature drops a little bit on the coffee grinds stops and waits lets the water soak into the beans then it takes the water arises at the high-pressure which is important for espresso and pumps it through the beans at the right temperature stops at the correct point then it takes to use coffee beans and dumps it into the container here on the right and then the little display tells me when it's time to clean the container or add more water or add more beans so inside very complex and once a month we paid the price we have to take it apart and clean it there's even another coffee maker than espresso and a whole bunch of pod makers which are really easy for us to use you just take a pod put it in the machine push a button and you get your coffee and the inside of the machine is simple it just keeps the water what's the word of the right temperature knows how much to put through the complexity is in the pod so trying to manufacture a pod that maintains high quality taste even though it might not be used for several months after the grinding and roasting of the coffee bean is very very difficult so making the pods or what's difficult so the complexity is kind of the same metaphorically in all three but it's been moved to different places in the cycle well in the world of complexity especially in design it's one of the things we where you get frustrated at is needless complexity and you know designing for the user is one of the things that we claim we should do as designers but that's actually the enemy because whenever you design anything and give it to people and if they like it the first response is always I love it but why can't it do this and the first people to use a device often are the reviewers and the reviewers their job is to say why doesn't it do this that or the other or to take an automobile and see how fast you can go from zero miles an hour to 100 kilometers an hour or 60 miles an hour which no a normal person ever does but the problem is the reviewers have huge amount of influence on design because that's and on purchases because that's how you first learn about things so we have reviewers and salespeople well-meaning salespeople you come in and you've done your homework you want to buy this device because it's understandable it does just what you need and the salesperson says oh why would you want to buy that it doesn't do this and shows you this other thing that does everything you want it and the other device but does a few more exciting things and before you know what you've ended up buying a more complex device many of you have probably fallen prey to that I have haven't decided exactly what I want and walk out of the store with something different and simple-minded marketing which is often done by feature comparison list so like um despite some missing features and performance issues that made it less than ideal despite some missing features please add the features or you know basic features include vibrate mode alarm clock calendar task list then we'll play our calculator world clock timer currency New York governor a speakerphone a stopwatch you'll also find them in the but voice dialing is disappointingly absent and so all that leads to feature creep you know these cameras that have lots of controls on them and lots of complex menu structures lots of controls and lots of complex menu structures to different brands of cameras but equal in I'll call it complexity or should I call it complicatedness well look at the feature comparison so what cars did I buy so I go to Yahoo which provides this really nice comparison of different automobiles and I say ok compare these for automobiles and it says ok here's a bunch of features and I'll tell you which are presently absent in the four cars oh that kind of Handy that's nice yep there's more except there's more except there's more there's no earth there's more that there's more there's more there's more and finally there's the end this is real you can do this yourself on the ah-hoo so the feature comparison is just gotten out of hand it makes no sense whatsoever I think that in the mind of the public and actually in the mind of many designers there's this interesting trade-off between features and power now we sort of assume that the number of feature is related to the desirability of the product that's what that last set of slide this is especially what marketers think who want to compare my product with your product by comparing the features list of one with the other so basically capability goes up as we add features and desirability goes up with capability and there's also a belief that usability goes down as we add the number of features and we certainly all have experienced that and so that's the horrible trade-off what I say but that's why people say I want simplicity and that's why the marketing people say no we're going to add these extra features and there's a standoff well I think there are solutions and there are several kinds of solutions some of it is something that we do ourselves or we benefit by and I'll call those natural social signifiers and some of the solutions are artificial and they're done by designers good design so let's look at that briefly look at social signifiers to start with so here's a problem I'm in Evanston or Palo Alto the cities of every sphere in palo alto remarkably parallel in many ways both near a big university both fairly close to a big city both are two blocks away from Pete's and and Whole Foods and the train station so anyway I want to I want to get to the city Chicago or San Francisco and I run to the train station did I miss the train no there are people standing on the platform so maybe I didn't miss it or oops the platform is empty I guess I missed the Train so we use social signifiers a lot to help simplify our lives and understand what are happening now these are obviously unreliable the people might been waiting for another train or maybe all of them missed the train - or when it's empty or maybe nobody was interested in taking the train just as it hasn't come yet and this of course doesn't work in in the middle of the city where there are many many trains coming and they're always people but still in places like Evanston in Palo Alto it's a pretty good indicator where the walk will watch for other people have walked so in the field of landscape architecture these are called desire lines and the landscape architects have lots of papers and studies of how to stop them people are destroying our landscape they're lucky or we don't want them to they put up fences they put up hedges they put up warning signs in one article I read they figured out a way to stop people from cutting across the park they put a lake in the middle as opposed to saying gee maybe we should put a staircase there this is UC Berkeley what I find amusing about this photograph I noticed it only recently was the woman sitting in the chair watching its entertainment - and when I was at the design school at Technical University of Eindhoven um they were they proudly showed me this path going from the school from the street to the school and so what's special about that it used to be a desire line they said it used to be there was no path there and people cut across the grass and it was ruining the grass and it was a bit dangerous but instead of putting up signs of eventing people they made it into a nice solid path so that's that's the proper outcome the other thing that we do is we often look at other people's behavior and obviously this has become big business now with recommender systems right Amazon said people who like this book like that book people who taster like yours like these other things Netflix says the same thing enjoyed by members this movie was enjoyed by members who also enjoy these other movies which I happen to know you likes new york times and all the all the periodicals now say here the most frequently emailed articles so you might also enjoy reading them the shows of people found them interesting you also find natural signifiers like that's a bookmark saying where i stopped reading and but there's even more if you look you see marks that the sort of thing Jim Hollen and his friends once called where marks and they tried to build it into a technical system technological system so see those those indicate places where I stopped for a period of time or went back and forth to and so in a reference book these would often mark the most important parts of a book I'm walking around at running to this talk maybe and I have a drink in my hand but I don't want to take it in or maybe I'm not allowed to where am I going to throw it suppose there's no trash can well those I see oh there's a flat fig I can put it there I'm not sure I should well if one person does that's the signifier suddenly now that becomes a social signifier to other people that ah it's permissible or it's really permissible and you see these build up and build up over time and this this is actually taken in vaso in south korea but if the people would I do have lots of photographs of the same phenomenon from around here so that was natural social the social signifiers now let's look at some artificial one so for example look at the messy desk syndrome how do you handle that if you think it's a bad thing one of the early solutions was this it's um it was called the young Wilton patent Capulet office secretary in the in 70s a very expensive very beautiful piece of woodworking you can find these in many museums misto nyan has won a place for everything and everything has its place was the advertisement the problem is you can never remember once you put them away out of sight out of mind they all look the same the drawers and shelves and so I consider that bad design or EMM look at this the remote control these are mine until I replace it with what I think is good design so here's now let's talk about how one overcomes complicated stuff a mixed it into understandable stuff so here's how you solve the remote control problem you don't care by having a universal remote of the normal sort because I have a remote for the DVD player and remote for the TV receiver we go for the audio receiver then we vote for the game machine the remote for whatever all those different things that different remotes and the way people normally do universal remotes is they make this one remote I can flip a switch and it's now this one or slip another switch units that one or flip another switches that one but it's not activity centered and so really good design is based on the activity you're trying to do and gives you just the tools you need for the activity and this is the harmony made by I always forget logitech Logitech Harmony remote control which I think does a brilliant job this is actually also my TV set and remote and it says what activity do you want to do you want to watch TV you want to watch a movie you want to listen to music you want to listen to a CD do you want to play on the play with the Wii and you select it and then when you've made your selection like be remove e you are given only the controls that you need in an understandable fashion and a few of them are hard buttons on the right because remember this is made to be used in the dark and trying to watch the movies you don't really want to watching the screen while watching the movie so it's nice that I can control the volume or the channel home watching television and I can turn the new you on and off or I can go fast forward and stop the things just by feeling the buttons on my right but what they've done is they've modularized compartmentalised so that although the total thing is complicated they've made it understandable by dividing into small meaningful units that fit the activity I'm doing what Google does an excellent job and all the search engines by the way they do equivalent things if you want to do a complex search well you hit advanced search and you're given something that helps you lead you through spelling out all different things you care about so you know I want to know about what does that say well that's your example right so I fill it out right and what it does is interesting is it will tell me what language it's translated into a simple control language so that I can now start to learn the language I can ignore it if I want and always use this tablet or I can therefore learn the language and then go in and modify the search terms directly so it's both a good teaching tool but also a very good usability tool so part of a important point is to provide a really good conceptual model if people have an understanding and a good conceptual model clinic it's not it's not confusing I can understand it a really good example of that is the file structure of a computer where that's the model we are given which is very understandable people can learn it and use it as you as many of you will know that's not how files are stored in the computer there are no folders inside the computer and even a file is not a single homogeneous thing it's divided up into wherever it fits but it's a model that is very effective and allowing us to do most of the operations we care about properly so it transforms it would be very confusing topic the one that everybody can use it has its limitations because it is a simplification they're one of the biggest limitations is deletion if I want to delete a file I either click on the delete command or I move it to the trash can and doesn't matter whatever I do it goes away and so the model fits my notion of what deletion is I want it don't want the file there anymore and I tell it to go away and it goes away and is no longer visible the problem is is so inside the computer it is still available to anybody with the right tools and that has gotten some people in trouble fortunately most of the people it gets in trouble or the bad guys would try to delete and don't understand how another solution is systems-thinking so why is the iPod so successful I really do not believe it's successful because of such a beautiful device if you look at the competition there are other devices that are maybe not quite as attractive but almost as attractive certainly have more functions more memory less expensive but they are sold as isolated devices and so the real difficulty event is how do you get the stuff into it how do you change what standard how you keep it up to date whereas Apple realized that this was a system the first thing that Apple did was make it legal before the iPod it was not legal to transfer music to your own personal player people were doing it but they were technology people people would the everyday person couldn't do it and it was in any event it repeat was not legal so Apple was the first company to do the licensing deal second where do you find the music so Apple developed a website that made it very easy to find the music and they made it very easy once you found the music to click on the thing you want it and to have it paid for and download it to your machine it was effortless you didn't have to do anything special yesterday I want that and your money was automatically taken away from you and it was put in the song was put in your machine and then they made it very easy plug the iPod into the computer and all the music was on the iPod or when the music was in the computer they made it very easy for you to see what was there and to select what you want to listen to and play or move to the iPod so they thought of it as a system and that's the power of the iPod it's not the isolator one and so many of the things that we do in life the individual components are simple but integrating them is very difficult and it's integration proper integration that transforms complicated into complex and understandable same is true with the Kindle the reason it won I believe in the beginning there were a bunch of eBook readers but they're only two major ones one was Kindle and one was Sony and they were almost identical they used the same technology made by the same company their prices are very similar the books were roughly the same size they were very very similar with the Sony though you had to go and find the books he had to make sure it was in a format of the Sony Reader would understand and then you had to get the books into your computer and then you had to transform transfer it from the computer to your eBook with the kindle computer you don't need the computer they took it as a system so the wireless is built into the Kindle at first it was cellphone Wireless today it's a choice of cell phone or Wi-Fi and all you do is you go to the Kindle Store from the Kindle device Desai's say what book you want and a minute later it's on the Kindle I have done this in lectures I'm listening to a lecture or someone's talking about their new book and it sounds really pretty good to me and so while the person is still lecturing about the book I take out my Kindle go to the Kindle Store and I have the book in my hands or in the Kindle while the lecture is still going on they made it so simple they also use a proprietary format a bit like Apple the other thing Apple did with the side tools was that you can only play the music on devices so the more music you bought the more you're screwed you're stuck you can't buy too many place else and those of you with kin those know that same thing is true with Kindle so you may now think the Barnes and Noble Nook is better because it has a color screen and I can see you here the photos and not only that but it will show movie and dynamic illustrations but gee I have a hundred books on my Kindle and I won't be able to read them on the look that's it so from the marketing point of view that's brilliant from the consumer point of view that's horrible okay that's basically my story so how do we cope with complexity namely by understanding and we understand through organization and structure modularization conceptual models are the major tools and whether what you want is this good conceptual model and the modular zation and the organization structure help there's also the designers duty to provide a model much like the one I showed for the file structure we also they need some guidance signs basically signifiers and systems thinking that helps bring together the disparate parts so it's very simple and why do we need complexity because life is complex our tools must match life and what we really want is understanding so it's about design thank now we take questions mic or do we just ask yeah ceiling okay yeah earlier you should have graph about how people's preferences for complexity change with expertise yeah the other times you see that will be used by people of varying expertise so how it gave me thoughts on how to design something that can cater to the question says that well it's all very well to say that their preferred level of complexity varies with your skill level what happens when the system is used by a large variety of people who have different skill levels well for that matter I'm an expert but I go away for a couple weeks and I come back and I don't remember I have to back up um we had a conversation earlier today about human centered design when you really try to understand people and designed just for them and I'm saying you know it doesn't work you try to design for everybody I want this product to be used by everybody in the world so that's a variant of the same question and the answer is we can do it what we have to have is sort of the basic functionality is visible and understandable and anybody can learn it and pick it up because it's right there but the more sophisticated operations are hidden maybe take time to discover and learn and maybe there are shortcuts a simple example would be a command-line interface where you can just type something or what a normal graphical user interface shortcut keys I'm inside you know on this particular computer I can type command shift return in order to start the slideshow from the beginning I have to memorize it but if I didn't memorize it I could go to the menu and try to find where it says start from the beginning and it would be there so that's a system that allows the expert to just use a shortcut but their beginner or who doesn't feel like taking the effort to learn it to go back and search and find it with a new gesture interfaces if that's the way it should be but the gesture interfaces people haven't learned that trick yet we've stepped backwards and design quality in on my opinion because the gestures can't be discovered but that will happen there'll be a little button to push that will make things happen or you could do a shortcut gesture that will cause three or four things but if you don't remember or you get or somebody who's not as experience comes in they'll do three or four separate steps to do it so it's a if the designer thinks about this properly in my belief there's my there's no problem with making something understandable and discoverable for the person just starting out and the expert can though just skip over that good example is the typing keyboard you've never typed before you can look at the keyboard and struggle and find the letters and types of it and as you get more experience you know where you are so you ability to find it gets faster or faster and when you get really experienced you no longer have to look one keyboard that hits all levels of expertise yes how nearly when I've had the first problem that Apple solved was not just building the device but solving legal issues in the building the entire system decreed the whole product that people could use but in order to do that you have to worry about also the timeline that you get involved with right because if you solve all those issues before you even release the product and you deal with the possibility that the product will come out after the market has gone after something else so can you talk a little bit about balancing those two those two issues ah that's that's a whole course and it's complex that if you come out too soon your product may fail and I was at lunchtime I was describing how proud I am with them several different products I've been associated with veneral failures one of them was one of the very first make it was even the first commercial digital camera that failed produced by Apple was a good camera it was ahead of its time it was too soon the market wasn't ready for it the technology wasn't quite ready on the other hand I tried to make something perfect people worked at interval research I think they'll pray to this they wanted it to be so perfect that by the time they released it the market already had other things Xerox had this problem with look when they invented the laser printer they invented a laser printer but actually they never IBM came out with the laser printer before Xerox that even though Xerox there invented it they were trying to do too much and the first practical laser printer was done by Canon and then the same you're saying even a different example which is even more complex so for dealing with legal or regulatory licensing issues that can take a long time it could delay the introduction of a valuable product so that's what makes business so interesting if it were easy you know there be a lot it'd be much different but design is complex it has to intermingle with business consideration with manufacturing considerations with the marketplace with the existing legacy products or new products or competitors and so what you think you're doing may not be right I've been involved in medical devices and medical safety and they're the major issues are not technology so trying to do health information systems in the hospitals is really difficult and it's a complex it's a cultural issue it's a legal issue there's a legacy issue there are cultural issues try and introduce checklists is really difficult it took 20 or 30 years for the aviation industry to accept checklist the medical industry is now where the aviation industry was in the beginning why do I need a checklist I mean that person needs one but I don't so the things you talk about are really difficult and that's why people get MVA degrees and that's why professors exist in business schools it's hard that's why most startups fail most startups that have been whittled down by the VC community so they of the hundreds of people produced you know proposing they've only fund one or two and of the ones that they carefully selected 90% fail for all these reasons part reason why fail pretty good design is the uncertainty inherent in the the thing that they're trying to design or the environment in which they're kind of delivered is design how the designers address a certainty in the exercise well kind of a question in having a designer address to get certainty when in the environment and the people and so on and actually both designers are not very good at this most designers don't know much about business and I think that what designers really have to understand more about marketing more about what makes people buy and more about the business what makes things profitable and what the competitive environment is like and there's a big difference between what people purchased and what people need and designers focus primarily what people need which isn't the same as what people buy and so we have to come to understand that it if you're doing research that's fine but if you're trying to reduce practical products you have to be sensitive to this distinction so I think a lot of designers would be not sensitive enough to the real world designers are in their own mythical perfect world that's a whole other lecture too how are we doing on time no so we have lots of time yes so you people enjoy complexity and computer games are all about complexity you must an advocate that design should incorporate more play no well I'm not against it so the point is because it was that was a funny parabola so funny syllogism if I think that there's an ideal level of complexity that makes things fun and computer games manage to do this then we order have more games or play in design well not doesn't quite follow but we can learn a lot from good computer game designers and a lot of good computer designers the game designers actually our artists they don't really know what they're doing that is in the sense of having a formal theory of informal description they often cannot describe to you what principles they followed they're just really good artists and in general I think we learn a lot by watching art much of science really follows art there's a lot you look at the sensory systems the artists are often far ahead of the psychologists and understanding it and what what we do as scientists we see what the artists have done and we try to say wow I just I don't understand that and we study it and this has been true to a number of areas the the clever inventors often go ahead of our knowledge and I see that in the game world so I think yes we should in games in design and let's talk about interaction design primarily not about simple products like like this which is or furniture or cooking utensils but things that are fairly has a number of parts we learn a lot by watching what the artists have done and from game designers and how they manage to make varying levels of complexity still available to anybody who enters and how they make allow people to make look if you're going to learn some Luke topic it's going to take time there's another point about living with complexity is it takes two people to make it work one is the designer to make it have a cohesion and understand ability but the other is for us to do the work to understand it the way they have to spend time learning it and this is funny bit that you know it took you a year to learn to use a pencil it takes a couple of years to learn to use chopsticks there are so people in Asia who can't use chopsticks well even grown up in Asia to learn language takes a decade two decades in order to drive an automobile you have to go to school and take some classes and for the first year you're not very good yet when we buy a new piece of technology and it takes 15 minutes we complain and say why do they make it so hard so there is some responsibility on our part to understand these things so the trick from the designer's point is if game people have done this very well is if it's going to take time for somebody to learn to master this how do I make it so that it's engaging time so they're actually able to accomplish something all the way as they go so it should be better my first steps I don't know very much but I'm still doing something I'm accomplishing something and with time I do more and more and I feel better and better about it and so not only willing to spend the time to learn more I'm anxious to learn more because I know I can do even more that's a good design trick and that's where elements of play are apt to play a role yes to question one is is our design practices getting better are we learning something through looking back or whether moved on and the products that come out and are we getting better the second question sort of from that is some cover shakers are one thing a single designer can sit down in the afternoon and design something provide some output but apply that to more complex things you touched on the system's thinking which is very baffle system of these players and applications but what about apply to a hospital or a really complex problem space where you know you have complexity in the design team in the design process of getting to some substitution the first question is designed getting better yes but I think much more interesting is that it's gotten it's changed its characteristic dramatically in the early days of design it really came from architecture and art and designers were primarily focused on the object and designers consider themselves craftspeople if you go look at a design education it's a four-year undergraduate course and I think it's really more of craft or a trade even and what you learn is you learn these wonderful skills so you can you learn to draw you learn to sketch you learn materials you learn to fabricate you learn about the details you learn about what it takes to make well this particular beautiful elegant piece which is not only neatly crafted but it's manufactured and machined in ways that other people didn't think was possible um you learn a craftsmanship and there's only in graduate school if you go to design you start learning some principles but the main principle is you learn where I think historical you looked at previous designs and you copied them or you change them and most of Apple comes from brown VR aun the German company that if you actually look at the iPods it look very pround products they're very similar this is not a I'm not criticizing them in fact Johnny Ives who's the vein designer is proud of that that he's because design in the traditional sense is like art in the traditional sense is that you learn about the other artists and you build upon them while still doing your own thing but all that's about appearance and it's not about how we use it an interaction and it's not about what we call human Center so that people really can understand and use it that's been a big change and I believe that change started with the computer with a home computer the field of human-computer interaction started with the first early pcs there was work before that airline airplane cockpits are a good example but the real field started and interaction design started with the development of the first pcs that we started to realize there were psychological principles like feedback ly conceptual models life ordinances like constraints etc that could be applied and that's very far into most designers and today design is still taught as an art at CMU technology school the art the design you Popular's in the school of art and the Dean is a piano player and at most schools of design is located in the arts and humanities or their separate design schools like the Rhode Island School of Design which is mostly art or Pasadena School of Design which is mostly art or the school of the Art Institute of Chicago which is inside the Art Institute units they care about art design is art so we need a new breed of designer and what we now have is this really funny thing we have human-computer interaction as a discipline with people really learning to understand about the way new technologies are evolving and used and we have a design discipline but they too seldom talk to each other and so the stuff that HCI people put out tend to be ugly they're not very good at communicating the real principles that they themselves are talking about and we have communication designers as a field of communication designer people study a lot about how you communicate concepts but it's unfortunate they don't work with the technologists so I think that we're getting better we're doing more exciting things but we need to change our educational practices so here's another problem for you another topic another another lecture in the university we pride ourselves on specialists people who are the world authority or topic and the way to become a world authorities become very specialized in relevant quite narrow you're really good at this in the world of business and industry we have to produce products and products require expertise plus a wide number of specialties require generalists well universities don't train generalists because actually the generalist faculty member would either never get hire or if they were hired by accident they wouldn't get promoted because in any given field they need to get letters from the world's authorities to see if this is a great person and they would say well it did an interesting paper but I haven't seen anything since then and we need more generalists and designers are generalists and right now though they're generalists in art and ten and maybe on materials but not enough I think they need to have much more training in social sciences and the technologies a lot of designers hate technology they hate numbers even it Christ where I teach where the where it's a highly technical university Korean advanced Institute of Science and Technology so every student has to take in the first two years calculus and science but the ones who hate it are the ones who end up in the design department and and it's similar way by the way Engineers hate people unless engineering about is about designing things and developing things that are be used by people if you actually look what modern design is about its applied social sciences and there's a big thing about we need to have better STEM education and STEM science technology engineering mathematics I listen to your president recently I'll give a really give a nice talk about how we must increase training and stem at Stanford other places so you know indices going on and on about stem stem has s for science which does not include the Social Sciences and take a look at other and if you doesn't include design and I think design I think stem needs a D and it goes in both ways designers should learn more about science including the social sciences technology education engineering and math but the engineers especially the technologists should learn more about the social sciences and about design and and most engineers will say oh we do that we have a design class that we even have design projects and they do but engineering design is not the same as what we're talking about the human centered design it's really about making something that's effective you for example do this project on the egg-drop the goal as many of you may know is to device at a very simple materials like so few pieces of paper or something cloth or something so you wrap the egg and you can drop it out of a third-story window where it goes to the ground and doesn't break the wonderful project students love it you can do all sorts of experiments but it's got nothing to do with human centered design no people and so engineers love that one too but if you try to have engineers do a design project which involves people like you taken with the medical school or something but they'll start saying is stupid people didn't they understand so design is getting better but I think our education is a problem we really need to change that we have some great designers by the way who do great job who overcame all these but in every case that I've seen they've been self-taught they've been interested enough to go and learn about these things it's really hard to get in the traditional educational setting feel free to come up ask on questions too late I answer like I use your questions as excuses for mini lectures so sorry about that but our time is up for more please visit us at stanford.edu

Channel: Stanford

Views: 93,546

Keywords: computer science, art, technology, design, business, consumer, product, education, engineering, complexity, human systems, concept, organization, structure, professional, model, function, life, innovation, understand, tool, simplicity, signal, industrial

Id: flRuSn0df8Q

Length: 71min 25sec (4285 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2011