The Design of Future Things

“How to Talk to People”
Report XP–4520.37.18
Human Research Institute
Pensacola, Florida
Humans are . . . large, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage, and they pollute the environment. It is astonishing that these devices continue to be manufactured and deployed. But they are sufficiently pervasive that we must design our protocols around their limitations.
—Kaufman, Perlman, and Speciner, 1995.

• Design Rule One: Provide rich, complex, and natural signals.
• Design Rule Two: Be predictable.
• Design Rule Three: Provide a good conceptual model.
• Design Rule Four: Make the output understandable.
• Design Rule Five: Provide continual awareness, without annoyance.
• Design Rule Six: Exploit natural mappings to make interaction understandable and effective.

“The traffic is no longer regulated by traffic signs, people do the regulating themselves. And precisely that is the whole idea. Road users should take each other into account and return to their everyday good manners. Experience shows that the additional advantage is that the number of road accidents decreases in the process.”

Communication and negotiation require what linguists call a “common ground”: a shared basis of understanding that serves as the platform for the interaction.

When two machines start to interact, they first go through a ritual to ensure that there is mutual agreement about shared information, states, and even the syntax of the interaction. In the jargon of communication engineers, this is called “handshaking.”

We need augmentation, not automation.

This scenario has shades of Minority Report, the Steven Spielberg movie based upon the great futurist Philip K. Dick’s short story by that name.

The conflict between human and machine actions is fundamental because machines, whatever their capabilities, simply do not know enough about the environment, the goals and motives of the people, and the special circumstances that invariably surround any set of activities. Machines work very well when they work in controlled environments, where no pesky humans get in the way, where there are no unexpected events, and where everything can be predicted with great accuracy. That’s where automation shines.

The machine is not intelligent: the intelligence is in the mind of the designer.

SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing. . . . they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever.

—Plato: Collected Dialogues, 1961.