Back in his flat, Thackara reflected on a workshop that he'd conducted for engineers at Canon. He had asked them to put less functionality in their video cameras so that people could feel as if they could master the devices, rather than be intimidated by them. To them, designing a better product meant adding more buttons. And that divergence, he warns, is bound to bring about such negative consequences as disappointing products, dissatisfied users, or failed companies. Speed may be a given, but it is not, per se, a virtue.
Understanding requires both time and place.
The time has also come, he says, to shift some of the focus of innovation away from work and toward everyday life. The early users of digital devices are almost always business users, so product designers have a natural inclination to create and design products with the workplace in mind. But that tendency can make for bad design, especially when those products migrate beyond business. People put up with technical difficulties in their work lives that they would never tolerate in their personal lives. As computing migrates from ugly boxes on our desks to something that suffuses everything around us, a new relationship will emerge between what's real and what's virtual, what's mental and what's material.