— Jaron Lanier (amen!)
— Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
If book designs disrespected attention as much as websites do, they’d probably look like this.
This is one of my favorite non-existant places in Chapel Hill. This lanscape architect’s office used to exist behind Penang restaurant, next to the old location of 3Cups but moved out a couple of years ago. Whenever I was over there, I’d look in the window and think about what it would be like if it were my office. Today, it’s my desktop wallpaper - a window into the past!
— Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
Designing for Attention
I’m not a fly. I’m just putting that out there. Not that there’d be anything wrong with it if I was. I mean, I’d be able to see across an almost complete 360 degrees! Sure, I’d have massive, grotesque, compound mirror-ball eyes, and sure, I’d probably get picked up by G-men and spend the rest of my days in a government lab, but I’d be able to focus on more than one thing at a time! Actually, I’d be the ideal web user. I could read an article while simultaneously reading all the other information on the page. I could divide my attention ten ways if I wanted. That’d be nice. But I’m not a fly, website designers, I’m a human! I only have two eyes, ok? I can only focus on one thing at a time. And you know what, I’m ok with that. I really am. I’m glad I can walk down the street without having to worry about scaring innocent children. So I just want to clear that up. I’m not a fly. I’m not even a “fly-person.” I’mjust a person. So, here’s my question: Why are most web pages designed for fly-people?
Designers, seriously, let’s make today the last day we create pages for fly-people. Instead of continuing to create confused, unclear and unfocused pages—pages that include more information than is necessary and in a way that undercuts their core purpose—let’s adopt a new standard, following a very simple rubric: enabling attention. Most of the ways in which we go about getting attention ensure that we will fail at keeping it. See, we’ve been adept atstealing the attention of viewers (ultimately from ourselves, mind you)—that eye-catching graphic, the moving advertisement, the blinking text, the many, many links to click—but we’re now learning that stolen attention never stays long. Lasting attention must be earned, and in order to earn attention, we must first respect it.
In designing for attention, there are two particular issues that we need to be concerned with: the “readability” of our pages, and the distance we expect web users to cross to reach information. Let’s get into it…
— Dean Kamen (via)
I just read a description of a new project - being funded by the National Science Foundation - to develop what they call the “Neurophone system,” a direct brain to phone interface. I find it amazing that we’re awarding grants - regardless of how small they are in the grand scheme of things (Neurophone has received around $300K so far) - for projects like this when we have much more pressing problems that are far more worthy of immediate attention, problems that could certainly interrupt many of the assumed controls that concepts like the Neurophone likely depend upon. Things like electrical resources, a sufficiently idle market, or even the continued operation of entities able to dole out funding. In other words, a collapsed society doesn’t need brain phones.
What’s also irritating is to see “green rationalization” for these concepts in their abstracts. (The NeuroPhone promises “new energy-efficient techniques and algorithms for low-cost wireless EEG headsets and mobile phones,” among other things.) I’m fairly certain that our mobile phones aren’t at the top of the energy-inefficiency list, that is, as long as we have airplanes, cars, trucks, buses, buildings, homes, appliances, etc.
In my company, we are continually evaluating research and development on the basis of what is needed. Until the items of greatest need are supplied, we don’t even consider addressing anything that is purely a matter of “wouldn’t this be neat?” The skewed sense of priority that enables projects like this to be funded reminds me of much more clearly sad situations, like the dilapidated homes of gaming addicts, where the water has been shut off, the cupboards are bare, and the children are malnourished, yet the computers are running.
We need to get real.
I just love this opening scene (to Contact).
The possibilities for large-scale deception using technology like this are growing to a troubling degree.
“On Thursday the 20th of May 2010, Samsung was the first to introduce a large-scale commercial 3D-Outdoor projection in the Netherlands, at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. Between 22.30 and 00.30 on the evenings of the 20th, 21st and 22nd of May, the public was able to view the addition of a new dimension to this historic building. “
— Robert Darnton, The Mysteries of Reading, from The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, page 173
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, page 44
Sean Carroll on time-travel
