Kill the Keyboard, Save the World

For my undergrad university thesis in 1994, I wrote about 30 pages on the implications of the phenomenon of emoticons on the Usenet ;-). I concluded with the admittedly difficult-to-prove prognostication that due to the nature of electric media (McLuhan's term) within 50 years the western phonetic alphabet would become irrelevant and would be replaced by some more symbolic system.

(I got a B-minus. :=0 )

15 years on, and I pretty much stand by my assertion, B-minus aside - the only things keeping phonetic alphabets alive right now are the millions of keyboards (both physical and digital) tethered to our computing devices. This silly mechanism of 104 (or so) buttons laid out in a grid is still our most consistent and reliable way of translating our thoughts into digits. Speech recognition is interesting, but most people will be hard-pressed to get over their embarrassment of talking to a machine until there's a strong motivation to do so, or until product designers make our machines resemble cute animals so we can tap into the power of anthropomorphosis. 

Our Central Nervous System Has No Keyboard

If you understand something about McLuhan's theories in the Extensions of Man, then you understand why visual communication is becoming more pervasive in our society - because electric technologies are extensions of our central nervous system. And we experience our reality and interface with our CNS through our senses. 

Writing and other communication systems, successful though they may be, are simply low-fidelity tools that allow us to share what's in our heads with others. I say low-fidelity, because what comes out of our hands when we write is very different from what would come out of our mouths when we speak , and that itself is very different from what would come out of our heads if we were simply to "think" things to each other. In short: there's a huge gap between the thoughts I'm thinking and the words I'm writing right now. It takes a lot of effort to close that gap. And that effort takes a lot of time. And that time represents waste. 

We Waste So Much Time

The implications of this are incredibly important to the practice of collaborative work. When you're trying to build complicated things with lots of people, you spend incredible amounts of time communicating things to those people, arranging for our physical bodies to all be in the same room at the same time to talk over the same things. The communication overhead becomes increasingly high with every body that is added to the project, and especially every body that is added to the project who isn't responsible for DOing anything on it, but has to make a decision about it. 

We've all been there.  You sit in a meeting room and brainstorm a bunch of amazing ideas with some great people - you've got it all on the board, with sketchy scribbles, boxes and arrows flying. You've developed a conceptual model, written in erasable marker ink, that all the participants understand and agree on. You've created a symbology, a visual vocabulary that maps to a problem you're all sharing in your heads. Then you all look at each other and say, "Okay, so who's going to put this into a powerpoint so we can communicate it to XYZ?" 

Then some poor sucker then has to read all of the scribbles and transcribe it into a digital format like a Powerpoint deck. He laboriously draws boxes where a scribbled line was drawn in less than a second. He retypes all of the text, written on the board in less than a minute. The work of honing and crafting and making a PowerPoint or Keynote deck starts. In the end the team spends two weeks creating a 28 page powerpoint deck that represents what a few individuals came up with in less than an hour, but means nothing to the people who were not at the meeting. So things need to be explained, rationalized, defended. Along the way, ideas become stillborn and don't develop. Important ideas get forgotten. People spend enormous amounts of time justifying the time they spent on things. And then they're sent home with Carpal Tunnel syndrome because of all the keystrokes they've performed trying to communicate and justify ideas that they came up with in less than an hour.

Our Problems Can't Afford This Amount of Waste

When you realize that this scenario is one that is repeating itself millions of times over across the planet, you start to get a picture of how much we are wasting. 

Given the promise of the future - of pervasive computing, virtual reality, emergent reality, nanotechnology, all that - when you sit down and look at what we're doing, it seems that we're mostly just wasting time. It's incredible that we get as much done as we do. But think how much more we could get done if we had better interfaces with our global CNS.

If we had a smooth interface with our global CNS (okay, ultimately I'm talking about plugging our heads in, Matrix-style, though it does make me cringe a little :-P ), not only would technology not limit us, but we would be free to develop digital human languages that would mirror thought more closely, and free us from the shackles of linguistic determinism (the idea that the language you speak moulds the way you think).  We could be able to start tapping into the universal grammar dictated by how our brains have developed, to communicate with all humans, and even our machines in a way that minimizes the physical labour of communication and REALLY start to be able to build amazing things. 

And then we'd really be getting somewhere. Until then, I'll do my very best to type as fast as I can, and design projects that emphasize doing over talking about what we're doing.