IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014 - 20

and the YMCA was prominent in providing instruction. Corn aptly describes what was happening:
"No machine had ever presented consumers
with a more daunting, less friendly interface, to
use the now familiar terms for the place where
humans interact with machines."
Keep in mind as well that this was in an era in
which most cars were open. There were no seat belts,
nor safety glass for the windshield, which would fracture into shards like a bottle.
Corn ends his chronology of user hostile technologies with a final personal anecdote, one that illustrates
that our having to master such hardware is apparently
a permanent feature of consumer life. He and his wife
install five digital thermostats to independently control the temperature in five rooms of their house. Of
his thermostats, he explains:
"Along with an LCD screen each has four buttons: one called 'menu,' another named 'item,'
and two buttons marked respectively with an
upward and downward point chevron. The buttons do different things, and the LCD screen
shows different information, depending on what
'mode' the thermostat is in, making it almost
necessary to have the owner manual by one's
side when using the unit."
The Corns were poised for disaster. The user's
manual that arrived with the hardware, apparently
written for the contractor, was useless and after much
experimentation on their part, the house was still cold.
In desperation they asked this installer to replace these
digital units with the old-fashioned reliable analog
ones. "Not possible," they were told; the central computer running their radiant heating system would only
talk to these computerized thermostats. The project
was saved only (partially) when a technician came to
their house and reprogrammed the central computer
so that it would make the thermostats approximately
emulate the older analog units. Corn speaks of his
now friendlier technology as being a "lobotomized"
version of what he thought he had bought.
Joseph Corn's book is a much needed addition to
the literature of the history of consumer technology. It
places in perspective the periodic upheavals in our lives
created when we purchase some state-of-the-art equipment and try to master its use. It's a comfort of sorts to
think of what took place with bicycles and especially the
automobile. I would have appreciated some economic
perspective: in the United States it is the middle class
who are most directly affected by these upheavals. The
rich had chauffeurs to do the driving for them and later
teach them to operate their cars. The rich hired people to
20

come to their homes to instruct them in the use of their
new computers. By the time the computers had fallen in
price to where the poor could afford them, they were less
daunting. Those early DOS machines were expensive.
In fact, if we were to explore wider class considerations, it would be clear that the most "user unfriendly"
technologies historically occurred not in the home but
in the workplace - one thinks of the noisy, dangerous
machines in the New England and British textile mills
in the early decades of the industrial revolution, satanic
devices that took off the fingers, put out the eyes, and
deafened and sometimes killed their proletarian users.
A subject that is just as rich, and ultimately more
important, than user unfriendliness is its opposite:
technologies that are immediately friendly. There is
much to be learned from immediately friendly technologies, and they deserve a book that could be used
in design schools and engineering colleges. For example, the most complicated device typically possessed
by a middle class consumer today is the "smart"
phone. Yet, one hears no widespread horror stories
purveyed by new purchasers comparable to those circulating around 1984 in the popular press about the
home computer consumer. Digital cameras are about
as complicated as things get too, but again there are no
woe-filled tales in the newspapers and magazines a la
the 1980s. What these devices have in common is that
you can easily use them at their most elementary level
"right out of the box."
Buy a smart phone and you're quickly making
phone calls; you like the phone immediately. An hour
later you've discovered how to take pictures and again
there is a sense of satisfaction. From there you're
making little films, or surfing the web, or buying and
learning the ways of new apps. The next day perhaps
you're using your phone as a GPS while driving your
car. Each of these accomplishments is incremental
and leave you with a sense of progress. The same goes
for the expensive digital camera you've bought. You
will probably never learn all its features but, take it out
of the box, charge the battery, and you're making pictures. They may not be very good, but you have something to show for your efforts. In brief, a user-friendly
technology gives you positive reinforcement from
your first meeting and makes you want to learn more.
You can enjoy it immediately at a beginner's level.
The presence of the "Quick Start "manual," often sold
with a new piece of hardware, is an acknowledgment
of the importance of an early sense of achievement.
Elementary school teachers know this - perhaps in
time engineers and industrial designers will too.
Whether such a philosophy could have been applied
to the automobile is doubtful. In the case of the home
computer it might have been. In any case, it provides a
useful guiding principle for inventors creating our technological future.
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014