An excerpt from E.B. White’s New Yorker essay, “The World of Tomorrow”, in which he responds to the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. His thoughts are not only beautifully articulated in classic E.B. White style, but the questions and concerns he raises have a great deal of relevance in our current approaches to technology and our always-connected lives.

The countryside unfolds before you in $5-million micro-loveliness, conceived in motion and executed by Norman Bel Geddes. The voice is of utmost respect, of complete religious faith in the eternal benefaction of faster travel. The highways unroll in ribbons of perfection through the fertile and rejuvenated America of 1960 — a vision of the day to come, the unobstructed left turn, the vanished grade crossing, the town which beckons but does not impede, the millennium of passionless motion. When night falls in the General Motors exhibit and you lean back in the cushioned chair (yourself in motion and the world so still) the soft electric assurance of a better life — the life which rests on wheels alone — there is a strong, sweet poison which infects the blood. I didn’t want to wake up. I liked 1960 in purple light, going a hundred miles an hour around impossible turns ever onward toward the certified cities of the flawless future. It wasn’t until I passed an apple orchard and saw the trees, each blooming under a canopy of glass, that I perceived that even the General Motors dream, as dreams often do, left some questions unanswered about the future. The apple tree of tomorrow, abloom under its inviolate hood, makes you stop and wonder. How will the little boy climb it? Where will the little bird build its nest?

I haven’t been posting here much lately, and it’s because I’ve been using Tumblr a lot. I really like the ease of use for posting and the social functionality built in to it. I’m still figuring out what I want to do going forward — I might continue to keep cog + sprocket as a separate blog, I might move my Tumblr blog over to this domain, or some third option. I’m not really sure, but in the meantime, if you want to see more of what I’m writing and posting, check out http://alexislloyd.tumblr.com

There has been a lot of reaction to the piece published in the Times earlier this week about the negative effects of multitasking and hyperconnectivity. Most of it has been either been further hand-wringing over how much of a problem this is, or a rejection of the idea that there is any problem to begin with.

I was happy to see this piece today, in which a number of contributors from different disciplines present actual, constructive ideas for how to create more balance and “unplugged” space. None of the ideas are particularly radical - most are of the “just control yourself” variety - but I appreciated the focus on solutions rather than problems.

First Steps to Digital Detox

An interesting thing I noted is that one of the authors compared cutting down on technology use to dieting: i.e., it’s difficult and unpleasant in the short-term but rewarding in the long term. I thought this comparison was striking, as it is fairly well-documented that people can’t really sustain dieting behaviors in the long term. It’s just too hard. Will the same hold true for technology? Will the gratification of the immediate rewards overwhelm our attempts at self control? Intuitively, I think not. I personally find there are great immediate (as well as long-term) rewards to unplugging — a sense of relief and peace and quiet — in a way that there aren’t for eating a salad. But then again, maybe I’m just not very addicted to connectivity… 

(Also, in the comments for this article, someone recommended the current Adbusters issue entitled “The Whole Brain Catalog” as another good read on the topic. While I haven’t gotten to read the whole issue yet, there are a couple of articles from it available on their website.)

Jakob Nielsen has done some usability testing on the iPad — the first person to publish results of any kind of formal user testing with the device, as far as I know. His results are interesting, but his conclusions are typically Nielsen-ish in their conservatism.

In short, he found that iPad apps are pretty confusing for users right now because it is a new platform and every app designer is trying different approaches in an attempt to take advantage of the device’s form factor, app model, and gesture support. Since everyone is being inventive and creating new ways of interacting with content, there is no consistency yet and therefore, users don’t know what to do.

Nielsen’s response: “Stop being so creative and experimental! Make it look and work just like the web! Make buttons look buttony and 3-D so users know where to tap!” One of my favorite quotes from his conclusions was:

“Abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness.”

But Jakob, don’t you get it? It’s the “weirdness” and the experimentation that lead to innovation. We need the weirdness. This is a necessary stage in the evolution of interaction design when a new platform comes along. The same thing happened in the early days of the web (and again in the early days of web 2.0). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I want users to be confused. But this stage will pass. Here’s what’s going to happen: We’ll have a period of turbulence where every app works differently and designers are trying every bizarre interaction model under the sun because…well, because now we CAN. Doing anything less would be like getting a pack of 64 Crayolas and only drawing in black and white. After a while, things will settle down, we’ll start to see what works best and those models will propagate and become standardized while others fall by the wayside. We will be unable to remember that we ever did anything other than “tap three times in a semicircular swoop” to get a contextual menu.

What comes out at the other end of this experimentation phase will be better and cooler and yes — more USABLE — than what we have on the web now. So telling designers to just settle down and stop being so creative is, in my humble opinion, just backwards thinking.

Here’s the full article for your perusal:

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

James Sturm decided to spend four months offline. Here is his reasoning for attempting this web fast:

My (Probably) Crazy Plan to Give Up the Internet

And here is his experience so far:

Drawing Ponce de Léon is A Lot Harder Without Google

I discovered something really handy today. A number of the icons that Apple uses in the iPhone UI are actually packaged as glyphs within the Apple Symbols font. Here’s how to get to them:

1. Open an application (works with most apps — I used TextEdit)
2. Go to Edit -> Special Characters
3. From the “View” dropdown select “Glyph”, and from the “Font” dropdown select “Apple Symbols”
4. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen and you should see what’s in the image above. Enjoy!

Note: You can also create a text field in Illustrator, select Apple Symbols as your font, and then go to Type > Glyphs to get the glyphs directly into a vector image format.