People And Technology
People have no innate understanding of any technology more complicated than a stick
- We must be trained to ride a bicycle, drive a car, ski, ...
- Appliances and tools come with an owner’s manual
But people accumulate experience, learn and reason, so we can “figure out” how to use some gear without reading the owner’s manual, e.g. portable CD player
Product designers try to make technology so simple that members of a technological society can guess its operation using only experience, knowledge and reasoning