I went to see a really interesting film tonight, a preview of The Flying Scotsman, a film about the life (or at least some of the achievements) of the remarkable Graeme Obree.

Obree, if you’ve never heard of him, broke the holy-grail record of cycling, beating a 9-year old total distance cycled in an hour. That record was always though of as the supreme struggle – get on your bike, cycle as hard as you can for 60 minutes, and see how far you got.

I had a passing acquaintance with Obree when he was in his teens (and I was younger): we were both in the same cycling club, very occasionally used to go on rides (which would generally involve me being dropped early on by Graeme and his pal Gordon Stead, in whose workshop he built the “Old Faithful” bike with which he stirred a hornet’s nest of controversy in the cycling establishment, whilst breaking a couple of world records and taking a couple of world championships).

Obree was always fast – even as a 17-year-old he was doing 20-minute 10-mile time trials on fairly ordinary bikes, along a dual carriageway. I recall hearing out of the blue in 1993 that some weird Scotsman who’d build his own bike out of washing machine parts – not strictly true, but looks good in the papers – had just taken the hour record… and couldn’t quite believe that it was the same Mr G Obree of Ayrshire.

Anyway, it’s a good film. A good story, and a darker and more interesting one than the usual “nice guy underdog triumphs against the villanous ogres of the establishment” type affair. Obree was, maybe still is to a degree, haunted by a bi-polar condition which he has sought therapy from in writing his own biography on which the film is based. Jonny Lee Miller turns in a top-drawer performance, and even manages to look a lot like Graeme did at the time.

I haven’t read all of the Flying Scotsman autobiography yet – I’m waiting for it to wing its way from Amazon – but I have delved into it using their excellent “Search Inside” feature which allows you to preview pages of a book before committing to buying it.

I suppose the Obree story is one that everyone can learn from – by having supreme self belief (he refused to talk about “attempting” to break the world record… the way he saw it, he was going to break the record) and raw talent, it’s possible to prevail. Now, I can talk myself into self belief, but I’m still searching for the raw talent… 🙂

PS. The film goes on general release on 29th June 2007, and the book has been available for a couple of years.

In part 2 of my book post about design (part 1 was earlier this week), I’ll revisit an old title which is still great reading for anyone interested in cognitive theory or design. It was written by Donald Norman, and first published nearly 20 years ago as “The Psychology of Everyday Things“. The author found that bookshops & libraries tended to lump the book in with all the psychology textbooks, so a later edition was re-released under the modified title of the Design of Everyday Things.

The book itself looks at lots of good examples of where a designer has clearly thought about a problem and taken account of it in the design, but the more interesting (to me, at least) cases are where the usability of a system is so totally shot just because the designer didn’t take a simple thing into account.

Examples of the kinds of scenarios that Norman deals with are cookers where the layout of controls for the burners is different to that of the burners themselves (eg the burners are 2 x 2 but the controls are in a line of 4 – very common) or light switches which seemingly bear no resemblance to the layout of the lights they operate. I’ve lived in houses for years, and still kept getting the switches in the hall round the wrong way, so I know where he’s coming from there. In fact, in my house right now, the left hand switch operates the lights at the right side of the room and vice versa – I really must get round to rewiring that switch one day.

My favourite examples in the book are of the humble door, however. Here are some example photos I’ve taken on a camera phone (my new Orange E600, a version of the HTC S620 which Darren recently raved about).

The first 2 pictures are of a fire door in Microsoft UK’s TVP campus; the point about design here is that there are no instructions on the door about what to do. If you walk up to a fire exit door, for example, and it has a horizontal bar across it, you would be drawn to grab it and do something – quite possibly pull on it, but when it doesn’t move up, you’d push, and the door would open.

Similarly, when you walk up to a door which doesn’t have any handles, the only thing you can do is push, so that’s what you’ll do, right? 

To make it a little easier, a good designer would put a plate of some kind on the door, to underline the fact that there isn’t a handle for a reason (ie it hasn’t fallen off or anything).

Conversely, when you see a handle, you’ll instinctively grab it and pull. So a well designed door will have a handle on the side that needs to be pulled, and nothing (or a plate) on the side that’s pushed.  The only other marks on these fire doors are signs saying that the door is to be kept closed. Interestingly, they was part of the original Thames Valley Park campus which opened in 1997.

Now if we move to a newer part of the campus, there are nicer-looking glass doors, but their design is less clear – there are handles on both sides which look swish, but offer no affordance – ie they don’t give the user any clue which way the door is going to open. Maybe you could look out for hinges or the likes, but it’s very common to see people walk up to a door and pull it when they should be pushing.

To try to avoid that confusion, the door company puts a little sign saying “Pull” or “Push” on the door – something that still evades many people’s attention, a bit like The Far Side cartoon of the School for the Gifted.

Here are just two examples…

Even the old part of campus has plenty of glass doors, but they are designed correctly. Evidence:

There is nothing on this door other than the furniture – a piece of design which looks good, doesn’t have anything superfluous, and yet is easier to use than the more fussily “designed” items.

It’s books like DOET which give you a new perspective on the mundane things you’d not normally notice, and as a result, are well worth a good thumb through even if not an exhaustive read.

I’ve no idea how accurate this information is, but in a short video on http://www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv there are some wild predictions about the future… under the title of “Did you know?”

This echoes somewhat  “The Age of Spiritual Machines” by the eminent Ray Kurzweil (I saw him present once, and it was truly amazing – this guy has a brain the size of, I suppose, a planet … e.g. he invented OCR when a blind friend complained that the supply of audio books was seriously limited), where the author theorises that technological evolution is almost exponential – ie. the pace of change is accelerating.

Kurzweil reckons the first 30 years of the 21st century will see the same degree of technology progression that the entire 20th century saw, and that the next 10 years will see the same again… to the point where, by the middle of the century, nano-bots will be injected into the bloodstream to repair damaged organs and defeat blood-borne diseases.

Of course, all of this could be a load of old tosh – after all, people thought in the 1950s that we’d all be piloting flying cars, wearing space suits, and eating food in pill-form by the end of the 20th century…

 

I was reminded the other day of a term coined by Edward Hallowell in his excellent and thought-provoking book, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD.

Hallowell, an ex-Harvard Medical School specialist in Attention Deficit Disorder, has deduced that technology and the modern way of life & work is turning us all into ineffective wastrels who burn out by the time we’re 50.

He tells a story of how he was staying in a remote cottage which had one of the old rotary Bakelite telephones, and no mobile coverage, and the act of dialling his friend in a nearby village took so long (in reality only a few seconds… the number probably had lots of 8s, 9s and 0s in it), that he was getting madly frustrated. This set him thinking about how strange it was that a simple act of waiting 15 seconds or so for something that normally takes a snap on a push-button phone, should be enough to make him near apoplectic. He started finding similarities in the symptoms of ADD patients he’s treated, and normal people who just get frustrated, distracted, impatient etc, in the normal run of their daily lives.

He’s even coined some interesting new terminology:

Vocabulary for a crazy world

Screensucking: wasting time stuck on the internet or Blackberry when you could be doing some work

EMV or e-mail voice: the ghostly tone of voice people assume on the phone when they are talking to you and reading their e-mail at the same time

Frazzing: when you are multitasking ineffectively

Gemmelsmerch: the ubiquitous force that distracts us from whatever we are doing with the desire to start doing something else

Doomdarts: suddenly remembered commitments such as a birthday or an invitation that had slipped our minds in all that frazzing and screensucking

I particularly like EMV and Doomdarts – been there, done that, many times…

Ever since reading  Robert X Cringley‘s excellent 1996 Accidental Empires book (which actually has the even more excellent full title of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition and Still Can’t Get a Date), I’ve been interested in some of the history behind the way the PC and internet industry has evolved. I’ve always loved Cringley’s description of Steve Jobs as “The most dangerous man in Silicon Valley”… (in fact, he even opens Accidental Empires with a line akin to the opener from the sadly departed Douglas Adams’ tome, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, which was, “High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.”)

Many commentators would trace the genesis of a lot of technology we now take for granted back to Xerox Corp’s famed Palo Alto Research Center, aka PARC. The roll call of what was supposedly invented at PARC is long – laser printers, ethernet, the bitmapped display, GUI, mouse, object-oriented programming, distributed computing… the list goes on.

Legend goes a little fuzzy though – not everything that came out of PARC originated there, but a lot of the researchers who worked there in the glory days brought ideas with them and refined them enough to be useful (eg Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse before coming to Xerox but perfected its use with the new bitmapped displays and Graphical User Interface). Legend also has it (backed up by some fact, in fact) that The Most Dangerous Man in Silicon Valley himself was given a guided tour of PARC’s facilities, saw the Alto computer they’d invented (showcasing their GUI, mouse et al) and became inspired to have Apple launch the Lisa computer, which was the forerunner of the Mac.

Anyway, a few years ago I picked up Dealers of Lightning – a potted history of what happened at PARC, and it really is a fascinating read. It can be a bit heavy going in places but gives a great insight not only into the amazing work they did at PARC (and the disdain the industry poured on Xerox Research for basically inventing the world as we know it but then alledgedly doing nothing with it, because they couldn’t see how it related to selling photocopiers), and it also paints an inspiring portrait of the head of the Computer Science Lab, Bob Taylor.

Taylor’s basic philosophy was to hire people that were smarter than he was (and he was the guy who founded ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, so must be a bit of a smart cookie himself). He also decided, in the CSL, that he couldn’t manage any more than 50 people directly, so he set the cap on that size of organisation (since he didn’t want to introduce layers of management), and just went about making sure those 50 were the best he could possibly find. What an visionary management style, and an amazing story.

It’s also interesting to see how many of the luminaries mentioned in this book as the fathers of computing as we know it, now show up in the Microsoft Global Address List 🙂

//Ewan