An office nightmare
On Star Trek, open floor plans in the workplace, and the problem with heralding every new possible technology as a solution to a real problem
The corporate vice president in charge of Windows products at Microsoft has made an appearance on a company video channel speculating enthusiastically about a near-term future in which Windows emphasizes "multimodality" -- stretching users beyond the conventional keyboard and mouse. A considerable portion of this, it appears, drives toward voice-driven computing.
■ Putting aside the many "Star Trek" references the concept conjures up, this kind of promotional enthusiasm tells us something important. It says that we've gotten technological development way out ahead of cognitive science. And that's problematic.
■ Really nobody who knows how human learning and reasoning actually work would say, "Gee whiz, let's fill open-floor-plan offices full of people making constant noise! It'll be great for productivity!"
■ Your brain works differently when it's composing sentences (or sentence fragments) with pen and paper, versus with a keyboard and a screen, versus in regular human conversation, versus being spoken into a machine with live feedback. These are different pathways and the differences affect the outcomes.
■ The same goes for receiving and processing information: What you read on a screen, read on a printed sheet of paper, hear in conversation, hear in a lecture, or listen to a machine read back to you all go through different cognitive mechanisms. (The screen inferiority effect is real!) Attention, comprehension, and recall are all affected by the mode of input.
■ Microsoft has an institutional imperative to deploy new technologies and to make them look like they will magically make office productivity sizzle. But it's important for the rest of us to take a step back and ask whether much-heralded changes really are for the better.
■ The paperless office was a myth, and for good reason: A lot of documents are better off being stored and transmitted electronically, but many (if not most) people still perform better when they read a written page. We need to carry the same awareness that not all modes of interaction are equally good into the imagined workplaces of the future. Just because technology can do something doesn't mean it's better for our brains that way.
