What happens to ourselves and our society when there are hundreds of microchips for every man, woman and child on the planet? What consequences follow when every object around us becomes "smart" and connected? As Bruce Sterling put it: What will you think when you step into the garden to look at the flowers - and the flowers look back at you?
Do we want flowers that look back at us? Or a toaster that does? How do we decide?
HCI researchers often decide on the basis of the usability of an artifact - how easy is something to be used. In the standard HCI literature you can probably find hundreds of approaches and methods for studying various usability aspects. I'll argue that we should look less at usability because making a system easier to use doesn't necessarily make it better or worthwhile. We need also to look at usefulness: The more useful an artifact, the more value it adds. The difference between usability and usefulness is subtle. Usability is necessary but not sufficient for usefulness.
Unfortunately, HCI researchers have traditionally focused on usability rather than on usefulness. They have built usability labs where zillions of bits of data are collected about people using various systems. Rather than build such labs and attempt to interpret this sort of data, I'll suggest that we instead concentrate on assessing usefulness.
To set the stage for this argument, I will briefly outline my perspective on where we are heading on the usability vs usefulness issue. I'll focus on the interaction between pervasive computing, on the one hand, and our social and cultural responses to technology on the other. I'll discuss, for example, how our notions of time and space have changed with the introduction of new technology.
In the second part of my talk, I'll discuss the innovation dilemma: We know how to construct new overwhelming technologies and gadgets but it seems so much harder to know what this stuff is good for. Are these things actually useful in our everyday lives? What is the experienced value of using these new gadgets, compared to using other technologies that were radical in their times, e.g. washing machines? And will we ever be fed up by increased complexity, or will be continue to be wowed by new technologies, perhaps simply because they are new?
In the last part of this talk, I'll discuss a new concept taking hold in the HCI community- Interaction Design, whose goal is to bring industrial designers, anthropologists, psychologists, and usability specialists together to create innovative, useful new technologies based on how people actually live. Interaction Design provides a unique opportunity for us to focus our research efforts on useful, not just usable technologies.
So what may be perceived as a dangerous idea is rather the opposite: We have the abilities and tools to refocus our research efforts so as to avoid building things that are silly, useless, unwanted, and in some cases even harmful - lets discuss how we use this path.