FOCUS
28
FORTUNE.COM // JANUARY 2020
BRIDGING
THE GAP
BE T WEEN
HUMAN
AND
MACHINE
People and machines can accomplish wonders when they
understand each other —and create cataclysms when they don’t.
Two important new books explore what it takes to make the
relationship work. By Clay Chandler
BOOK REVIEWS
THE PARTIAL MELTDOWN of a
reactor at the Three Mile
Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in
1979 is typically explained as the product of
mechanical malfunction and human error.
The precipitating cause of the catastrophe,
the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history, was
the malfunction of a pipe meant to pump
water into one of the plant’s two reactors to
keep it from overheating. Plant operators
inadvertently made things worse by shutting
off a backup system.
But Cliff Kuang, in a fascinating new
book, argues that Three Mile Island is better
understood as a design failure. The reactor, he
notes, would have saved itself had it been left
alone. Instead, a simple pump failure became
a nuclear nightmare because “catastrophically
bad control room design” made it impossible
for the men operating the plant to understand
what had gone wrong. “The plant and the men
were talking past each other,” Kuang writes.
“The plant hadn’t been designed to anticipate
the imaginations of men; the men couldn’t
imagine the workings of a machine.”
Humans and machines talking past each
other is the central preoccupation of 2019’s two
most important design books. One is Kuang’s,
written with designer Robert Fabricant and
titled User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of
Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work,
and Play. The other is How to Speak Machine:
Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us, by
design and tech guru John Maeda.
Both books agree that people and machines
can achieve great things when they understand
each other—and invite cataclysm when they
don’t. But whereas Kuang stresses the impor-
tance of keeping technology “human-centric,”
Maeda suggests that humans, especially
DESIGNS FOR
LIVING Our picks
for the two
most important
design books of
2019 are How to
Speak Machine,
by John Maeda
(Penguin), and
User Friendly, by
Cliff Kuang with
Robert Fabricant
(Macmillan).
