need stories and context. Who cares whether the details vary? Who cares
whether there is word-for-word accuracy? That is simply not important for
everyday life.
Human memory is organized around the important things in life: the excite-
ment, the meaning, and the experience itself. Word-for-word accuracy is simply
not important, and it is difficult to accomplish. However, this is no longer true
in today’s technological world. Great accuracy is required. Lawyers watch
every step. Machines are sensitive to every deviance. We are forced to use
memory in ways not natural to its evolutionary biological history. And so we
must turn to artifacts.
Beware: Using artifacts—technology—to help overcome the frailty of human
memory may move us in undesired directions and swamp us with excessive
amounts of excessively precise information. The question ‘‘What can technol-
ogy do to help?’’ is almost always the wrong question. Sure, we can devise
technological solutions to the problem. Maybe we can invent small, powerful
computers that will remember for us, computers small enough to be available
at all times. If not computers, tiny voice recorders small enough to be worn on
the wrist. But once we start thinking this way we become trapped in an ever-
lengthening chain of technology dependence that in turn forces us to deal with
an ever-increasing load of detailed information. Because we can’t readily grasp
all of this, we will need to devise additional technology to aid us, putting us
even more at the mercy of our machines. The whole solution is wrong because
the problem is wrong. The correct approach is to structure the world so that
we do not have to remember such mindless trivia. Then the question of tech-
nological aids would never have been asked. No ‘‘solution’’ would have been
necessary.
This is the lesson from the preceding sections of the chapter. Those large
control rooms may be unnecessary today, but in changing them, we must be
sensitive to the social communication that they afford: Changing the equipment
may accidentally destroy the informal communication channels that make
work proceed smoothly, synchronized among a group of workers without the
need for direct verbal communication.
In airplanes and navy ships, shared communication may at first seem un-
necessary, exposing people to irrelevant messages. But, the messages carry in-
formation about the activities of others, information that at times is essential to
thesmoothsynchronizationofthetaskor,asinthecaseoftheshipnavigators,
information that serves as an efficient training device for the entire crew,
regardless of their level of expertise. People are effective when they work in
a rich, varied environment. Adisembodied intelligence is deprived of rich
sources of information.
Finally, some aspects of technology expose us to demands for accuracy and
precision that are of little importance to normal life. Nonetheless, we have
altered our lives to give in to the machine-centered focus on high accuracy,
even where accuracy is not critical. Our goal should be to develop human-
centered activities, to make the environment and the task fit the person, not the
other way around.
452 Donald A. Norman