Philosophy

Public objects

(Still thinking about the subway) -- Any public object -- a building, a fence, a rule, a tool -- gets used and tested and pressed to its various limits by lots of people, and that using and testing and pressing changes, humanizes the object. You build a fence of a certain height. Most people don't bother to climb it. A few do. You decide whether keeping that few out is worth the trouble of revising the fence. If not, the fence becomes, de facto, a different sort of barrier than you initially intended, a barrier for the most part. You make a rule against eating on the bus. Lots of people ignore it in sneaky ways that end up not leaving messes. The rule worked, in a slightly different way than you intended it to work. You build a park with concrete benches. People use them to do skateboard tricks. You decide whether that makes sense, given what else that park is for.

In a place where people have been working on buildings and rules and barriers and institutions for a long time, the public things have undergone interesting evolution, have shaken down to some generally acceptable arrangement, in many cases. New things may still not be tamed. In old cultures, the institutions and technology and rules may have attained a kind of perfection -- and understanding them may require just that one understand what kind of perfection they have.

I was at a workshop today to train university instructors in using Vista, a new web-based course management tool. It was clearly wet behind the ears -- too many bells and whistles, no priorities. If it were a piece of public technology that could evolve, it would pretty quickly be tamed by use. But with this sort of software, new products are introduced before the old products have been humanized, and the natural humane evolution of the thing is interrupted by the much faster advance of technological possibility.

I think what is needed in electronic technology is stuff flexible enough to evolve naturally as users use it, so that development happens constantly and continuously.