A Technology Galapagos at CHI 2011

by Erin Bradner

I was at a conference last month and found myself in a room teaming with people engrossed in technology. Two people were using smart phones, others were tapping on PDAs, and one was using a word processor. None of this is blogworthy until I tell you that the transfixing technologies in the room were all digital antiques curated in a makeshift gadget gallery. On display was the world's first portable word processor from 1978 with only six keys on its keyboard. Another curious artifact was an early touchscreen PDA featuring buttons designed to be played like a trumpet. But what drew me in was the world’s first touchscreen smart phone, a dinosaur that predated the Apple iPhone by 14 years. That phone, designed by IBM, is the origin of several user interface patents in the iPhone today. 

Image from the Buxton Collection Sampler. Image Source CHI 2011

This anachronistic smattering of digital curios was part of a private collection shipped to the Human-Computer Interaction Conference (CHI 2011) in Vancouver, B.C. The owner and curator of the collection was the inexhaustible gadget hound, Bill Buxton. Throughout the conference Buxton gave non-stop, guided tours of his collection for anyone who walked by. Think Darwin in the Galapagos. Meandering through the collection he would point out the design quirks, elegance and ingenuity of each device. I noticed that he rarely got two gadgets into a thought without referring to a larger innovation taxonomy that seemed self-evident to him. While walking and talking, he would grab two dissimilar devices from opposite ends of the room, hold them next to each other and explain that they were in the same family; one was simply the miniaturization of the other. Next he would scoop up a specimen and explain how it was the cross-fertilization of species from the PDA genus, the tablet genus and a trumpet.

Over time, as Buxton spoke, I noticed that his rapid-fire audit of the distinguishing traits of each gadget included complimentary terms like wonderful, inventive, and inspired. Yet never, while I was there, did I hear the words big idea, giant or genius. Then, standing somewhere between a Reverse Polish Notation calculator and a foot-operated mouse, he blurted out a Darwinian truth. I can’t quote, so this is the gist:

That’s how we do it. As designers, we slice up a given design space along the various dimensions of size, speed, permutation, etc… we amplify and attenuate, expand and contract until we find something interesting and suspiciously doable.

 Something clicked for me then. Perhaps the collection of digital doodads catalogued before me wasn’t as it appeared to be. It was not a systematic progression of gadgetry punctuated by paradigm-shifting sparks of the Genius Inventor. It was a mashup of form factor, features and user interface. It was the work of legions of tireless designers actively seeking under-populated niches in a design space and growing ideas there – then cross-fertilizing and mutating and growing more and more ideas.

Economic or ergonomic, it also struck me that some form of natural selection had to be in play.

Freshly liberated from the cult of the Genius Inventor, I went downstairs to lunch. As luck would have it I found myself sitting across the table from Jim Lewis, the Human Factors Engineer from IBM who designed the user interface for a phone I held in my hand only minutes before in the gadget Galapagos upstairs. I felt compelled to confront Jim immediately with a pressing question: “If you’re not a genius, if you’re not a giant, if the UI for the world’s first smart phone didn’t spring fully formed as a big idea, then how did you design it?” I let him finish his lunch and then I asked. I’ll recount that conversation in my next DUX post.