Knock, knock
(Response to Urban Computing entry: 03. Door)
Doors got me thinking of Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things where he discusses the affordances of doors, and what they signal users to do with them. He cites an example of when that fails with a picture of a little boy who has to open a cabinet door without any handles by tying a string to it.
“We expect to find some visible signal for the correct operation. This tells us where to act. The next step is to figure out how: we must determine what operations are permitted, in part, using the affordances, in part guided by constraints.”
Doors are necessary; we need entrances and we need exits. Sometimes we need doors layered on top of doors, to feel safer. This is how I grew up, and though we know that locks can be picked, having layers provides some mental level of added security. And then sometimes we even need doors within doors. I think also of the inadequate doors that we put up with on a daily basis. For example, how certain locks become slightly dysfunctional and we learn the tricks needed to manipulate them.
So where have we failed to accomplish the proper affordances in digital spaces? Or where do we have “doors” that we just put up with because their design is not within our reach to change? I’m sure we’ve all run into sites or use applications that frustrate us because it’s not obvious how to find some information we need or how to accomplish a simple task. Visual or sensual cues are so important - more important than the aesthetics of an object, tool or space. Doors are an introduction to what lies ahead.
To respond to the question posed in the reading, “What might be communicated by the difference between an open door and a closed one?” Catherine, Corrine and Alex point out that first and foremost, the door must be seen and that doors are socially constructed. In 1960, J.C.R. Licklider wrote in The Computer as a Communications Device:
“For the society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will “to be on line” be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of “intelligence amplification,” the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity.”
I think that open source and ecologically minded design are major components to progressing accessibility to these opportunities.
