Stop telling people what to do; let them figure it out for themselves

An article in Wired called Roads Gone Wild describes a Dutch traffic engineer who says that traffic signs are an admission of failure on behalf of the road designer.

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."

An interesting idea, and one that I think should be increasingly used for the design of other things, technological artefacts, for instance.

I think that Moderman's basic idea is that people are better at negotiation and mediation than traffic signs and that putting all of the negotiation/mediation into the hands of the drivers results in a "better" traffic flow and a "safer" intersection.

I've read various things about the design of technology that said similar things. Particularly with regard to CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Work) design, several people have argued that trying to mediate human interaction with floor-control systems or other artificial communication protocols is counter productive, for a number of reasons. People have very sophisticated communication protocols for all sorts of things. Watch two people co-operatively using the same whiteboard, for example, and see how they decide who can draw where and when. Why impose some other sort of process on top of that which people do themselves?

Extending that idea to ubicomp (or ubicomp-like stuff) is pretty interesting. Ubicomp things should be designed for people to adopt into their lives, they shouldn't attempt to re-order or remake the existing ways that people do things. They should (warning: sociology jargon warning) respect existing practices. This is not to say that existing practices will remain the same once people start using ubiquitous technology, just that trying to create artificial practices is much harder and usually unsuccessful anyway.

One example of this that I saw recently was an Economist article called The meaning of iPod. It showed how the (ubiquitous!) iPod is changing how people consume music. The iPod doesn't really tell you how to listen to music, but it does give you a lot of open options for doing so. It respects the existing way you listen to music but allows you the flexibility to listen to music in new ways.

Cool.