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Some
time ago, I was invited for a meeting with a high-level personage
in a large corporation. This company still maintained its long-standing
culture of rewarding upper-level executives with plush offices in
the top two floors of a high-rise building.
Upon
exiting the security-controlled elevator that had whisked me up
to the next-to-highest floor, I could instantly feel myself sinking
into the deep-pile carpeting. The environment was hushed silence,
with only two secretaries occupying the overly-spacious reception
area. After the proper notification of my arrival, I was ushered
into an equally spacious office with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking
a broad expanse of a major downtown metropolitan area.
This
is not a "real" office, I thought to myself. Surely this must be
a movie set for a stereotypical Hollywood film production. But no,
this was as real as my senses would allow me to believe.
One
half of the office was arranged for meetings such as we were about
to have, with a comfortable sofa and two plushy chairs -- one of
which was clearly intended for my "big choo-choo" executive host.
How did I know? Well, when you find yourself in this kind of situation,
you just know! Across from this friendly meeting area was the more
formal desk with two less comfortable chairs for visitors, or lower-level
managers, who may not be entertained quite as graciously. The desk
itself was large enough so that reaching to the far corners while
sitting behind it would be a serious challenge.
I
couldn't help but try to imagine how I would feel having such an
office as my work environment. It all seemed too perfect and too
isolated from the activities of the world as I know it. Something
else that I observed and found hard to understand was that this
massive desktop had only one small in/out box in the corner nearest
the door, one telephone, a pen set, and a perfectly clean embossed-leather
desk pad in front of the executive. The in/out box contained just
a few items on each of its two small mahogany shelves. On the credenza
behind the desk sat a typical PC with a 17-inch monitor and on the
opposite end -- a small family photo. The monitor screen was open
to the company's e-mail. And that was all! The desk-top and credenza
were otherwise incredibly bare.
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How
did this high-level executive manage to get anything done? On my
desk, which is also of reasonably ample dimensions, seldom do I
get a glimpse of even a small area of the wood-grained top surface.
Of course, the reason is that arrayed on it are the latest phone
messages, the incoming faxes and e-mails requiring immediate response,
the lists of active clients, the technical articles that must be
read as soon as possible, copies of patents, purchase orders, wafer
carriers containing material that must be scheduled for testing,
electron gun parts, and drawings for the latest new display concept.
The two shelves to my left contain information folders on other
clients. Travel schedules and expense reports typically spill onto
the floor in the corner bounded by the credenza and the bookshelves.
Now,
I must tell you that I don't consider myself a messy person. In
fact, I have been told that I am sometimes too neat-and-tidy. So
what is my problem? Why don't I seem to be able to keep my desk
as neat as the one I encountered on my visit?
Only
one time in my career, while working for DuPont, was I required
to abide by a corporate "clean desk" policy. This policy is in place
for quite good and logical reasons as a way to protect a company's
confidential information from after-hours prying eyes. I found that
the only way I could meet the requirements of this policy was to
keep a deep drawer empty and every night to create a criss-cross
stack of all the items on my desk and carefully lay it into this
drawer. Then each morning I would reverse the procedure so that
I would know what I needed to work on that day. Why couldn't I just
use file folders that stayed in a desk drawer, a file cabinet, or
my PC to keep track of everything? And with the recent advances
in computer technology, why don't I do it now? Well, at long last,
I think I may have stumbled onto the answer.
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Prof.
Jay Brand, a former psychology professor, who now works for the
office furniture manufacturer Haworth Inc., has provided an explanation
that makes me feel ever so much better. This explanation came to
me by way of an article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer authored
by Carol Smith. As I began to read, I immediately noted how similar
her observations and concerns were to mine. Well, of course, don't
we always appreciate wisdom and insight that agrees with our own?
What
Prof. Brand, who is now called a "cognitive engineer," has concluded
is that all of us have limited capacity in our short-term memories.
Aha, good insight, Prof. Brand! It's good to know that I am not
the only one who can't handle a list of items greater than two without
writing them down. Perhaps, my limited-capacity CCD-like short-term
memory, where the third or fourth items seem to fall out the back
end whenever a new one comes in, is not so atypical after all. According
to Prof. Brand, "Since most people are doing seven things at once,
they tax the capacity of their working memory almost immediately."
Therefore, information placed into our external environment is known
as a "cognitive artifact." This allows us to off-load some information
from our own over-taxed working memory. "It expands a person's capacity
to think. You're using the environment to think as well." I think
I am beginning to really like this Prof. Brand!
The
companies that require clean-desk policies are in essence giving
their workers "environmental lobotomies" or at least requiring them
to re-create their working environments at the start of each day.
"Workers in such environments can sometimes feel like they spend
more time getting organized than working on actual projects." As
with all good things one can, however, carry this to the extreme.
If the piles of papers no longer have meaning and are not providing
visual cues, then they become just that -- piles of meaningless
stuff. However, while organized in some coherent and frequently
updated way, there is real benefit to be gained here. I think I
can be sufficiently honest with myself to say that mostly I fit
into this well-organized category. In fact, while writing this column
I did a quick survey. I passed the test.
I
am sure that most of you reading this column will agree with and
accept this explanation with enthusiasm as great as mine. I know
you will because I have seen many of your desks. However, as display
engineers and scientists, there is something here about which we
should be concerned. What does this say about using our computer
screens to display our important information and to keep it organized?
It says, I think, that current display products, which provide only
a limited active display area, are going to continue to be significantly
less efficient than the cluttered-desktop method. Computer folders
and the files they contain provide minimal visual cues compared
to a "real" desktop. The process of browsing is also much slower
on the computer. If I'm not sure what a file or a document contains,
I have to click on it, open it, read it, and then close it again.
I have to do this with each item that I want to see. On my desktop,
using the traditional manual method, I can visually scan and retrieve
these items in a fraction of the time. Furthermore, on the computer,
when I close a file or a folder, the visual cues once again disappear.
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Some
of you more dedicated computer users will tell me that if I just
took the time to create a special folder for all my current activities
and created links to these folders containing the information on
those clients, I could keep that screen active and always be able
to overview what I needed to do next. But why do I want to take
the time to do that when I can do it faster by just putting a piece
of paper or a "real" folder on my desktop in a fraction of the time?
What advantage will I gain by doing it on the computer? The result
would be a far slower process for every one of the steps of acquisition,
access, updating, and deletion. Would I do better if I had a larger
computer- monitor screen? Only slightly. The real problem seems
to be in how to provide the necessary visual cues and how to create
the equivalent convenience of the desktop. Some traditionalists
among us may even pose the deeper philosophical question more concisely:
"Why bother?" Is it necessary or even desirable to try to endow
computers with the power to replace some or all of these current
behaviors and activities? Let's test this premise.
As
a thought experiment, suppose you could do the following: Suppose
you could have a flat-panel display of 40- to 50-inch diagonal and
very high resolution (perhaps 3000x4000 pixels) conveniently located
near your computer. This could be the primary display or a supplemental
display to the one used for current processing activities. On this
large display, all of your important stored information would be
shown in a pictorial format similar to the view of looking at a
desktop from a sitting position -- that is, a 2-D display with a
computer-generated appearance of perspective. Now, suppose you could
point with your finger to a particular stack of information (documents)
on this virtual desktop and that document or memo would instantly
appear in an unused part of the display screen. And if you moved
your finger up or down this virtual stack, other pages would similarly
be retrieved and displayed. If you wanted to store something, all
you would have to do is "draw" a square on the screen with you finger
and the material would be placed in that location. Or if you pointed
to a document and then to a location, it would be placed there.
For more involved instructions, the computer would accept simple
verbal commands.
Using
this approach, we have now not only provided all the visual cues
that can be found on a traditional desktop, we can actually find
and retrieve information faster in this "knowledge space" than is
possible with the manual search method. Once we develop such a display,
the days of the clicking mouse will be numbered. What a grand challenge
this could become -- perhaps as important as the development of
the shadow-mask CRT for color television. Such a display would create
a picture-window view for the rapidly evolving Information Society
to use instead of the comparative peep-holes that we have today.
We
display engineers hold more of the future of the Internet and the
World Wide Web in our hands than most people yet realize. We may
need to help promote this awareness so that adequate investment
becomes available to develop the necessary new display technologies.
Over the last twenty years, computer processing power and information
storage and manipulation capabilities have progressed faster than
improvements in displays. As the recognition grows that displays
are now limiting the further development and usefulness of various
information appliances, the demands on the display community will
increase. This will lead to great opportunities for many of us --
balanced with equally great challenges.
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Are
you ready to start work on the 3000x4000 pixel, 1.2-meter knowledge-space
display? I am. To get this project under way you can contact me
by e-mail at
Email,
by phone at 425-557-8850, by FAX at 425-557-8983, or by high-resolution
hard copy at 22513 SE 47th Place, Issaquah, WA 98029.
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