Brenda Laurel is a member of the research staff at Interval Research
Corporation, where she coordinates a group that is investigating how design
can better accommodate human diversity. She is editor of the book, The Art
of Human-Computer Interface Design and author of Computers as Theatre. A new
collection of her essays, entitled Severed Heads-Notes On Computers, Art,
And Nature, will be published on the world wide web this year.
ER: What do you think are the most important current issues in interface
design?
LAUREL: Well, it's starting to be the case that "interface" is not a very
useful word, so I'm not sure how to answer that. I think there are a lot of
important things in the world having to do with how humans and computers
deal with each other. I think agents and virtual reality are the most
important things that are going on right now, but maybe for non-obvious
reasons. VR in the sense that there is an aggressive desire to take all of
the human body and all of the senses into account. And I see this as a
major, major change in what you might call the ethos of computing, the
character of computing-in the sense that from the beginning, at least in
Western cultures, computers have been seen as brains, that they are
extensions of our cognitive abilities, our mental faculties. Whereas VR
says, "Wait, wait, brains aren't powered by themselves, you know. There are
senses here!" That line of thinking was actually opened up, I think, by
scientific visualization, and VR is sort of continuing it. I mean, the whole
body is an interface, and senses are interfaces, and computers have to
understand things like audition and vision and touch. So I lump all that
stuff together in the domain of virtual reality, and I think it is extremely
healthy for us to begin to relate the technology with the whole body and to
conform to the human body, because that's in the small what needs to happen
on a global level-that we need to make our technology conform better to the
body of nature.
ER: What about agents?
LAUREL: In terms of agents, I guess, the real issue is not whether or not we
can build little guys like Bob that act as quasi-intelligent help menus or
e-mail filters-I mean, that's all well and good and obvious-but, more
interesting, it seems to me, is can we represent information as an organism,
as an organic entity that grows and changes and has a dynamic relationship
to other things in the world. It's a nice little convergence with what the
world is like and it starts to heal the kind of "severed head" thing we've
had with computer technology.
ER: Well, how do you think agents could be used in non-trivial ways? Though
I don't mean to be disdainful of trivial ways--
LAUREL: No, me either, because they are great.
ER: But beyond shopping and scheduling airline flights, do you see them
having any real value in social studies or education or--
LAUREL: Of course. I think there are myriad values. Think about creating
rehearsal spaces or simulation spaces for the study of behavior of living
things or systems that may or may not have living components. For instance,
I can imagine constructing an agent that models the dynamics of weather and
it could be this organic entity that takes in information, produces action
in the world, and is in dynamic relationship with its environment. Make that
a wonderful sort of architecture for thinking about modeling complex dynamic
systems even when they are not living beings.
I think we can use them to learn about people and society, too. People say,
gee whiz, we can't learn much about social behavior from computer-based
agents because they are made up, they are not real people, they are simple
little characters. But the answer to that, it seems to me, is that for
thousands of years we've learned a whole lot about not only our social
conditions but our spiritual conditions and our ethics and morality from
representations of characters that have relatively few traits. And I mean
narrative literature and drama and opera, so the agent is a very
sophisticated tool in the extension of our narrative ways of knowing as a
species. And I don't think we should fault computer-based characters or
agents for being not human enough, when you compare them to Peter Pan or
Coyote. Peter Pan and Coyote are not tremendously complicated characters,
but they are grand for us to use in our imaginative construction of what it
means to be human, and what the world is like, where the world came from,
what it means to be alive now.
ER: But do you see a difference between understanding something and trusting
it-that you can understand a mythic character and relate to it and let it
help you make sense of the world, but not necessarily trust it to navigate
an airplane?
LAUREL: That's exactly right. I agree with you. You probably would trust it
to communicate some important stuff to your children about the nature of
imagination, about love, about certain ethics, but you certainly wouldn't
trust it to fly an airplane. I think one of the things that's lessening in
its impact in the domain of computer technology is scientism-this belief
that if it is not scientific, it is not useful. We came at it with such a
bias in that direction. The first big use of computers in this country, as
far as I know, was in the census, where you didn't want to make a mistake.
Kind of like flying an airplane. But there are all these other ways of
trusting. We are comfortable with myths and fairy tales because we have an
understanding of how to trust them and what they are good at. So I see that
as where we are now with life-like computing. Also, let me add, people get
really freaked out by that message: "Oh, well, my God, photo realism is
indistinguishable from reality, and we'll all be confused!" But that
difficulty has been put out at least since Plato's Republic, and it's never
held water, because within a generation of the development of a technology,
people begin to understand its conventions and have a good relationship with
representation. So I think that's a false alarm.
ER: Now that we're talking about ethics and values, do you have any serious
doubts about the instructive value of the various information technologies?
Are you worried about the education of your kids?
LAUREL: Of course, but not because they're coming in contact with
technology. My issues about their education have to do with their being
given patriotic and religious narratives in the schools that I think are
really damaging because they discourage investigation and encourage certain
kinds of intolerance. This is really about government policy, and I am
discouraged about their education when their funding is cut to the point
where they can't take the California Achievement Test anymore, so we don't
really have a benchmark to tell how well they are doing compared with other
students. Back in the 70s California led the nation in the quality of
education because we valued education in this state and funded it well. Now,
despite a state lottery that was supposedly earmarked for education and lots
of nice words from Pete Wilson, California ranks 40th in the nation in
educational funding per student. At the same time they're making noise about
a "competitive workforce," the hyenas in Congress want to eliminate the
Department of Education. The rhetoric about "giving power back to the
states" is just horse puckey-the states are not going to ante up more money
for education, there will just be less, all the way around. It's ridiculous.
Who are they kidding? Public education in America is the worst in the
developed world. We should be lifting up our children, they should be our
greatest investment. AMERICA IS EATING ITS YOUNG. It's really alarming and
it has nothing to do with technology. I surround MY kids with technology. I
give them every tool I can find at home, and I guess the only silver lining
of the deterioration of education in America is that for those children
lucky enough to have parents and resources that help them, it is encouraging
a kind of resourcefulness and self-directed learning-because there is not
much alternative to it! I am also keenly aware that for the large majority
of children that is not what happens, because their families are too busy
trying to make ends meet.
ER: And of course that raises the general question of the ratio of haves and
have-nots. Is that something that is likely to change in the next thirty
years?
LAUREL: Well, it is currently getting a lot worse. There have been a couple
of studies indicating growing disparities in income levels and the growing
percentage of people who are in poverty. Something like 30 percent of
children in the country are growing up in poverty, and the hyenas want to
cut the school lunch program. I don't know what will happen. I can't
predict. I'm really hoping that the current sort of unbelievable
niggardliness and misplaced priorities that are showing up in Washington are
a blip and that the public will bring the politicians to their senses in
some way.
ER: Speaking of politics, do you have any particular feelings about the Gore
vision and the Gingrich vision of information technology? Is that important
to you?
LAUREL: It used to be more important to me than it is now. When the
information superhighway hype started-oh, so long ago, about two years,
right?-I was very concerned about that kind of top-down metaphor that was
put forward would supplant the burgeoning grass roots movement of people
reaching out to each other that I'd been seeing on the net, as someone who's
been there for fifteen years. But, God, in the last two years, watching the
growth of the World Wide Web and seeing how this has all come down, I now
believe that the top-down metaphors that we get from various people trying
to sell us visions of the information environment are almost meaningless in
terms of actually influencing what happens. What's much scarier is the idea
that we're being asked, for instance, to censor content on the Internet.
That's frightening. That's not a metaphor.
That's a policy. And the reason that is frightening has first of all to do
with all the reasons why all censorship is frightening. You give somebody
permission to say what's good or bad and they promise they are only going to
work in the domain of child pornography and the next day they are saying you
can't publish anything about birth control. But way beyond that-by censoring
certain kinds of activity on the Internet because their contents are
objectionable to certain populations, we're censoring some of the most
innovative, creative economic activity, and the kind of commerce that's
really going to support a whole lot of people and make the Net a place that
employs individuals, improves their ability to provide for themselves, and
have relationships with each other. So that part scares me, but I don't
think that's about anybody's vision of information technology. I think
that's just an extension of a kind of censorship as control mechanism that
pervades politics right now.
ER: How do you apply those thoughts to movies and television? Do you feel
that there is a lot of censorship in those areas right now?
LAUREL: Well, yes and no. There is a natural selection process of getting a
film to market that reduces the likelihood of certain kinds of content being
presented to the public.
ER: But that wouldn't be censorship.
LAUREL: No, I wouldn't call that censorship. I think there is more
censorship on television-for instance, about gay and lesbian themes, certain
kinds of political themes. As television becomes more decentralized, that's
less of a problem, and we can have channels for people with special
interests-for example, where the religious community can have a channel on
which they can communicate their ideas and their interests. Cable television
has done a mediocre to good job of addressing the problem of controlling
content by giving people the means to prevent themselves or their children
from seeing content that they don't want, placing the power in the hands of
the consumer rather than in the hands of some large regulatory agency. The
survival of democracy depends on our having the right and the responsibility
to continually exercise our individual judgment about what kinds of
information we want to receive and what we want to do with it. And parents
must take responsibility for their children and we must not delegate
responsibility for our cultural lives and our ethical awareness and our
sexuality to the government. That will destroy our democracy if it happens.
ER: Do you object to the role that commercial interests are playing in the
information age?
LAUREL: I was a lot more concerned about that two years ago. Now I think
that the difference between commerce and consumerism will become clearer and
clearer in the near future. The old advertising strategy of creating needs
and then selling products for the needs that were created is inevitably
going to be replaced in the near future by the necessity of looking at what
people actually need and want. The people who have this sort of top-down,
giant ad agency view of consumerism are either going to have to change their
view or basically vanish.
ER: That's more than an opinion. That's a prediction.
LAUREL: That's a prediction, yes.
ER: You are really predicting a renaissance of arts and crafts and
creativity.
LAUREL: In a way, in the sense of a grass roots marketplace-a moment in
history when we begin to understand that we are all producers and all
consumers. Of course, we have only a crude notion of how it will all work,
but, God, what a wonderful thing. Sometimes a prediction is just a hope
somewhere in the domain of rhetoric.
ER: Let's do some role-playing. You're the newly appointed president of a
college or university. What would you do?
LAUREL: Well, that's very interesting. I haven't thought about that. I think
I would make sure we had a very strong curriculum in history and
anthropology and other human studies, and I would probably adjust
requirements accordingly. Judging from my own experience I would discourage
things like BFAs and really lean hard on a liberal arts model. I feel that
the kids that I know-the adults that I know who went the super- specialized
route from the beginning of undergrad are not as able to roll with the
punches here in our rapidly evolving scene.
ER: Your answer is interesting for several reasons, one of which is that you
didn't immediately start talking about technology.
LAUREL: No, I didn't. That's because I think sometimes places like the Media
Lab suffer from the same crippling disability, an underemphasis on the
humanities. Carnegie- Mellon does this wonderful thing: They require their
English students to take a programming class and they require their computer
science students to take a rhetoric class. That's a small step but it is
headed in the right direction, so, yeah, I think the technology can't solve
problems very well unless the people who are using it are well- grounded in
a lot of other kinds of thought.
ER: What do you think of Neil Postman's work?
LAUREL: I am a big fan of Neil Postman. I think he's right about a lot of
things. He may be guilty of a little exaggeration, but as the Queen of
Exaggeration I appreciate that.
ER: He suggests that there are no important questions to which lack of
information is the answer.
LAUREL: I think what you are alluding to is his belief that one thing that
is really wrong with our information environment is that we have a lot of
information coming at us about things that we can't really do anything
about, and that don't really impinge on our lives in any direct way. And the
things that we should be informed about-like the state of our democracy;
like the long discourses that led to the enormously high level of political
and civil rhetoric in this country in the early days-are not happening
because of the nature of our media. And I think he is absolutely right about
that. And I see the sort of evolution of government and commerce on the Net
as a grand opportunity to re- engage in that kind of thinking, because it is
relevant to one's individual self as you become a citizen of the Net.
Everybody has to reinvent their ideas about government and economics and
responsibility at this point in time in the network environments. I love
Neil Postman. He really made some things very clear for me and his influence
has been strong in the way that I feel about things right now.
ER: As someone with advanced degrees in theatre, you have given a lot of
thought to the relationship between drama and technology. How do you see the
future relationship between interactive technology and drama?
LAUREL: Well, I think drama as a traditional, linear form will be with us
always, I hope, because it has a great value as that-just as completed, told
stories, as written literature has real value. I would hate to see that
replaced, and I don't think it will be. Interactivity takes a lot of energy
and that's a different kind of play than the enjoyment we get from linear,
fixed media.
ER: So what will happen?
LAUREL: We will see more believable or more interesting characters supported
by computers. I predict the most growth will be in the use of computers to
generate things like smart costumes and environments and materials for
people to engage in dramatic and narrative play with each other. We will see
active, collaborative story-making conceived and performed as play in
network environments. It's going to be a lot of fun out there.
� 1995 Educom.