The Sixties are (finally) almost over. Oh, you'll still occasionally see some technology pundits making the conference rounds wearing jeans and sneakers, but for the most part the Sixties are over, in the same way that the Cold War is over. Granted, you wouldn't know it from the rhetoric and the punditry you hear, but that's understandable and to be expected: a lot of people enjoyed the Cold War, and a lot of people had a pretty good time in the Sixties, so they like to sing the same old camp songs and make the same old eternally new predictions for the future.
Remembering that none of the political pundits predicted the sudden and stunning fall of communism until the day after it happened, it would be prudent to bet that the technological future will be just the opposite of what's predicted by the Current Conventional Wisdom - a CCW which is focused on differentiation, choice, multifunctionality and solipsism (such as the highly touted concept of the "Me" newspaper). In the first decade of the next century, as the culture of the Sixties recedes into the tribal memory, it would be smart to look once again for standardization, simplification, minimalism and community.
Market systems, along with educational systems and other social systems, are driven not by technology but by people. Therefore, you have to look for changes in people more than just changes in the set of technological possibilities. So the question becomes: how do people change? And the answer is: they don't change - they just recycle their attitudes. The Grand Thermostat that regulates human social behavior fiddles with the temperature as human emotions run hot and cold. What comes around, comes around again . . . and what's coming around next is a round of yearning for the New Simplicity.
Of course, you would never know that from all the TV commercials, most of which tell you over and over again that every gizmo they're pushing can perform an infinite number of functions. Needless to say, what they don't tell you is that those gizmos - the VCRs, microwaves, clocks, PCs, programs, fax machines, telephone instruments and many other "power tools" - are bewildering, unlearnable and humiliating devices. All of these over-designed, over-engineered, over-rich, over-customizable products are created by marketing departments and design groups stuck in an outdated Sixties rhetoric developed at a time when bell bottom trousers on middle-aged people didn't seem completely ridiculous (at least not to the middle-aged people who were wearing them).
And yet there is hope! - which is signaled by the important work now being done by the many insightful designers who are concentrating on creating simple, single-purpose "appliances" intended to help people actually accomplish some simple task they want to do - rather than to overwhelm them with incomprehensible technological monstrosities.
And perhaps hope is also signaled by the steadily growing interest in "lifelong," "distance" and "just-in-time" learning activities focused on the needs of the learner rather than on the relentless institutional rituals that overwhelm students with incomprehensible rules and convoluted curricula.
It's really too bad that what started out as a worthy and well-intentioned desire to give people "tools" to "empower" them has instead given them "power tools" which befuddle and enslave them. It's as though Everyman's secret desire was to be a C++ programmer. The Technological Imperative of much contemporary design is derived from that naive (and really somewhat) condescending attitude of the technological elite. It may be one of the few modern horrors to which lawyers can assert their innocence.
Of course, in addition to the Technological Imperative there is also the Bureaucratic Imperative. The fact is that the over-designed, over-engineered, over-rich, over-customizable products of today (and, alas, probably of the next few years) are the result of Design By Committee, which proclaims enthusiastically: "If it's a feature, let's add it, because the only reason we're selling this product is that somebody might buy it, and the more features we offer, the more tickets we have to the lottery, and the better our chance to win it!"
Vision By Committee is all-too-easy (because there is no vision). What's needed is Vision By Visionaries - by individual engineers, marketing people, teachers, programmers who have minds of their own. Well, let's hope that that's what the colleges and universities are trying to produce.
John Gehl is editor and publisher of Educom Review. [email protected]