The Tech Lab: Greg Papadopoulos

As part of a BBC series inviting some of the world's leading technologists to speculate about the future, Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems, calls for technology and design to be married to people's needs:

"As a technologist, when I look at the artefacts that we're thrusting onto the world they contain a lot of historical baggage and biases because we simply carry on the assumptions from the past. Things really could be a lot simpler. All too often, it's like we're asked to care for these things that we really shouldn't care about - and that ranges from mobile phones to personal computers - rather than asking the technology designers to build tools with us in mind.

'RIDICULOUSLY BROKEN'
Think about the voicemail system on your cell phone. It's really bad. You get the messages linearly, you are told that you have five new voicemails and you don't know what's from whom or the content of each message.

To organise your messages, you have to dial through with ridiculous key sequences. Making it worse, you can't choose a better system as you have to take voicemail from your mobile service provider. When I look at my phone, with the nice display and all sorts of processing power, I begin to think that voicemail is not just bad - it's ridiculously broken.

REFORMING THE PC
But that's just one example of how the legacy of design holds us back. PCs are full of old designs.

Take the concept of installing and maintaining software. Since the beginning of personal computing, we've thought about PCs as machines that sit on our desks that we have to take care of: they run software that needs to be installed and maintained. My computer runs code, the code has bugs, and now it's my job to worry about what needs to be updated when or if I should allow it to take place at all. I can barely decide what to do. I'm thinking most people don't have a clue and we're all pretending that we do.

There are other even deeper assumptions within the programs that we run. Have you ever been at your word processor and asked yourself why you have a save button? Why save a file at all? Why isn't it just remembering every keystroke you type?

Today we're asked to care about things that we really do not want to care about. I don't want the technology artefact or its management to be one of my objectives.I want to turn on my TV, not update its software.

For me, all of this is more demanding from a design point of view. I would say that there has been laziness or a lack of courage by some technology developers, because we could go and redesign our entire system of computing. But to do that upsets a whole bunch of assumptions and even more technological ecosystems, like the software makers who sell us software to run on PCs."

Associated Link: Full article: The Tech Lab: Greg Papadopoulos

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