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Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class - NYTimes.com

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“We’ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture,” Gibson says in the Paris Review. “Consumers don’t buy products so much as narratives,” Bigend says to Hollis, elaborating on what he means when he talks about “brand vision transmission”. She tells him the idea’s old (which it is, though the rise of the ebook gives it a literal new twist), and he concedes the point. “Once you have a way in which things are done,” he continues, as if this were the line he’d wanted to take all along, “the edge migrates”. In an interview last year, Gibson described Bigend as someone “who presents himself as though he knows what’s going on, but who in fact doesn’t … he’s bullshitting himself”. Which is clearly true, and the way he talks is a finely judged send-up of vacuous marketing-speak. But at the same time there’s no denying that Bigend is very successful, very rich and very powerful. The “edge” that he’s most interested in is the edge of his own sphere of influence. He seeks out whatever lies just beyond it and finds a way to incorporate it, and in that way his sphere of influence expands.

And speaking of technology, today’s Luddites have a short memory. Parents who lament the iPods and mobile phones soldered onto the ears of teenagers forget that their own parents made the same complaint about them and their bedroom telephones and transistor radios. The abbreviated prose in tweets and instant messages is no more likely to corrupt the language or shorten attention spans than the telegrams, radio ads, and advertising catchphrases of yesteryear. Email can seem like a curse, but who would go back to stamps, phone booths, carbon paper, and piles of phone messages? And now that dinner companions can fact-check any assertion on an iPhone, we are coming to realise how many of our everyday beliefs are false—a valuable lesson in the fallibility of memory.

This is why so much well-designed software fails. This is the problem with BMW’s original design for the iDrive. The iDrive provided a logical, sensible organization of the automobile’s controls and displays. But it failed to support activity patterns. The correct approach to the support of behavior is activity-based classification.

Is activity-centered design overthrowing all that we have learned about human-centered design? No, definitely not. I consider activity structure to be a refinement of HCD. Taxonomic structures are appropriate when there is no context, when suddenly needing some new piece of information or tool. That’s why this structure works well for libraries, stores, websites, and the program menu of an operating system. But once an activity has begun, then taskonomy is the way to go, where things used together are placed near one another, where any one item might be located logically within the taxonomic structure but also wherever behaviorally appropriate for the activities being supported.

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

We are in the grip of a sadness so total that it will last us the rest of our lives which, if the doctors and technicians are right, will be about another six days.

People ask of Kindles and iPads: ”Can you read the screen in the sun?” But no one in their right mind sits in the full glare to read a novel, not on the page and not on the screen. Reading is naturally done in the shade.