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Presentations
Thursday, July 1
8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.
Keynote Address
The World Needs You Desperately
Dr. Thomas Landauer
We all know that computers are amazingly wonderful technology. And we've heard for decades that they are going to improve the world more than the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the printing press combined. Yet during the whole twenty-five years and six trillion dollars of their intensive deployment, labor productivity has improved more slowly than in any previous period for which data exist.
What's going on? Is it a mirage, are the gains there but hidden? Dr. Landauer doesn't think so. He thinks the d..... things are just too complicated and hard to use, and do too little for most people most of the time. The problem is that enlisting computers in useful work requires fundamental design and engineering discipline that has been incredibly neglected out of infatuation with the technology itself.
Simple evaluation of what does and doesn't work can be done even more easily and effectively than many usability professionals think. The big problem is how to get the world to do it. Dr. Landauer will promote this answer: do it well and the world will follow!
Tom Landauer is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he is also a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, an interdisciplinary combination of Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics, Computer Science, Education and Philosophy. He is a popular author of three books, including The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, usability and productivity.
In the late seventies, working at Bell Labs and later Bellcore, Dr. Landauer formed and directed the first industrial human-computer interaction research laboratory. A highly interactive team of computer scientists, cognitive psychologists and linguists, the group specialized in research on information retrieval, navigation and display. The research, primarily based on empirical studies of users, led to the invention and design of computer-based solutions to users' problems. Dr. Landauer is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. He serves as consulting editor for several journals.
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