As a student of Communication, I often think of myself as a child of a newer world. Simon Fraser University was founded in 1965, and its history is a colourful one. Communication, Political Science, Sociology–these fields are typically known as being interdisciplinary, emphasizing perspectives, in order to distinguish them from the old guards of Journalism, Law and Psychology, to name just a few examples. (Perhaps the university’s physical stance, glaring from the mountain across to that older institution by the water, the University of British Columbia, has something to do with this as well.)
I like to think that the new world is the one focusing on catering to audiences and users, rather than trying to “design” or dictate the needs and wants of the users out of some paternalistic posturing of knowing better. Instead of someone just arbitrarily deciding that they can dictate someone’s necessities, the person in the position to do the designing has to instead learn to humble themselves so that can actually learn about their audience, from a place of non-judgment. While the endeavour may still get mired in squabbling over methodology, the first and foremost commitment must come from the idea that in the end, the user is key.
This mode of thinking is not without its drawbacks. This excellent article at Design By Fire, about the ideological risks of catering to every user’s merest whim and making their slightest wish a click of their mouse away, is an excellent example of what happens if you take it too far. I remember reading a critique very on in my career as a Communication student about how the user interface of the machines at McDonald’s are somewhat insulting in their simplicity of using images. I think now that that critique was levelled more in order to make a point, which may or may not have been more about designing interfaces for the lowest common denominator. In a fit of idealism, I think users like a balance–of having their technology be powerful for them, given a little time and learning, which acts as a reward; but also not punishing users for being newbies, or making mistakes. Allowing for exploration is what makes technologies fun, after all. You can only get a feeling of discovery if, in fact, there is something to discover.
This makes me wonder and marvel a bit at my own IT preferences. I am a Linux user, but I would not be a Linux user if I hadn’t formed relationships with Linux enthusiasts, and I definitely wouldn’t be a Linux user right now if their ranks didn’t have something that developers tailored to someone like me: someone who has concerns in life that prevent me from learning more about how to configure a boot loader, or tinker with my sound or graphics card drivers (which, I am now reminded, I actually still need to do). Life is simply not permitting it, and life most likely will not permit it for me for at least the rest of this semester, and hasn’t for the 10 months since I started with willow.
As a result, I’m using something called Ubuntu Linux now, which, honestly, is so easy to use out of the box, if I didn’t know it was Free, I probably wouldn’t believe you. Still based on the Debian system, which has the distinction of being technically challenging yet one of the distributions adhering the closest to Free and Open Source Software principles, it is a paradoxical combination of power and ease. I know how to use apt-get, so I can use it to do my package management just as any other Debian power user would. It also auto-configured almost all my hardware drivers for me. Not to say I haven’t had problems. But they haven’t felt nearly as insurmountable and hidden as my problems on Debian were. The nature of the community plays a lot into this too; the fact that they seem to have a lot of the same problems as me doesn’t hurt either.
This doesn’t mean that I still don’t do what I call the “man page test” or “google test”–I bring up the man page or run a Google search for the program or configuration file that I’m having questions about; then, I read up on the thing I want to change. If it looks like it’s something I can understand and implement in 5 or 10 minutes, I’m there and I’ll do it. If it looks like it’ll take more than that, it’ll probably never get done. (Incidentally, some of the problems I’ve run into with Ubuntu, I’ve found answers for through Google that have given me fixes which, even if they haven’t worked yet, made an honest attempt to explain the problem to me–something that makes me feel a whole lot less stupid about using Linux).
Ubuntu markets itself as Linux for Human Beings, and I rather like that. Because while those of us who want to grow up to be sysadmins are really comfortable with poking through .conf files all day, I’m just an open-minded power user and I have no scruples with staying that way, because it just makes me all the more able to communicate to the smiths in the back what kind of problems everyone else is having with their wares.
