LiveWorld Transcripts

Borders.com presents

Alan Cooper
Author of "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum"

April 12, 1999

NetCafeLive presents author and tech guru, Alan Cooper, who discusses his book, "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum." There's no escaping the information age, Cooper claims, and proceeds to explain his vision of a world where technology is simplified and designed to better suit users' everyday needs.

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OrCCCa: Welcome to NetCafeLive, where we host authors and celebrities throughout the month. Thanks for joining us! Borders NetCafeLive is a joint production of Borders.com (tm) and Talk City (tm), a Talk City, Inc. Production. Tonight's guest is Alan Cooper, here to talk about his latest book, "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum." A few questions Alan poses in this book, Why are VCRs impossible to program? Why do car alarms make us all crazy at all the wrong times? Why does your computer reprimand you when IT screws up? Every one of us is becoming dependent to a frightening degree on the electronic products that are proliferating on our desks, in our briefcases, our cars, and our homes. Borders.com and TalkCity.com is pleased to welcome tonight's guest, Alan Cooper. Welcome to Talk City!

Alan Cooper: Thank you, it's my pleasure to be here!

OrCCCa: Tell us, Alan, what prompted you to write this book? Are all those remote controls getting the best of you?

Alan Cooper: That's a very funny question, because there is a crisis at the Cooper family household this week. One remote is missing, the one to the satellite dish! We're paying $38 a month, and no one can use it! Sometimes, we think somebody will turn over the appropriate cushion on the sofa and reveal it, but we so far have had nothing but despair. Anyway, back to your question. Paul Saffo, who wrote the introduction to the book, says we're standing on the back of a whale, fishing for minnows. As we stand around exclaiming, in awe and wonder, at the benefits of modern information technology, we aren't reaping the rewards because we have handed the reins of this technology to the technologists. And they think differently from the rest of us. They get a satisfaction from the understanding of how technology works, not from the application of it for productive ends. So we have an industry that is constructed on products that revel in their own capabilities, but don't deliver much in satisfaction to real humans. It's demeaning, weak, unpleasant to us. Just by bringing design into the process, we can have both power AND pleasure. We have yet to see what the information age can REALLY bring!

Myprettyface: "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" is a remarkable collection of several important elements of products design that companies just cannot live without. How did you get around to make it?

Alan Cooper: I don't make it, as I am not in the software business now. Now I have a consulting company. One thing I have sacrificed doing that is the ultimate control over the creation of the product. But our breadth of the effect is much wider. It's a strategic choice. I think there are people who like to build and those who like to design. Builders like to build, but it's a different kind of design, one for construction, not use. Design doesn't detract from construction I think, but the business right now is all construction, a bunch of carpenters. They are madly building beautiful things out of wood that can't be used. It will be a significant benefit to collaborate the two - design and construction. Before anesthesia, surgery was very crude. After it, it became more refined. I see this the same way for design and construction.

Chocochip: To whom do you think "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" is targeted at? Who will be most interested to read the book?

Alan Cooper: That's a great question! I have a couple of answers. The first answer is the irreverent one. My first book, "About Face," is a paperback almost 600-pages long and many said I made it that long because it would be good for whacking programmers upside the head to get their attention. My new one is a hardcover and, while less pages, is still effective for hitting program managers upside the head. Seriously, there are two groups, whom I call "business-savvy technologists" and the "technology-savvy businesspersons." The information age is here, and you ain't seen nothing yet. There are those moving at the speed of information, and those who are failures. The info age is going to treat non-info-savvy business people like road kill. It's going to be brutal. Some bookstores are already feeling the heat, because of online book suppliers. Everyone in every business is in the information business, or they will be soon, or they will be out of business. Everything else is just a commodity. So the successful person is one who is in the information business. It used to be finance or operations, now it is information. The significant thing about information is how people interact with it. And if people cannot manipulate it, it is badly designed. The phrase "computer literacy" is condescending and divisive. Someday we will look back on that as we do now on Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat cake."

Mr Peabody: What happened to this ideal that computers would make our lives so simple, we'd have hours and hours of free time each day? The 'leisure race.' Not only computers, but cars, planes, household appliances. Why is it that instead of shortening our day, we're also now expected to get five times the work done, simply because it's supposed to take us less time to do it?

Alan Cooper: I remember in the 60's and thinking my father worked a lot, but now.whew.I know the feeling! I think you need to be careful about the word "technology." Our technology isn't that much more progressed, rather it's the interfaces. The technology we use to surf the Web, for example, is not new. The components have been around from 20-40 years. What's remarkable is we are all speaking the same language for a change. What I did on CompuServe 12-14 years ago, I now do on the World Wide Web. More people, a larger group of people, understand it. A rogue virus came along, called "Netscape" and it inoculated all our PC's with an antibody called TCP/IP and now we all speak the same communications protocol. This is truly remarkable, and something that hasn't happened before in human history. It's like Esperanto, but online. So it's not surprising that I do more and work harder. Also, computers in general are not about doing the work more easily. Computers' real advantage and contribution is about the multiplier. The initial time to do it in a computer takes more work, but additional times are MUCH easier on the computer.while manually, it can be just as hard the 100th time as the 1st time, just as much labor. Computers therefore make multiples easier, not a specific single task. This is another reason why computers haven't made it easier; it's not what they do.

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