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PHD-DESIGN  March 2011

PHD-DESIGN March 2011

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Subject:

How to warn the future

From:

Don Norman <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:25:28 +0200

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (118 lines)

Ah yes, I do remember the project: how to put up a sign that will tell
people 10,000 years from now that this area is dangerous. So I did
what the rest of you seemed not to have thought of: I used the exotic,
unfamiliar technology called google.  I immediately found a lot.

(As i was writing this, Jeffrey Chan posted a reference
Nolin, J. (1993). Communicating with the Future: Implications for
Nuclear Waste Disposal. Futures. Vol. 25, No. 7, pp.778-791.

Editorial rant:
But hey, in this modern age, don't you really hate it, dear reader,
when someone fails to give a URL? to me, that makes the reference
useless. Sitting in my hotel room in Florence, italy, what can i do
with that reference?

If you google the title, you can find the article, and science direct
will sell you a copy for only US$ 42. (if you are lucky, your library
has a subscription.  Science is supposed to be free!)

End of editorial rant:
----

Here is what i found -- all of which are free.

If you want a free authoritative study that covers the same topic that
Jeffrey suggested, try:
    http://www.andra.fr/download/andra-international-en/document/editions/381-va.pdf

Here is a short review
     http://www.grist.org/article/stang/

here is a slightly better one:
     http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor

and best of all:
     http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html

This last one is a wonderful article by Gregory Benford, a physicist
at University of California, Irvine, but also a very well known
science fiction author.  Read his entire article -- it is a wonderful
design case study. Here is one part i particularly  like:
-------------
Begin quotation from Benford

Congress mandated that the Pilot Plant erect markers to warn future
generations, all 300 of them, about what lurks over two thousand feet
below their bootheels. But it gave no guidelines.

I asked a computer-whiz friend how he thought we should mark the site,
and he had a quick answer: Scatter CD ROM disks around. People will
pick them up, wonder what they say, read them-there you go. After I
stopped laughing, he said in a puzzled, offended tone, "Hey, it'll
work. Digitizing is the wave of the future."

Actually, it's the wave of the present. This encounter made me think
again of our present fascination with speed and compression as the
paradigms of communication. I imagined my own works, stored in some
library vault for future scholars (if there are any) who care about
such ephemera of the Late TwenCen. A rumpled professor drags a
cardboard ox out of a dusty basement, and uncovers my collective
works: hundreds of 3.5 inch floppy disks, ready to run on a DOS
machine using Word Perfect 6.0.

Where does he go to get such a machine in 2094? Find such software?
And if he carries the disks past some magnetic scanner while searching
for these ancient artifacts, what happens to the carefully polished
prose digitized on those magnetic grains?

Ever since the Sumerians, we have gone for the flimsy, fast and
futuristic in communications, our fascination with the digital only
the latest manifestation. To the Sumerians, giving up clay tablets for
ephemeral paper-with its easily smudged marks, vulnerable to fire and
water and recycling as toilet a aid-would have seemed loony. Yet paper
prevailed over clay, so that though Moses wrote the commandments on
stone, we get them on paper. Paper and now computers make information
cheaper to buy, store, and transmit.

Paper isn't for eternity. But even tombstones blur, and languages
themselves are mortal. How to talk across the ages, to call out a
warning? How to even get their attention? We have to learn to write
largely, clearly, permanently. And largely may be most important of
all.

Buildings of religious, emotional or memorial impact tend to fare
well. Cemeteries, for example, hold their own against urban
encroachment. One of the striking images as one approaches Manhattan
from Laguardia airport is the broad burial grounds, still there after
centuries despite being near some of the world?s most valuable real
estate. In Asia and Europe, temples and churches survive better than
the vast stacks of stones erected to sing the praises of more worldly
power. Of course, often they were better built, but as well
communities are hesitant about knocking them down. Often, new
religions simply adopt the old sites. The Parthenon has survived first
as a temple to Athena, then as a Byzantine church, later a mosque, and
now it stands as a hallowed monument to the grandeur of the vanished
Greeks who made it.

Sometimes conquest destroys even holy places, as when the Romans in 70
AD erased the Temple of Solomon. Perhaps some conqueror thousands of
years from now would pass by the Pilot Project monoliths, berms and
buried rooms (if, indeed, the rooms haven?t been exposed, turned into
a tourist attraction...). Seeing them as tributes to a society now
vanquished, he might order them all knocked over, buried, their
messages defaced. Something comparable happened many times over as the
Europeans moved across the planet a few hundred years ago, rubbing out
the religious and literary past of whole peoples. The Mayans wrote on
both paper and clay, but nearly all of their work is gone.

end of quotation from Benford
------

Don Norman
Nielsen Norman Group, IDEO Fellow.
KAIST (Daejeon, S. Korea)
[log in to unmask]  www.jnd.org
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/
Latest book: "Living with Complexity"

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