Digital Tools for Making Digital Tools

Forget the futurethe present is complicated and sophisticated enough. The skills required to use the technology that is available now are far beyond those of most people. Not only are our devices too difficult to use, tapping into the available technology to do something personal is too challenging. We need tools for making tools.

Humans should be able to design and create applications just for themselves, that fit their needs and their interestsnot just what designers and engineers think they should have. The beauty of Web sites like eBay and MySpace (Figure 9.9) is that they allow a person who isn't tech savvy to set up an online business or personal home page or create a social network without knowing anything about how it is done. But now we're at a point where we need a richer set of tools to create richer, individual applications, not just customizable pages.

Figure 9.9. MySpace may look unattractive, but it easily allows users to create communities, share music, and post blog entries. It did what many had tried before: lowered the barrier of entry to the creation of personalized home pages.

courtesy of MySpace and Micki Krimmel

Some Web sites like Ning (Figure 9.10) have taken steps in the right direction, providing all the back-end technology (databases, maps, and so on) necessary for users to create their own Web applications. Where, though, are the tools for doing so on the desktop? On mobile devices? This has been the Holy Grail for yearsa simple programming language/toolkit for nonprogrammersbut thus far there has been little progress toward it, perhaps because it has been mainly programmers working on the problem. Tools for programmers have become better, but certainly we are nowhere near the point where someone with little knowledge of technology can put together an application for, say, alerting her when a friend has a new post on his blog.

Figure 9.10. Ning allows users to modify basic types of social networking applications such as reviews and surveys to suit their own needs.

Interaction designers need to find ways to make the already amazing technology we have available right now to the billions of people who don't yet have a way to make this technology their own, to create things that, because of their personal nature, have little or no commercial value but great human value. Interaction designers need to make sure that the already wide so-called digital divide between those who have and can use technology and those who thus far cannot gets no wider. Those peopleand we are surrounded by them every dayneed the tools to make technology relevant to them and their lives.