More thoughts on technological change

I was reading an obituary in today's New York Times for a man named John Karlin, who was a pioneer in combining engineering and psychology to create functional design. His most famous contribution (one of many) was the development of the touch-tone phone, and the arrangement of the numbers (the opposite, one might note, of the arrangement on calculators) based on research showing that the our current arrangement minimizes errors.

It reminded me of a class I took on organizational design and decision-making at Wharton, taught by a guy named Russell Ackoff, who was, as I learned mostly from being told by him, a giant in the field of decision sciences. One of the lectures related to the topic of this article by Dr. Ackoff, which talks about the same development from a management point of view. A group of people sitting around a room thinking about what would they want their telephone to be able to do. It's a pretty fascinating story from either angle, especially for something that people take for granted, but when you see something happen from two totally different perspectives, you really get a picture of how potentially difficult important change can be.

The top manager in the Ackoff article is the real hero, for setting up the project in the way that he did, and I remember Dr. Ackoff almost gleefully describing the process and the kinds of developments that came out of it. Even taking cellular phones out of the picture and speaking only about wired phones within the house, the ideas for touch-tone, cordless phones, and caller ID came from these sessions, making it one of the greatest incubators of technological innovation of the 20th century.

This relates directly to what I wrote yesterday, about deciding what you wanted out of the introduction of technology into a classroom setting before actually introducing the technology. Knowing what it is you seek to accomplish is one of the most powerful bits of knowledge you can have, and it continues to amaze me how many people simply do not realize this.