Through the Computer Screen, and What Alice Found There

I wonder if every computer scientist who writes for the general public is tempted to do an Alice pastiche?

This is a fragment from a draft of the first chapter of my soon-to-be-published book, Computing for Ordinary Mortals. One of my excellent reviewers said that this passage had to go, and so I replaced it. I still like it, though. I'll put up another post, a bit later, with footnotes.

Alice is wandering through the downtown area of her city. As she walks down a side street, she passes a man and a woman leaving the entrance of a small white building. The woman says, "That was an interesting museum."

Alice decides to go inside. She stops in front of a sign titled “Read me” and discovers that she’s in a museum of Victorian artifacts. Alice passes a display of postcards, then an arrangement of fashionable women’s clothing (cuirass bodices, skirts with bustles), and then a penny-farthing bicycle. Eventually she sees a man in uniform sitting behind a writing desk. His badge reads, Docent: Charles Corvus.

"Hello," says Alice politely. "Can you tell me about your museum?" Charles doesn't look up.

"This isn’t a mausoleum," he says.

“Your museeeum," Alice says, enunciating carefully.

Charles glances up at her. "I beg your pardon," he says. “It’s a bit noisy.” He rises and shakes Alice’s hand. “Would you like to have a tour?"

He gives her a small plastic device with buttons and a display. "This is a mobile guide. If you press this button, it will tell you where to go next in the museum."

"Thank you. How does it know what I’ll be interested in?"

"It doesn't," Charles says. "It takes you on a walk in a random direction."

"But how does that help me?” asks Alice. “I mean, the museum seems very confusing as it is. It’s as if there’s no organization to the exhibits."

"Ah, but there is. You're meant to explore the museum, and it's organized so that whatever exhibit you're standing in front of, related exhibits are as far away as possible."

"Does that help?"

"Yes—the key is to take your time. Join me. We’ll explore together."

Alice and Charles pass two stout museum workers holding opposite ends of a large flag. The men are arguing and pulling violently in opposite directions. The threads part and snap, leaving the fabric in tatters.

"Those contentious fellows are in charge of separate exhibits," says Charles. "They're always having a bit of a fight."

Alice and Charles walk through the rooms for a while longer, talking about the exhibits. At the exit she says, "Thank you, it's a very interesting museum."

"All of our visitors say that."

"Do you have many visitors?" asks Alice cautiously. She hasn't seen another inside the museum.

"Uncountably many," says Charles.

"Oh. Have you tried counting?"

“Well…” Charles halts and looks thoughtful. "Good-bye."

Experiencing Design: New encounters

For a few years I wrote a column on human-computer interaction (HCI) for the British quarterly trade magazine, Interface. This is one, slightly revised.

Advice for building interactive computer systems usually includes something about learnability. The learnability of a system includes two important parts: how easily new users can learn to carry out common tasks and, once they have some experience with the system, how easily they can improve their performance.

There are obvious differences between learning in a software environment and learning in the real world. For example, a few years ago I spent some time in California, and I learned how to skate with inline skates. (I eventually managed to stay upright for minutes at a time.)

Experiencing Design: One’s own experience

For a few years I wrote a column on human-computer interaction (HCI) for the British quarterly trade magazine, Interface. This is one, slightly revised.

Every year I greet a new group of computer science students who have signed up for my HCI course. By the end of the semester, most of them will have a reasonable grasp of the basics of HCI, and some will even be enthusiastic about the topic. Projects turned in by students, working in teams, have included a voice-controlled video game, a gesture-controlled Web browser, a social networking application for gamers, and a variety of personal information organizers, on the desktop as well as on cell phones and other mobile devices.

Over the past ten years or so I've noticed students becoming more interested in applications that push the bounds of what's currently possible. The projects generally target what Jonathan Grudin calls discretionary hands-on use (Three Faces of Human-Computer Interaction, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2005). That is, students are less interested in building a better calendar system, financial planner, or electronic voting ballot; they look to applications and devices that fit into the natural and often optional activities of our everyday lives. How can I contact my friends? Could I play a familiar game in a different way? What would people like to do with their mobile phones that isn't easy to do now?

Behind the title of a new book

Forthcoming this fall from Oxford University Press

So you've written a book. What should you call it?

Tough question. Two years ago I submitted a proposal to Oxford for a book titled Computational Thinking.

My editor liked it. (She suggested that I resubmit a proposal for two books, one purely about ideas in computing and the other about how those ideas connect to our everyday lives. She also asked if I would edit a collection of papers on the subject... but I declined both options.) Reviewers also liked the proposal. (Non-fiction is different from fiction; you can pitch a book to an agent or publisher before you've finished writing it. Sometimes before you've written any of it.) But some reviewers argued about the title--there's disagreement among computer scientists about what computational thinking actually is.

Back to the drawing board. My second effort at a title was How to think about computers if you're not a computer scientist. The marketing folks at Oxford hated it.

The third try, a suggestion from my editor, ended up on the book contract. Understanding the computers in our lives. I don't think anyone was really satisfied with that, though.

So I sat down with my wife and brainstormed.

By analogy, the challenge was this. Imagine an alternative universe in which you're looking for a popular science book about biology. You find biographies of Darwin and other famous figures of the past and present; you see books that tell you how to turn on and focus a microscope, and even how to run a DNA sequencer; you come across a wide range of books aimed at professional biologists. No one at the bookstore has ever heard of Stephen Jay Gould, Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, James Watson, or Lewis Thomas, and hardly anyone thinks that it's possible for a book to convey the basic principles of biology to the average, non-biologist reader.

The literature of computing is something like that. There are lots of books about the history and social impact of computing, and about how to use a computer. There are libraries full of deep technical books for computing professionals. But there aren't many books about the ideas behind computers and computing, written in an approachable way. Mine would be a new addition to that tiny handful.

How should the book's title convey what it's about--and what it's notabout? One batch of titles we came up with emphasized the "popular" aspect of "popular science", while de-emphasizing the how-to aspects of computing:

• Computers for the rest of us
• A hands-off guide to computers
• The human element in computing
• A computer scientist looks at life
• Computable lifestyles
• The computable lifestyle
• A computable life
• This is not a computer manual
• About computing
• It's all computed
• Computing without computers
• The ABCs of computing

But none of these quite works, even if I like a couple of them, in the sense that they're too general, or they're a bit misleading about the contents.

The next batch of titles was based on the structure of the book I was writing. I tell stories to convey abstract ideas, real-world metaphors for how computation works. So...

• The metaphorical computer
• Computer stories
• Stories about computers
• Computers: A bedtime reader

Also less than ideal. The point isn't the stories themselves (which could be about anything, including the history of computing), but what the stories suggest.

The next batch of titles moved away from description to the equivalent of Buy this book. 

• Computers: The important stuff
• Computers: The first book to read
• Computers: The first book you need to read
• Computers: What everyone needs to know
• Computers: The inside story
• Computers: Behind the silicon curtain

But none of them seem quite right. (In case you're curious, all of these titles have the word "computer" or "computing" in them to help Web search engines find them.)

In the end, we settled on Computing for Ordinary Mortals. It says, "This is a book that anyone might read," and I hope that it also makes a subliminal connection between computers and our lives.