The Paradox of Technology

I have owned a Suunto watch for the last ten years. Not my grandfather's or my father's watch - - part computer and part watch. It does so many things, I have to go back to the quarter-inch thick owners manual just to occasionally catch up. I think I purchased the watch the first time for the altimeter function. And like many things, if you can measure it, people want the results - - in the case of 13-year old Boy Scouts, every five minutes.

Donald Norman has a great book, The Design of Everyday Things (1988), in which he discusses watches. The passage is a little dated, but you will get the point.

In the modern digital watch the spring is gone, replaced by a motor run by long-lasting batteries. All that remains is the task of setting the watch. The stem is a still sensible solution, for you can go fast or slow, forward or backward, until the exact desired time is reached. But the stem is more complex (and therefore more expensive) than simple push-button switches. If the only change in the transition from the spring-wound analog watch to the battery-run digital watch were in how the time was set, there would be little difficulty. The problem is that new technology has allowed us to add functions to the watch: the watch can give the day of the week, the month, and the year; it can act as a stop watch (which itself has several functions), a countdown timer, and an alarm clock (or two); it has the ability to show the time for different time zones; it can act as a counter and even as a calculator. But the added functions cause problems: How do you design a watch that has so many functions while trying to limit the size, cost, and complexity of the device? How many buttons does it take to make the watch workable and learnable, yet not too expensive? There are no easy answers. Whenever the number of functions and required operations exceeds the number of controls, the design becomes arbitrary, unnatural, and complicated. The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology.