Science, technology and humanity

There are three key aspects to consider when inventing anything - design and usability, how the technology will be manufactured, and the impact it has on society.

So said professor George Ellis, of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, at Popular Mechanics' FutureTech event last week.

"Technology is a key element of life," said Ellis. "It can be most broadly defined as the entities - both material and immaterial - created by the application of mental and physical effort in order to achieve some value. In this usage, technology refers to tools and machines that may be used to solve real-world problems."

He noted that technology has transformed our lives and is still doing so at an ever-increasing pace, reaching every aspect of living. All technology is organised around some central concept or principle, which is the mechanics of technology.

To be brought into physical reality, the principle needs to be expressed in terms of physical components, he said. "So you've got the idea, the processes and then the devices or the hardware that make it real."

"It's clear that technology changes not only the possibilities open to us, it actually shapes the way we think. Technology shapes culture to a major degree; social life is transformed by technology," Ellis said, providing the example that it now takes less than 24 hours to travel from SA to Germany, whereas in the past, prior to air travel, it could have taken six weeks or longer.

However, culture also influences technology within the limits of what is scientifically and technologically possible, he noted, adding that the rise of civilisation is based on the development of technology, for example, agriculture and telecommunications technology.

Abstract technologies make further complexities possible, Ellis continued. "The key feature of technology is its cumulative nature; it keeps building on itself. Each further step depends on the one before and is impossible without it. And it depends on a core of technologically capable people."

Technology also transcends international boundaries, said Ellis. "Once people have developed it in one country; if it's a good idea, it spreads like wildfire and it transforms life in all countries; not just in the country where it started. Once a discovery is made, it's there forever after and is adopted by all advanced societies."

He used the example of 3G and LTE technologies, which would not exist if James Clerk Maxwell had not come up with Maxwell's Equations and discovered the principle of light as electromagnetic radiation, and therefore the possibility of radio waves.

Any technology can be used for good or ill, said Ellis. Unforeseen consequences enabled by technology include environmental destruction and mass warfare. "This is as a result in many quarters of widespread fear of technology; people think of technology as highly destructive. Often, this dislike of technology is associated with a certain irrationality and a lack of appreciation of the enormous positive side of technology," he explained.

The key issue in making technology more human and more useful, said Ellis, is the thought processes involved when one is engaged in technology development: what is its purpose? Who will benefit? Will it only be the well-off who benefit, or will the have-nots also benefit? What are the costs? What are the downsides? Underlying all of this, who will control the technology and how will that control happen? he asked.

In many ways, abstract technology is by far the most transforming technology, said Ellis. Abstract technology will eventually embody a material entity, but its key nature is non-physical and it underlies social, economic, political and legal systems that centre on symbolic systems, such as language and mathematics.

All technology is a product of a design process, said Ellis. The way this is done crucially affects the quality of living and the environments created. "It has to be designed to do the work it should be doing, it has to satisfy its function."

And then there are issues of appearance, he noted: does it look good? Does it feel good? Added to this, technology has to be reliable and simple. "There's a tension between aesthetic design and functionality: should you design something to look great, or should you design it to be functional?"

There is an added issue of the suitable kind of technology. When is a low-tech approach adequate and when is a high-tech approach more suitable? "There's a tenet that high technology is used for everything, but this should not be the case. You need to look at the problem - what are you trying to solve - and it may be that low technology will be better.

"Designers should use local designs - the things that fit local problems. Often, if you import methods from overseas, they may fail in the local situation because they don't respect local habits and local understanding of how things should be."

A key note, said Ellis, is that any technology has partly a hardware nature - the item itself - but technology always has a behavioural component too, which is how you use it, how you interact with it. "High-tech products can be very difficult to use or very easy to use, depending on what they do and how they are designed," he said.

"Nevertheless, there's a trade-off between requiring the user to adapt to the technology or the technology to adapt to the user. To what degree are you going to force the user to change their habits or to what degree will you change the technology to suit what the user already knows?"

Crucial is the issue of the user interface, stressed Ellis, as some devices are notoriously difficult to use.

The design must make clear to the user what the options are at any point. "Those options need to be carefully thought out. If there are too many options, it becomes unusable because you spend all your time choosing between the options and you probably won't use 95% of the options. If there are too few options, the device won't do what you want. The technology should avoid leading the user to a dead-end where no viable options are presented."

Furthermore, use should be intuitive and easy. "The ideal is that you can use the device without needing to read a massive manual. In fact, nowadays, that's what we expect."

Attention must also be paid to menus, said Ellis: How many layers of menus will you have? How far do people have to drill down to get to where they want to be?

In addition, the interface should be adaptable to individual needs, allowing enough choice but not too much choice. An advanced system recognises the need for emotional design, he noted. "A huge amount of how we interact with technology is not intellectual, but emotional. If we are to be comfortable with technology, this needs to be handled right. If people don't like the 'feel' of it, they won't use it."

The key feature here is that there are no reliable rules as to what is good design. Design is a craft, it's an art, he noted.

When doing all of this, designers need to keep manufacturing in mind, said Ellis. "It's no good designing something if it can't be manufactured in a reasonable, efficient kind of way. And associated with that is quality control."

A huge part of technology is the technology to improve manufacturing, he said. "This is a place where there's a great field for invention - the speed, the cost, the accuracy, the reliability of manufacturing."

In conclusion, he said, there's always a key idea related to individual and social needs; there's the concept; there's the ability and hardware to make it happen, where you have to get the details of the technology right; and there's the design; creating the product - how it's going to be manufactured and replicated, ensuring it works and it's reliable in quality.

"Technology creates a better life for all if it's used in the right way," he concluded.