The Crutches of Technology

I am currently reading Donal Norman’s The Design of Future Things, in which he mentions a study that surfaced on a few popular blogs and social news services today, namely that the lack of traffic signs result in fewer accidents. The theory deals with something called “Shared Space”.

What the article fails to mention and Norman subsequently does is that this theory (deregulating our environment or removing some of the safeguards) is also applicable to technology. I find this particularly interesting, especially after this post I wrote a few weeks ago, in which I started to ask myself to which extend technology is actually making our lives easier.

To give a practical example: has our spelling improved thanks to built in spell checkers or have they simply made us lazy? Would the lack of a spell checker keep you alerter? And has the ability to edit a document ad infinitum lead to us doing exactly that: sending documents to colleagues to review in give feedback on until, after many (time consuming) iterations a final result is achieved?

In his book (which I can highly recommend) Norman goes into this phenomenon a lot deeper, it actually forms a substantial part of his publication and I believe that this is in ever increasing problem. Should we (sometimes) let go of the crutches of technology on which we are so heavily relying on?