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There’s no such thing as a free lunch they say. Although I did go to a corporate evenings entertainment with my friend. We went along to drink beer in the sunshine, chat and eat canapés. And that’s exactly what we did for four hours, and yet at no point were we approached by any member of the host firm. We have never bought any product from that firm and if anything we feel less keen on doing so simply because if we continue not to we have a free lunch story which beats what most economists think is going on.

There is another example of “free lunch” economics going on, or rather “something for nothing” which sounds perhaps more palatable and certainly is a more flexible phrase. The comes from two charities, both connected.

The first is a charity called play pump. Their idea is breathtakingly simple. They install a water pump for people who need water in Africa. But they install a childrens playground on top of the water pump and they install this playground next to schools. The simple plan is that when the children are playing on the round about they are, unwittingly, pumping water for everyone. This simple idea is so powerful and fantastic. It really is something for nothing. Their website is here: http://www.playpumps.org/

Also play pump have inspired another charity which is a little bit closer to home. It is a charity called One Water. It’s a very strange kind of charity in that they basically just market and sell a product, bottled water, but all of the profits from the sale of the water go to play pump. It’s a strange idea similar to the fair trade mark I suppose. But it does make sense. By buying water you are providing water for others. Their website is here: http://www.we-are-one.org.uk/ You can buy this water instead of other water and yet the water you’re buying is making a difference. Also something for nothing.

Here is a video about one of their projects, it’s about 10 minutes long, but probably worth watching.

The other day I was talking about Automagic Shock (Automagically), the sudden realisation that you have no idea how the device you are using actually works. The flip side of this is, in many ways, the situations where we miss the realisation of how making something slightly less complicated might make it better.

I have had much experience, and I’m sure many engineers and software developers are the same, that releasing something that kind of works is very dangerous. Because if you release something before it is ready then it can be the hardest thing in the world to convince people to upgrade to the new thing once you’ve fixed it. This is not the same if the new thing is just the same design but faster or cheaper, in those cases people will happily upgrade. This is specifically in the case where there is a barrier to them getting the new thing.

For example: Consider a toaster. It is very simple but it has problems. What if you want four slices cooking at the same time (then get a four slice toaster), what if you only want to cook two slices once you have a four slice toaster. Or if you have an uneven number of slices. You will no doubt have experienced that if you have only one slice of toast in a toaster then it doesn’t really work as well. Only one side of the toast seems to get cooked. Also we know that when we’re making toast to be buttered, the second slice of toast gets cold while we’re buttering the first slice. The bread is often a different size than the size of the toaster. The bread is often too thin or thick and it’s difficult to quantify before you’ve cooked some what the thickness means in terms of the number on the dial. What about the different needs of different toast eaters – some like lightly brown some burnt. And what about that second set of toast that comes after you’ve already done one set. The first set needs more time than any of the others because you’re heating up the element too.

I’m sure all of these problems and more have been solved in different toasters on the market (I know that there is even a toaster that delays the cooking time of the second slice of toast specifically so that it will finish toasting just after you’ve finished buttering the first one). But the problem is that people in general think that toast is kind of fine. It’s sorted really. And because people want a non-complicated life the maximum complexity that a toaster has is the dial on the front. And maybe the humble toaster doesn’t need to get fixed but if it doesn’t need to be fixed then why do people keep designing a new toaster?

I didn’t know how rubbish my video recorder was until I had a PVR. Once I could simply navigate the television programs and press record and series link I realised how easy the thing was, but before then I always looked down my nose slightly at people who couldn’t program the video recorder because to me it seemed like it was so easy that they weren’t even trying.

If it had been up to me the video recorder technology would have probably stayed the same forever. But now it’s been fixed I love it and realise what an idiot I was being. This problem was solved because real users kept complaining that it was too complicated for long enough. It’s very rare that we should require users to come to us, we should always go to them.

All of those people who are designing new toasters are doing it because as geeks they can see an inefficiency. Something that is broken as far as they are concerned. And it doesn’t matter to them if something gets more complicated, they just want it to work. The video recorder worked for geeks, they understood it, and there wasn’t a single program they couldn’t record. But to most real people the situation was the other way around. The toaster is fine, the video recorder is broken.

So what’s the next thing that’s broken I wonder?

Lots of people think that the reason that it is generally women who make telephone announcements is because they have better and clearer voices. And that their voices are more reassuring. And they do, studies have proven this to be the case after the fact. However that’s not the reason that women were selected. In fact the reason was far less scientific than that.

Originally the people who were telephone operators were all boys who had previously been employed as telegraph operators. They were ideal for the telegraph service which involved a lot of learning of systematic techniques and running about delivering telegrams (mainly the second thing was the thing they were good at it turns out).

But when they started converting them to work on the telephone system it was soon obvious that they were not very good at working in the new conditions. In the telephone system they had to speak to the punters and ask them what they wanted them to do (rather than simply saying, while out of breath, “telegram for you sir”). And then they would have to connect the right wire into the right socket in an incredibly complicated series of wires. And in amongst all of the wires and the enclosed operating spaces not only were practical jokes a problem for the customers more often the bored boys would break out into fights. And so it was realised that girls were the exact thing for this new service and that perhaps they would be able to understand technology after all. Women have never looked back, whereas boys well they’re still fighting over the latest gadgets.

How do things that we think of as magic become technology? When does the mysticism of the old become the reliability of the new. And if I don’t know how a mobile telephone actually works… don’t I believe in magic too? Arthur C. Clarke once said: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

I really like technology, gadgets and the like. I don’t always have the newest and latest thing, but I do like to get the word out when I find something that is actually really good. And as part of my fascination in this area I tend to know quite a lot about how the thing actually works. Not necessarily the nuts and bolts, but at a conceptual level I have an idea of how a thing works.

But like most people I don’t say things like “well I can’t have this in my house unless I know how it works”. I don’t have to have a working knowledge of something before I will be willing to let it in the house. Some things I know a lot about, some not much.

For example I could explain to you at length how a Microwave oven works, but I don’t really know much about how a mobile phone works other than it uses microwaves to send a signal somewhere. Realisation about things like this come to you from time to time. The other month I was a passenger in a car in England talking to a person on a mobile phone who was in America and who was able to tell better than I was what the traffic situation was a mile up the road because they were looking on the internet for that information and relaying it to me over the phone. The oddness of this situation occurred to me instantly. And I realised that I didn’t really understand how all of the things connecting me to this information actually work. I had a bout of what I refer to as “Automagic Shock”. A moment of realisation that what I’m doing could just as well be magic, and yet every single bit of it is explainable, somebody does know how all of the separate bits of this thing work, I just have faith that they do.

I wonder if the situation is exacerbated by me knowing some of how it works? In that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I wonder if people that I know who claim to hate technology ever get such a feeling?

The other day I got a call from a friend who said, “I’m really sorry but I just had to ask for your help with my computer – I just really hate technology”. Obviously it didn’t occur to them that they were using technology to make the telephone call. That they used sophisticated technology in their car, mobile phone, washing machine and so on every day without any problems at all. Because these technologies have achieved that great feat of stopping from being a nebulous bit of technology and have succeeded in becoming a thing in their own right. Computers are slowly but surely trying to move that way, but the problem for a computer is that it is specifically designed to not be proscriptive. The proscriptive “word processors” and “adding machines” were not versatile enough, but while computers have taken the trade-off to become more versatile what they are effectively doing is allowing the computer to surprise us. But the fact that the computer can surprise is both good and bad, it means that somebody can show us a new program like “Google Earth” which makes you really go “Wow” my old computer can do that! But it also means that your computer can surprise you by saying to you “Stack Error Memory Dump”.

I think that’s the difference between technology and devices. Even though my new phone doesn’t just make telephone calls it cannot surprise me because on the very first day I got it I knew all of the things it could do: take calls, photos, send e-mail, browse the internet. I might not have used all of those features on day one, but I’m not going to suddenly get a surprise in a while by discovering that the thing can make toast.

And I think that’s the difference, we’re more likely to get automagic shock from a device then a bit of technology because it slips in under the radar without us asking how it actually works.