User:Mathijs van Oosterhoudt/rwrm/button

The retrospective of the Button.

Introduction.

The button, one of the most impaction and important inventions ever created.

Widely and highly gone unnoticed, seen as a simple extra or 'logical' component to such fascinating inventions as the camera, computer and radios, but fully deserving recognition of it's own. The button changed our way of thinking, our way of behaving and our understanding of technology around it. It makes life both easy and more complex, at the same time. It obfuscates what lies beneath, it hides, yet it gives us the power of interaction, of change, of control. But then it makes that control abstract, rather than the direct form of it's precursor. It requires from us a new way of understanding, of decision making.

The button might seem simple, but is deceivingly complex.

This article will aim to dissect the button into it's many forms, find ways of discussing buttons and understanding their role in our culture.

While the button might have disappeared, it's mindset has not.

What is a button?

First of all, it's important to understand what a button is. A button is a physical object which offer a way of interaction to it's user, often part of a larger interface (Another wholly complicated and long subject). The form of interaction can be of endless ways, but in all cases the interaction is a means of achieving a goal. To get to that goal, however, we have to overcome certain obstacles. The stages of the button are as follows;

1. Anticipation.
2. Understanding.
3. Interaction
4. Feedback
5. Goal.

These stages altogether can be passed in seconds, but all are present when one presses a button. When one encounters a button, but decides not to press, only the stages up to interaction are followed.

Anticipation.

The anticipation is the first stage to pressing a button. Anticipation is generally a state of joy at our encounter of a button. We speculate and ask ourselves questions about this button, questions as "How does it work?" or "What does it do?" and "Am I allowed to press it?". Unique to the interaction phase is that it is the only phase which in itself can be the goal of the interaction. A button can be pressed purely by the anticipation of pressing it, by the desire to understand it or to settle the questions in our head. Funnily enough, the button itself is rarely designed to purely satisfy anticipation. The physical appearance of a button can shape our anticipation enormously. It can either raise questions or answer them, the latter discussed in stage 2. The former can be by it's physical appearance ("Why does it look like it does?") or by it's context ("What is this button doing here?").

Understanding

Understanding is the second stage of pressing a button. It is the user's attempt to settle the questions raised in the anticipation stage before actually making a conscious decision to press the button. The questions can be answered in a multitude of ways, whether it is the physical appearance of the button ("If it's locked behind glass, I probably shouldn't press it."), by the contextual location of the button ("It's on a door, so it most likely opens the door.") or by simply mimicking others and examining their results ("That user pressed the button and got a cookie, if I press the button I will also get a cookie").

Interaction

Interaction is the third stage of pressing a button. This is where the user will have made his or her decision about what the button does, how it must be pressed, and whether to press it or not. It sets the inner mechanisms of the button in working, either by completing a circuit, breaking a circuit or triggering a chain of mechanical movements.

Feedback

Feedback is the fourth stage of pressing a button. It is one of the most important parts of the design of the button, as it is one of the few key moments where you can directly feed the user the correct and needed information that he or she desires. There are multiple forms of feedback:

Praising

The button praises the user for the interaction. It lets the user know through various methods that, yes, you did indeed press the button, and you did well doing so.

Criticizing

The button criticizes the user fo the interaction. It lets the user know through various methods that, yes, you did indeed press the button, but unlike praise, it was not a good idea to do so.

Neutral

The button does not give the user any feedback on whether it did the right thing, but does let the user know that it was indeed pressed.

None

The button does not let the user know whether it was a good or a bad thing that it was pressed, nor does it confirm that it was pressed.

Goal

The goal is the fifth and last stage of pressing a button. The goal rewards the user for pressing the button.

The history of the button.

If we see the button as a means of controlling machinery, then there's an obvious precursor to the button, namely, the lever. A lever would be a very direct mechanical control of machinery, one where the movement of the lever is directly related to what it does, for example moving gears in place. Often machines would show it's working to the user, nothing was covered up, nothing was hidden, one could visibly notice how each element and each mechanical linkage influenced each other. One can anticipate what comes and come to a fully understand and decide whether to interact with the lever.

When electricity became more commonplace in machinery, men needed an 'electronic lever' which would be able to influence the electrical circuit, simply by either closing it when open or opening it when closed (connected). The push button was a simple means of doing so. Compared to the lever the use is almost identical, a way to control machines, but in reality the push button does something very special that a lever does not: There is no direct correlation between the motion you are performing (That of pushing) to what the circuit might actually do for you. It's a very abstract way of control. This takes away our understanding of the machinery and therefor also that what the button does.

One of the very first push buttons produced for commercial use is that of the flashlight, which in itself is one of the simplest electrical circuits (A power source, a button and a light). The first electric flashlight was branded as the "Ever ready" flashlight. As one might imagine, it was a fair bit easier than torches, lanterns or candles.

The theme of the ease of the button is one that recurs often within it's evolution, perhaps most famously about 10 years later, when Kodak released the Kodak Brownie; a simple box camera, aimed at making photography accessible to everyone. It did this not only by making the camera very affordable for it's time, but most importantly, by making it easy. What Kodak had previously done for it's Kodak Camera, albeit unsuccessful due to it's higher price, would garner the success the Brownie needed to change the market. The camera would come pre-loaded with film, and once one had finished the roll, all you had to do was return the camera to Kodak, they would develop and print the photos, put a new film in your camera and send it all back (For a fee, of course). This whole process was summed up as follows;

"You push the button, we do the rest."

This popularized the concept of the button as something that makes complex actions simple.

The ease of the button is something that is used in many advertisements, commercials and films, going from kitchen appliances to cars. Often such commercials would depict women using the machines with a touch of a button, implying that if a woman can do it, it must be easy (Sadly not an uncommon thought in this period, where women are valued below men). The button becomes luxurious, advanced, often linked to leisure.

This ease of the button comes back to haunt it as the button becomes known in more than what is used in customer appliances. Buttons are more and more appearing in military devices, most of which truly come to light during the Cold War. When bombs can be dropped, rockets fired and lives destroyed, the 'ease' of doing so by simply pressing a button scares many. Not so much by the button itself, but by who has control over the button "Who has the finger on the button?". Of course there is no one true button which would be pressed for everything to go down, but this is what would come to represent these doomsday devices; A big red button. Once more was a complex action hidden beneath the ease of the button.

The military technologies developed throughout the end of World War II and the Cold war were, at the same time, bringing different uses to the public when it comes to the button, namely the concept of play. In 1947 the "Humpty Dumpty" from Gottlieb introduced the button to pinball machines, which before this time did not have flippers. Previously one would simply launch the ball and see what happens, whereas the flipper offered the user interaction with the process, giving a sense of control. At the same time Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. files a patent entitled the "Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device", employing buttons and the CRT displays used in military radar systems to create what is known as one of the first video games, albeit never commercially produced.

Furthermore, computers slowly start to switch from mechanical typewriters and keypunches to actual electronic keyboards as a method of input, whilst searching for different ways of input. One to come out of the Cold War was that of the trackball, a ball that one would be able to 'roll' as a method of input, used in the radar plotting system called the "Comprehensive Display System".

More and more complex processes became automated by the simple touch of a button over the following years. Video games slowly start to find a form and shape that allows commercial exploitation, and computers start to show more and more than just text. More and more the need for what is known as a "Computer-Aided Display Control" arises, one of which influenced us for a long time, developed around 1960 by Douglas Engelbart and his team: The mouse. The command line was slowly evolving, the idea of hyperlinks (Click-able words that would bring you elsewhere) became popular, and graphics are being interwoven with text. The mouse was supposed to make it easier to navigate texts with hyperlinks, as was first commercially shown in the Xerox Alto in 1973.

The development of the mouse changed the idea of pushing a button to that of clicking one, in more than one way. The invention of the mouse coincided with the development of the Graphical User Interface, graphically showing information and, most importantly, buttons. Virtual buttons, aimed to replicate physical ones, which one would aim your virtual hand (The mouse pointer) at and push them, virtually, by physically clicking on your mouse button.

This concept was popularized in 1984 by the Apple Macintosh, the first Apple computer to be released. Virtual buttons become the norm in GUIs, whereas hyperlinks become the norm on the world wide web, rapidly gaining attention from consumers during the late 80s and early 90s. Whereas the GUI tries to replicate the physical button as we know it as much as possible, even to the point where designer Susan Kare designs the button to be 3D for Windows 3.0, the hyperlink does the opposite: It loses the shape of it's parent. No longer does a button have to adhere to a physical presence, often round, square or rectangle. Anything could be a button, whether it was an image or a piece of text. Because of this, the stage of understanding becomes not only more important, but also harder to accomplish. To have a button that does not relate to those we knew before, there needs to be ways of indicating what is a link, and what is not.

The physicality of the button starts to dissapear as touchscreen interfaces become cheaply available and widely spread. The visual button, however, remains and influences the user interface heavily. Where the touchscreen has an interesting new development however is within the form of gestures. A lot of 'clicking' is done on a touchscreen, but to go from page one to page two one could also 'swipe', moving the hand from the left to the right or vice verse. This is the inbetween stage of the way we interface with machines nowadays, and one can see the slow transition from the obfuscated non-related motion of pressing a button to motions that directly relate to their goal and outcome, making the stage of understanding easier and more logical.

The button in culture

The button throughout it's history and spread across public spaces, appliances, websites and what not have two major consequences for us that are inherent flaws to the button. These flaws can be addressed, but more often than not, they're exploited.

Obfuscation

Obfuscation of mechanics

The first of these issues is that of obfuscation. This happens in two ways, one is the technical obfuscation: The button hides what lays underneath, it makes invisible what happens once the button is pressed, invisible how the mechanism works. This same obfuscation happens in motion, where the action of pushing forward has nothing to do with, say, turning on the light. This makes the understanding of a button in question up to it's design, context and possible textual and graphic explanation (Think manuals and icons), allowing for more things to go wrong. This same obfuscation also makes it hard to think about what goes beyond pressing the button as a human interaction. You're interacting with a machine, but in a lot of cases, the press of a button is just a first step in a long process, which might or might not involve other human interaction. Secondly, it grows a generation on a lack of technical knowledge. By hiding what happens, it's harder to make it understandable, teachable and desirable (to understand).

Take for example the mechanical Turk, an amazingly built early chess robot who would have the intelligence of a human. Of course, this makes sense once you find out that there's actually someone INSIDE the machine operating the arms. Knowing or not knowing however, does influence your behavior towards the machine. Would you react the same knowing someone is inside, or when it's simple electronics? In popular culture this obfuscation is explored in, for example, an episode of the twilight zone; "Button, button." based on a '70s story. A poor family is offered a chance at financial resolve by a small wooden box with a button, with the offer that if the button is pressed, they will get 200,000$, but, in return someone they personally do not know will die.

Obfuscation of ease

This is a second problem of obfuscation, the obfuscation of ease: Pressing a button is easy, but what happens might in fact be very complex. Take Facebook's terms of service agreement: On one hand, here's 4000 words for you to read and agree or disagree upon. On the other hand, here's a simple button that, once clicked, won't question whether you've read it, it won't show you the text, confront you, everything will be gone in one easy click. The exploitation of this is often seen in commercial ventures, think about getting loans, signing contracts and so forth. With one click of a button we can agree or sign up for all kinds of things, we can change our lives (I signed up for this study with the click of a button!) but the way we live now, it is up to the user to be conscious about what it means to actually go through with this simple act. This same kind of obfuscation can be seen in what is more and more known as push button war, where the push of a button can have all manner of political effects. The military makes use of the inventions regarding the button as an apparatus of entertainment, which had it's origins in military technology to begin with, by controlling deadly drones and other machines, further distancing the soldier from the actual effect war has on people, further away from their own actions.

Binary

The second issue with the button is that of it's binary nature. This is of course inherent to something which is supposed to convey a single action: Either the action takes place, or it doesn't. Whether in the form of an on / off switch, a button that opens the door or one that signs you up for a newsletter is indifferent. You either press a button or you don't. This becomes troublesome when the action that resolves out of this action is not binary at all. A lot of actions involving humans and decisions are not black and white, the world is not black and white as is often said, but the button would be happy if it were, and is definitely trying to make it so. Whether you agree for 80% or 40% with something, you either agree (press the button) or not. Complicated decisions are funneled into 1s and 0s.

The Now

Nowadays we live in the age of gesture driven control. Like the movie from the early 21st century; Minority Report, we control through physical movements of both our hands, head and feet. Things are visualized in front of us, and to a certain degree our motion relates to the actions we perform. With this comes a greater issue, however, since none of those actions and gestures have anything to do with what is happening under the hood. For the computer it doesn't matter whether you swipe from left to right, you could give a thumbs up and agree with a contract, for example. How these inherent flaws and further obfuscations of the gesture get exploited is another subject, however.