Price of flexibility in intelligent interfaces

摘要

Flexibility and customizability are central to the perceived advantages of the growth in technological powers. However, these and other vectors of technological change, when used clumsily, create new burdens and complexities for beleaguered human practitioners responsible for achieving goals within some field of activity. ‘Intelligent interfaces’ are sometimes seen as solutions to the growing demands of highly technological and highly automated fields of activity. However, data from a variety of sources indicates that an exclusively technology-driven approach to the development of intelligent interfaces is likely to provide the illusion of assistance while creating a new layer of burdens and complexities. It is necessary to understand the difference between two types of flexibility in cognitive artifacts: (a) flexibilities that increase practitioners' ranges of adaptive responses to the variability in the field of activity, and (b) flexibilities that simply create new burdens on practitioners, especially at high tempos or high criticality periods.