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people to understand and choose rather than confronting them with unintelligible actions, are perfectly sensible. The lack of common ground precludes many conversationlike interactions, but if the assumptions and commonalities are made clear, perhaps through implicit behavior and natural interactions that are readily interpreted by both machines and people, why then, I’m all for it. And this is the topic of chapter 3 .
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    F IGURE 3.1
    Kettle with whistle. A simple technology that summons us to do its bidding: Hear my whistle? Come and take care of me.
    Photograph © Daniel Hurst. Used under license
from Acclaim Images™.

 
CHAPTER THREE
Natural Interaction

    Whistles signal. People communicate. The difference is profound. Designers may think their designs communicate, but, in fact, they only signal, for the communication only goes in one direction. We need a way of coordinating our activities, cooperating with autonomous machines, so that we can perform tasks together smoothly, pleasurably.
Natural Interaction: Lessons to Be Learned
    Almost all modern devices come with an assortment of lights and beeping signals that alert us to some approaching event or act as alarms, calling our attention to critical events. In isolation, each is useful and helpful. But most of us have multiple devices, each with multiple signaling systems. The modern home and automobile can easily have dozens or even hundreds of potential signals. In industry and health care, the number of alerts and alarms increases dramatically. If the trend continues, the home of the future will be one continual wail of alerts andalarms. So, although each single signal may be informative and useful, the cacophony of the many is distracting, irritating, and, as a result, potentially dangerous. Even in the home, where danger is less often encountered, when many signals might be active, even the beep of one is unintelligible:
    â€œDid I hear the washing machine beep?” asks my wife.
    â€œI thought it was the dishwasher,” I respond, scurrying from kitchen to laundry room and back again, trying to figure out which it was.
    â€œOh, it’s the timer on the microwave oven. I forgot that I had set it to remind me when I had to make that phone call.”
    The devices of the future promise to move us into even more confusion and annoyance if they follow the same method of signaling used today. Yet, there is a better way, a system of natural interaction that can be more effective and simultaneously less annoying. We manage well in the natural world, interpreting the signs and signals of the environment and its inhabitants. Our perceptual system conveys a rich sense of space, created from the seamless combination of sights and sounds, smells and feelings that surround us. Our proprioceptive system conveys information from the semicircular canals of the inner ear and our muscles, tendons, and joints to give us a sense of body location and orientation. We identify events and objects rapidly, often from just minimal cues—a brief glimpse or sound, for instance. But more importantly for my purposes, natural signals inform without annoyance, providinga natural, nonintrusive, nonirritating, continuous awareness of the events around us.
    Consider natural sounds, for example: not the beeps and buzzes of our equipment, not even speech sounds, but natural environmental sounds. Sounds convey a rich picture of the happenings around us because sounds are an automatic result whenever objects move, whenever they meet one another, scraping, colliding, pushing, or resisting. Sounds tell us where things are located in space, but they can also reveal their composition (leaves, branches, metal, wood, glass) and activity (falling, sliding, breaking, closing) as well. Even stationary objects contribute to our aural experience, for the way that sounds are reflected and shaped by environmental structures gives us a sense of space and our location within it. This is