Leonardo鈥檚 Laptop: Human needs and the new computing technologies by Ben Shneiderman, MIT Press, $24.95/拢16.50, ISBN 0262194767 Reviewed by Barry Fox
LEONARDO da Vinci was 鈥渕ore than just a Renaissance geek鈥�. He combined science with art and engineering and he would have done a better job of designing today鈥檚 computers than today鈥檚 computer designers. This is the interesting premise on which Ben Shneiderman, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park builds his book of essays.
The early parts of Leonardo鈥檚 Laptop remind us that today鈥檚 PCs waste time by crashing and infuriate us with gibberish. They sometimes even kill people: when a radiotherapy machine gave error messages that no one understood, it then delivered lethal doses of radiation. Shneiderman backs all this up with well-indexed notes and references.
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But the book then starts to drift off into airy-fairy PowerPoint eduspeak. There are endless pages on concepts such as collect, relate, create, donate, circles of relationship and stages of activities, with a lot of preaching to the converted about what computers should, would and could do.
Shneiderman gives us more solid fare on e-medicine, with ideas for a World Wide Med, where patients share experiences and information, and on e-government, which can help politicians spread their message while we talk publicly among ourselves. After all, it took e-lobbying to help get landmines banned.
Reading this book left my Windows PC idle for a day, so I set it the task of making a full safety copy of all the data on the hard disc to a second similar disc. I installed the very latest disc-cloning software, which promptly threw up an unintelligible DOS error message and invited me to press OK. When I obliged it trashed my original disc.
So when Shneiderman ends his 269 pages wondering where the next Leonardo will come from and what he will achieve, I wonder whether it鈥檚 now too late. Even a Leonardo II couldn鈥檛 unravel the mess we鈥檙e in.