A recent article in the TechRepublic blog suggests that the true legacy that Steve Jobs will leave behind was the shift toward humanising technology. The article is an interesting take on what Jobs left behind after his passing in October 2011 and represents much of how Zen Ex Machina works.
| Focus on | Reject |
|---|---|
| Thoroughly inculcate human-centric design concepts into the company and all of the products that it produces. | Give lip service to similar ideas. |
| Build useful tools that adapt themselves to the ways people already think and work. | Ask people to retrain themselves to learn how to use their machines. |
| What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? | Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and how are we going to market that. |
| Natural interface mechanisms, understanding human behaviour & motivation, and mental models. | The foundation of the computer industry, with its codes, keyboard commands, and programming languages. |
| Multi-disciplinary teams with that include liberal arts education and a wide variety of life experiences, from typography, music and history to Western & Eastern culture. | A purely software engineering development focus |
It might sound touchy-feely, but we start looking at tech from the standpoint of how humans can approach the tools, not the other way around. As the TechRepublic post suggests, this will be the focus for companies for the next century.
M
