so i was just called over to the office of the friendly 70 year old math professor who works down the hall. he was having a problem – someone had emailed him a file, and he wanted to change it. he opened the attachment, made his changes, saved it, and then went to open the attachment again and didn’t understand why the changes weren’t there. he wanted to email the new version to someone else, but couldn’t figure out where it went. in his mind, the file attached to the email was the only instance of the file, and he didn’t understand his temp folder, or the idea of making a local copy, or the fact that, to forward his revisions to someone else, he would have to eRase the copy that outlook automatically attached when he hit “forward”and replace it with his new, improved version. i started to explain it as simply as i could, but 5 minutes could not shake his mental model, which told him that the file existed as a part of his email, and always would. and you know what, why should he have to? i understand what happens with attachments, but i run into my own version of this problem all the time. i didn’t notice when word started saving attachments to temp by default, but it was a Stupid, Stupid day, imho. i appreciate that my desktop isn’t cluttered with all the detritus that i may really only view once, and i appreciate that my email has original versions as a record, but that appreciation doesn’t keep me from cursing on those times when i do edit the original, hit save like a good girl, and then realize that i have to navigate through fourteen levels of the computer to find the file again, and i can totally believe that a lot of people have the experience of my math professor friend – the file just disappears. but what is the best advice i can give him? why should he have to save the file to his desktop, or within another folder, when it is already a part of the email in his mind? why should he have to create another email and keep track of them both?

in case you don’t know this, i’m focusing on categorization for my capstone, and the ways that our current computer models don’t align with our mental models don’t align with the potential that computers hold for helping us keep meaningful track of the masses of information at our fingertips. so this was a good random help session for me to be a part of, even though all i could really do this time was do the task for him, help him cobble together a bad, temporary solution in case he wants to edit the file again, and feel embarrased when he thanked me.

i want to make it better, and while filing an email attachment doesn’t seem like all that much in the big scheme of things, i think that it is. i think that as long as people feel like information + computer = jumbled and mysterious, we are missing out on a whole boatload of the ways that information + brains = beautiful. and that makes me sad, and angry, and afraid.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 4th, 2005 at 5:25 pm and is filed under capstone, design, ranting, work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.