Jan, you make good points, but you cemented my point of view. When you are inside a system, you cannot see or experience it from the outside.

That is the reason, early tech designers evaluated their designs on users - not themselves.

For two decades, industrial designers and computer programmers argued like crazy over this stuff. No matter how hard industrial designers worked to make their case, computer programmers were too deep inside the guts of the machines to understand it from the outside.

Of course, that was way back in the 1970s, when I was working at PARC where we were developing personal computers, medical and dental imaging equipment and high-speed printers.

Contrary to popular opinion, it was the user interface that made personal computers possible - not the programming. Same thing applies to every tech device produced today.

As industrial designers, our biggest challenge was overcoming user's disbelief and distrust. Take keyboards, on/off buttons, and input modules for example. If humans don't get a response, they will keep pushing the same stupid button, over and over again. Without a response, users gave up so fast, it made computer programmers heads spin. But... if we built a tiny click , a little pushback, a light, or a noise into a button, people would trust the machine and keep working until they mastered it.

If a user inserted a disc and had no response, they walked away. Our test users pounded on the machine, or screamed at it in frustration. But if we built a silly thermometer or clock into the screen, users waited until the program loaded. The response had to be immediate too, we had one millisecond before emotions kicked in.

Its like a car. Most car owners don't know what makes their car move. All they know is what they need to do, to make their car move. If their car doesn't move, off it goes to a mechanic.

As an industrial designer, my analogy makes sense, for I am talking about the users of social systems - not computer systems. My analogy makes no sense to you, because you are programming the system, not using it.

You take the machine where you do your programming for granted. I suspect you have no idea how the machine itself was developed, let alone how all the design work that went into that machine, made your work possible.

And the same problem, the same disconnect between those inside our social systems and those who have to use it, is the same today as it was fifty years ago.