UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Google John M. Carroll -- better known at Penn State as Jack Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), co-Director of the College of IST’s Laboratory for Computer Supported Collaboration and Learning and Director of Penn State’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction -- and several things jump straight off the screen:
-- Carroll is prolific, with the website ResearchGate.net listing over 500 available publications;-- he is influential, cited in Wikipedia as “a founder of the study of human-computer interaction”; and-- despite accruing several lifetime achievement awards (something Carroll calls “old guy awards”), he’s not stopping yet.
The most recent lifetime achievement award hails from the Society for Technical Communication, or the STC, where Carroll has been named a 2015 Honorary Fellow. Although he admits to “deep ambivalence” about lifetime achievement awards, this one is special. Past recipients of the award include stars like Alan Alda and Stephen Jay Gould. This year, Carroll will accept his award alongside Temple Grandin, pre-eminent professor of animal science at Colorado State University, best-selling author and autism activist.
Carroll recalls, “As a young man, I was totally enthralled by the ideas of Stephen Jay Gould and Buckminster Fuller. I wanted to think like that. And I have treasured a letter I received as a student from Herbert Simon for more than 40 years; I still am amazed at the thought he put into a letter to a student he had never heard of. And of course I watched "M*A*S*H," starring Alan Alda, every week. I honestly don’t know what I am doing receiving an award that they received. It’s not the company I picture myself in. In my case, I will be standing next to Temple Grandin when we both receive the award, so it will be pretty tangible that I am in over my head.”
According to the STC webpage, Carroll’s award is being given, “For … lifelong contributions to technical communication through your research into human-computer interaction and the concept of minimalism in documentation, and for your dedication to teaching the next generation.”
That dedication to the concept of minimalism is just what brought writer Mark Svenvold to call Carroll “The Man who Killed the Manual” in the January edition of Popular Science magazine. In “The Disappearance Of The Instruction Manual,” Svenvold elegantly examines the role of the instruction manual throughout history -- beginning in antiquity, exploding with the advent of the printing press and suffering obsolesce in the digital age -- and rests finally on the dangers incurred by minimalist design. Svenvold writes, “If manuals began as great equalizers, then their disappearance should at least give us pause.”
But in Carroll’s view, the traditional manual was ineffective; “Why lament the disappearance of clunky designs that clearly did not work 35 years ago?” he asked. Much of Carroll’s research has focused on the idea that, as he puts it, “Information should not be decorated for no purpose. Information should not be more complex than it is useful. It should not be an obstacle between a person and his or her objectives and interests.”
Examine history, and it quickly becomes apparent that when a void is created, something rises to take its place. Is the disappearance of the written manual truly a loss or merely an opportunity for something better -- something more functional, more efficient, more successful -- to flourish? When Carroll considers the question, he immediately thinks of YouTube.
“I used YouTube videos to understand how to twist an exercise bar to treat my golfer’s elbow problem,” he begins. “I got better instruction than a manual could ever provide -- one key to this bar is the grip and twisting motion -- something best conveyed through demonstration. I also enjoyed the sense that my instructor was another user. We can now make social experiences of our training experiences, and that’s a win, I think.”
Minimalism for Carroll is informed by The Bauhaus Movement. “Function should dictate form, and function is what a person wants to do, understand or accomplish,” he explained. “Function is not the reading or listening itself -- it is the action, achievement and satisfaction enabled by the reading and listening.”
Part of Carroll’s goal as a scientist, he said, was to understand how to evoke and unleash active engagement in technology. As a designer, Carroll has aimed to create information and information models that facilitate that active engagement.
“If I am the man who killed the manual, it was involuntary manslaughter,” Carroll said. “I witnessed, I documented and I analyzed the failures of manuals and other information designs -- like tutorials and help systems -- that merely organized information presentations. We can do much better than that.”