Human-Product Communication - Emotional Engineering - page 13

in situations and in environments. So their traditional approach of making things
arti ! cial and uniform does not work anymore.
In other words, machines that only speak are no more effective. Mechanical
engineers have to change their way of thinking from speaking to listening. They
have to listen to what the human users are thinking or what decisions they are
making to cope with these changes. In fact, only users know what is happening
now. Therefore, mechanical engineers have to quit designing smart machines.
Instead, they have to make machines more adaptable to the situations, just as Brand
pointed out with respect to buildings.
4 Listen for the Next Action
Why do machines have to listen? It is not to listen to orders or instructions, but to
make the next action more appropriate. Machines have to communicate with the
users to help them come up with better decisions. Traditional machines worked in
the open-loop environment. In an open-loop system, machines did not listen.
But to cope with the frequent and extensive situational changes, machines have
to work in a closed loop environment. They need to interact with humans and with
the outer world to cope with the changes.
5 Communicating Machines
To put this in another way, this is to attach capabilities of communication to
machines and to add the memory functions. The current design of machines is
based on speaking technology. Machines work in the same way, no matter how the
situations change. Reproducibility has been regarded most important in machine
design. If machines work the same way, no matter how the situations may change,
its functions were thought to be robust. Robustness is the ability of a system to
resist change without adapting its initial stable con ! guration. This philosophy is
very much hardware oriented. In fact, robust originated from the Latin word “ro-
bus,” which means “strength, hard timber or oak.” But if the wind blows very hard,
oak trees fall, but willows will survive. This is because willows communicate with
the wind and adapt to its changes.
Thus, communication becomes increasingly important in the age of frequent,
extensive, and great changes. To design a machine that will resist all these changes
is extremely dif ! cult and will cost very much, even if it may be possible. But if we
note how willows survive the strong winds, we will realize it is much better and far
easier to change our goal from developing a robust machine to designing a machine
that is fl flexible enough to adapt to the changes.