book review - 'Leonardo's Laptop' by Ben Schneiderman

Book title: Leonardo's Laptop : Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies

Author: Ben Schneiderman

ISBN: 0262692996

Schneiderman's Leonardo's Laptop is singularly disappointing. Promising to raise our expectation of what we should get from technology, he instead uses a forced extended metaphor in the form of Leonardo da Vinci. What would Leonardo do?, we are repeatedly asked. Schneiderman attempts to answer the question. Sadly, his answers are neither new nor groundbreaking. I cannot believe that da Vinci would simply recount solutions that are already available and attempt to make such solutions sound visionary and forward-thinking.

The chapters in the book discuss the issues with usability today, activites and relationships, and attempt to discuss future directions in several fields: government, healthcare, business, and education. In these chapters, Schneiderman uses feel-good buzzwords like 'empowering' and 'enabling', but never moves beyond the feel-good buzzwords to suggest real solutions. In most cases, he suggests solutions that are already implemented; in others, he simply waves his hands at the problem and says that there has to be a solution.

Each chapter concludes with a skeptic's corner. This section could easily be re-labelled the strawman's corner. In that section, he constructs arguments that skeptics might use, but he must assume that skeptics are uniformly moronic. The so-called skeptical arguments are drawn with exceptionally rough strokes, which he dispenses of with little regard to very real concerns that can and should be discussed.

I had high hopes for this book. I wanted something that pushed the boundaries. I wanted something visionary. Instead, I got a repetitive book that somehow didn't say anything. I can only hope that future works give us something better than this.

Related links:
Ben Schneiderman's website
Amazon's page about this book