Assignment #6 - Design Critique

The case of the push-to-talk phones has many benefits in the case of allowing for ambiguity, but there are many problems it also causes. One feature of the phones is that as long as they are on, the phone will transmit a message. In one example, person A might send a message to person B, and person B may not respond. A doesn’t know why B isn’t responding, and this creates the ambiguity that the authors say is good for communication. The trouble with this, however, is that without a response, A doesn’t know how to act in return. If A assumes that B simply didn’t get the message because they were out of the room, they may continue sending B messages on a periodic basis, to see if B has returned. Or, A could assume that B was busy doing something else, and simply wait for B to respond. In the first situation, B might have gotten the message, and simply didn’t want to respond, and then he will have to listen to all of the following messages that A sends. In the second situation, B might have been in another room, never even heard the message at all, and would have no idea that A is waiting for a response. While this creates ambiguity, I would argue that this ambiguity is destructive to the conversation, because there is no way of knowing what the proper response should be.

I think this could very easily be corrected, by the addition of a simple feature to the phones that allow users to set their status, analogous to an away message on Instant Messaging programs. If the phones had a dial that you could set to a condition such as available, busy, or away, this would allow for ambiguity, but also eliminate the confusion illustrated above. If you left the room, you could set your phone to away, and then when someone tried to talk to you they would receive a signal that let them know you were away. Another setting would be ‘busy,’ when you were around your phone, but unable to take messages – perhaps in a meeting or in class. This still allows for ambiguity, because you could set your phone to say you were busy even if you were available, in order to avoid a call you did not want to take.