A broken finger is a speech impediment

An interesting coincidence occured to me during the organization of this event, and it has brought me much insight into the nature of tangible interfaces: I broke my finger. Not just any finger, but the all-important index finger, and on the hand I normally write with! A most unfortunate event, to be sure; nevertheless, it has at least led me to appreciate the extent to which we depend on this traditional tangible interface in our everyday lives.

Writing notes in my agenda became slow and tedious, but preparing lecture notes for the new course I’ve been teaching has been even more hopeless. And if you think I have trouble reading my left-handed notes, imagine my students trying to decipher the child-like scribbles I make on the blackboard! And it doesn’t end there: at the same time, I had been organizing tonight’s event entirely through email communications involving 4 busy speakers in located in 3 different time zones. Normally this is no problem, as I am a proficient 30-words-per-minute keyboardist, but now my usually detailed informative replies suddenly became one-line grunts like “please send bio” or “thanks for abstract”. Now I was actually running a risk: Some our speakers may have easily interpreted my abrupt replies as rudeness or hints of impatience; and I couldn’t afford the extra letter-typing required to clarify the situation!

It is interesting how, in today’s digital culture, a technical failure in the chain of communication tools, in this case a broken bone in a finger, can actually change people’s impression of your psychological state. It brings to mind the quandary faced by people whose speech abilities have been degraded due to a stroke, and have to face the additional burden of the situation being misinterpreted as a sign of a mental handicap: In a text-centric communication culture, surviving with a broken finger is the digital equivalent of recovering from a stroke. The increasing use of the hand for communication in today’s digital culture really demands a broadening of the concept of “speech impediment”. We can only speculate as to the cultural impact this implies for today’s youth that rely so heavily on text-based communication and yet have such poor typing abilities. Perhaps online “chat” should be renamed “online grunt”..

Struggling with these many communication difficulties, I finally realized what the digital equivalent to a crutch must be: my salvation lay in obtaining speech-to-text software! I was very impressed with its effectiveness, and that’s coming from a proficient keyboardist. Maybe we should organize an event on vocal interfaces next year; all suggestions welcome!

Speech-to-text technology hasn’t solved my blackboard-writing problem, though: An interactive whiteboard would be the way to go for that one. If there are any HCI research folk here tonight interested in exploring the communication potential of interactive whiteboards, come talk to me later, it could be a fun project!

My broken finger is also teaching me a lot about the complex dependencies of many seemingly simple manual tasks, such as zipping a coat or tying up my shoelaces. In the words of ergonomic design, or to paraphrase Karon MacLean, the “complex set of affordances” of my hand have been severly compromised! Every minor task that relies on manual abilities ( and there are a lot of them, believe me!) has become an opportunity for me to appreciate the wide adaptability, reliability and extreme versatility of the human hand as a means of interacting and communicating with the world around us.