Last week I worked tech for a student-produced (MUSKET) musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman — quite a good show, I might add — at the Power Center. It was really great to be back in theatre, and especially great to be back behind a board. The fact that, as a sound guy, it was the “wrong” board, the light board, was irrelevant; it was a lot of fun.

With just a few quick stints in between, it was really the first time I’d done any theatre tech work since high school, and this time I looked at everything with a very different eye: the eye of an HCI student.

Trying to explain what studying “information” means to the uninitiated has always proved challenging, and explaining it to my fellow theatre techs was no different. What I ended up saying that I study user interface design. Overhearing this from across the empty auditorium, one of the lighting guys made an obvious, but not-so-obvious, jump, shouting, “You’re majoring in control surfaces‽”

“Well,” I thought, “from his perspective, yes.” So much of what we study in school is limited to on-screen interactions, be they in traditional software, web applications, or mobile applications, that input devices have been relegated to a single day’s worth of discussion in one class. This pushes more complex input devices, like control surfaces, way out into the periphery. But there it was: I’m majoring in control surfaces. Brilliant.

This realization got me started thinking about the control surface with which I am most familiar: the analog mixing console. This is truly an elegant device, with one channel strip for each input channel, and each channel strip laid out as the signal flows: preamp gain at the top, then processing, routing, and finally level. These are then mixed together and sent to the outputs.

Then along came digital. Sure, they can have a much higher input density, and the power to run dozens of mixes from one board is very cool, but it comes at a significant cost to usability. Wikipedia agrees:

Analog consoles remain popular due to their continuing to have one knob, fader or button per function, a reassuring feature for the user. This takes up more physical space but allows more rapid response to changing performance conditions. Most digital mixers take advantage of the technology to reduce the physical space requirements of their product, entailing compromises in user interface such as a single shared channel adjustment area that is selectable for only one channel at a time. Additionally, most digital mixers have virtual pages or layers which change the fader banks into separate controls for additional inputs or for adjusting equalization or aux send levels. This layering can be confusing for operators.

The reason, I believe, for many of these usability problems is that much as computers rely on a nested-folder analogy to manage files and have only recently begun to take advantage of their digital nature by using tags (think Gmail’s Labels), digital mixing consoles are using the analog mixing console as an analogy for digital signals.

This point was really driven home when the lighting designer explained to me that the market leader in moving light consoles has been uncontested for ten years because its designers gave serious thought to what makes moving lights different from conventional lights, and what designers and operators need to do to accomplish their goals; in other words, user-centered design.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I believe that some fundamentally different way of handling large volumes (pun intended) of audio channels in a reasonably sized board is lurking just out of reach.

Post your sightings, vote up new contributions, and discuss grammatical errors.

I’m responding to a comment that was generally in agreement with Tom Friedman’s column of 11 November 2008 about what to do about the automakers, but also frightened of the implications their failure will have on the economy, especially here in southeast Michigan:

I know, it’s a tough one. I feel sorry for all the employees (and retirees) who are being screwed, but on the other hand, if the market isn’t allowed to punish the shareholders (who will in turn punish the management), nothing will ever improve.

I also think that ultimately education is going to have to improved because there is no future for manufacturing in the US; Americans will do R&D, manufacturing will happen overseas. We just need more Americans capable of doing “brain work”.

My brilliant plan (just thought up while typing this): the government acquires the assets of the automakers for pennies on the dollar and auctions them off to the highest bidder (i.e. Toyota, Honda, and defense contractors (the only manufacturing that should stay domestic)).

With the capital raised by the sale, put some into health care, but most of it should go into alternative energy research and training. The white-collar auto workers can be trained to do engineering, etc., and the blue-collar workers can handle the massive deployment of new energy technologies.

(While they’re waiting for the research and engineering to happen, they can fix what President Elect Obama(!) has been calling our “crumbling infrastructure”. The Eisenhower Interstate System was designed to last 50 years^{[citation needed]}. Time’s up.)

I think someone should make a Facebook application that compares a user’s profile to the list of stuff from the blog, then determines how white that person is.

I haven’t given a ton of thought to how that comparison would work (n things in profile that white people like / m items in profile x 100 = % white?), but I think it’d be amusing.