[masswerk]

There are many sides to this. E.g., a couple of days ago, I had a conversation with the owner of the next-door pizza shop. He doesn't use computers or the internet. Years ago, he had participated in a course, but found it frustrating. He wanted to understand the grammar of this, how it worked, and how things were related and connected to each other. (He was actually using the term "language".) Unable to do so, he turned his back to computers.

You could call his a civilizatory demand. Compare modern UX to this, it's more like, "here's your hand, use it for everything, just try, don't think about it (we won't make you think, promise)." Which might be closer to what figures as "medieval barbarism" in the article.

Also, the bit on the "Mother of All Demos" may be a bit unfair: The system relied on multiple users' views rendered on a single screen and respective portions of this being relayed to the user via CCTV, and, for this particular event, input and output were miles away from the machine that ran the demo, connected via a network bridge. Modern videos on social media showing a person manipulating their smartphone can be messy in appearance, as well… (On the other hand, Engelbart's real ambition, the "bootstrapping" process of symbol manipulating minds and symbol processing machines elevating each other to levels never imagined before, a project very much civilizatory in nature, probably never became a reality. And this may be due to interfaces, which teach us how to think about this process and the systems involved.)

Edit: Another early "civilizatory" approach may have been J.C.R Licklider’s "Man-Computer Symbiosis", where human and machine meet on a shared, common ground (the interface), instructing each other by suggestion, thus eventually reaching a goal of refined understanding and problem insight.

[drewcoo]

Present day UX grew out of Englebart and co's notions of computer interfaces for children. They were meant to be discoverable. They weren't meant to avoid thinking. That's still the guiding spirit in it.

One could argue that children are "barbaric," but I really don't think it's useful framing.

[masswerk]

Alan Kay's work is very much about children, but Engelbart's project was about (qualified) grownups and future civilization. (Children at the age of about 10-12 were especially interesting to Alan Kay, because they're at in a transitional state from visual dominance to symbolic dominance in thinking, following the work of Piaget and in the updated version by Jerome Brunner.) Regarding, what is discoverable, the civilizing aspect may be well in what is shown and in what way. E.g., Licklider's examples are actually conversations about constraints, without verbalising constraints specifically.

Edit: One notable "relict" of Engelbart's project is the outline view in MS Word (which, out of context, may not appear to be that remarkable, while it was much about how texts should be organized and understood).

[masswerk]

*) Jerome Bruner (just one "n")

Wile Piaget thought that the newly established dominance would replace the previous one, Bruner showed that the older one remained and could be observed in parallel. (Which is rather decisive to Alan Kay's work.)