Licklider essay touches upon many areas in interaction between men and computer. The interaction is the most important part because it is a behavior that have an impact on designers’ work as well as the businesses.
My “thinking” time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight.
J.C.R. Licklider
We all can relate to the thinking time above. This is a pain point that consistently being captured, analyzed and redesigned over time. For instance, the phrase or words suggestion in GMail reflects well on the thinking time. Users want to focus on getting their point across without spending much time on the writing itself.
We are living in the information age, where things keep evolving at a lighting speed from business transactions to social media and so on. Licklider illustrates the behavior of the memory system, which in many ways sound familiar, if you know coding.
The trie memory system, on the other hand, stores both the functions and the arguments.
The characteristics of the memory system above are similar to the core function of software engineer, where Object Orientation is very important in manipulating data. So how does this relate to interaction design? Without the understanding of the data structure itself, it is hard to imagine how users might interact with it. Storing and recalling would be a great example that interaction designers need to design for.
Thirdly, the input and output equipment. In The Mother of All Demos video would have demonstrated this point. The inputs are mouse and keyboards, while the output is the screen in most cases. It clearly demonstrates how men interact with computers. It serves as a foundation for interaction designer like us to understand and think beyond those interactions in today technology space.
When you mentioned the”memory system” it makes me think of the Memex!