Technology versus Policy Making
Oxford University has just established a new Internet Institute (OII), but should HCI and usability practitioners care, asked Usability News recently. Does research into behaviour, interaction with technology and user-centred design even enter the policy-making vision?

The signs do not augur well. At the launch event for the Institute held at the end of September, BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen considered the need to educate the population about the uses of broadband in order to stimulate demand, while e-commerce minister Stephen Timms discussed using public procurement to drive broadband rollout.

All too often, what passes for policy seems little more than a confluence of economics and marketing, with a paternalistic state excluding any consideration of how we can more accurately determine user (read voter) needs and better cater for them. Once again, we are in the sphere of technology-driven policy: if we build it, they will come! Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" rhetoric (1963) lives on to confound us almost thirty years later, with more recent support in the shape of technology illiterates such as Manuel Castells, all amply informed by the hardware manufacturers (See the blog on the Tablet PC).