“[the] social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested—often by destroying mechanized looms—against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their entire way of life.”

More recently, however, the term has been applied to people who don’t like technology, to people who feel it is improperly used, or when more loosely applied, to people who “aren’t really into technology.”

I have sympathy for today’s Luddites, in much the same way Mick Jagger has sympathy for the Devil. As in, there are Luddites in all of us, and we are well advised to remember that. Why would I say that? Because as a future HCI expert, my job is to have empathy (okay, I grant you that empathy is different from sympathy, but I always like a good Rolling Stones reference) for people who are under-confident or straight-out distrustful of new technologies. As someone who likes technology and tinkering with things and trying new things, as someone who finds great appeal in developing sleek, usable interfaces, I have to remember who I’m serving. I won’t just be serving early adopters, or even late adopters, but reluctant, I-never-cared-to-be-doing-this-in-the-first-place adopters.

When I opted to go paperless with my bank, I thought of my friend’s dad, who, when we were in college, would never let her conduct credit card transactions online. I remember the first time he let her. We share the same technological universe, but it’s his way of life that is being transformed. As a future HCI professional, I need to understand and respect that.

During a summer home from college, I worked at Stone House Bread, an artisan bread company. I worked early mornings at the Leland shop. I got to know many regulars, served them coffee and the day’s loaf of bread, along with cinnamon rolls until we ran out. As the day grew later, the customer base changed. More tourists came through, hungry and on the way to or coming back from Lake Michigan. Many didn’t know their way around the winding Leelanau County roads, where the nearest restroom was, or how to pronounce “Garlic Fougasse.” It was my job to make them feel comfortable and calm, to feel that no matter the circumstances that brought them into the little building on the side of the road, they were going to eat some bread, and they were going to leave feeling happy and with fuller bellies.

It was not my first job in the “service industry,” but it was the first summer I articulated to myself what really good service meant. So you have a product or service that somebody needs. Sometimes they are excited or happy about it, but not usually. Sometimes their first priority is their kid who cut his hand in the van, which is now bleeding, and they find themselves in your building, asking for help. And there you are, with bread. So it becomes not about the bread, but the experience, giving the kid a slice of Cherry Walnut after you find a band-aid. Getting the dog a bowl of water, because it’s hot out. Transparently helping build a memory.

I may be chomping at the bit for an iPhone 3GS, but I am also a student of North American Culture. If I plan to become a designer among North Americans (which I almost certainly do, having both U.S. citizenship and a sustained interest in who we are and what we are like), I have to remember that we are a nation that produces thinkers like Wallace Stegner (though technically, I think Stegner’s from Canada) and Wendell Berry.

Stegner and Berry are both environmentalists and much of their work covers sustainable growth and technology. I’m no scholar of either one, but I’ve come across their ideas now and again. Stegner talks about this concept of “boomers” vs. “stickers” — boomers are proponents of the very American tradition of Westward Expansion, active pursuers of the American Dream. Stickers are people who stay; specifically they are people who settled in North America with the intent of coming and staying put.

Yet most people, whether they stay or go, pursue novelty or stick with what they have, will adopt the interfaces they are provided by people like us. Personally, beyond a shadow of a doubt I’m a Boomer. I’d like to hang out with this fellow Jay Gatsby, should I ever meet him, and attend one of his parties. I would like to know and live in different parts of the country and world. I hungrily update the “Places I’ve Been” facebook app as soon as I’ve been somewhere new. Sometimes I even watch the E! network.

I think Berry thinks of himself more as a sticker. Berry and Stegner are talking about physical space. I’m talking about digital space, which is a different ball of wax. However, digital space and the ventures it produces are distinctly the effects of industrialization. Therefore, it is hard not to need to participate, regardless of your position. I am not implying that the term Luddites and the term stickers should be used interchangably, but surely they’re related.

When Berry talks about his own participation, he says: “we are in it because we were born in it. We can’t get out of it because it made us what we are; we are, to some extent, what it is. And perhaps we would not like to get out of it if that meant giving up, as we would have to do, our language and its literature, our hereditary belief that all people matter individually, our heritage of democracy, liberty, civic responsibility, stewardship, and so on.”^1.

But I come from stickers, as a lot of us do. Morally and practically, I find myself in service of the stickers. In the same essay, Berry says “the problem obviously is that we are not well practiced in kindness toward our fellow humans.” This post took a turn somewhere around summer jobs and Stone House Bread. I am trying to get at this big, nebulous concept about service. It comes down to having respect and care for reluctant users. Service isn’t just found in non-profit institutions. As far as I’m concerned, Stegner’s people, the stickers, also need to have a place in user-centered design.

^1.Berry, Wendell. “The obligation of care: “saving the planet” means sticking with a place – and each other – Saving the Wild Planet” Sierra. Sept-Oct 1995. Retrieved from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1525/is_n5_v80/ai_17397185/?tag=content;col1 on 7/9/09.