Cooperative software

There was a problem with my last column ("Hat Racks for Unders tanding," Oct. 1992, p. 21). It claimed good software helps people in their quest for understanding. Although it ment ioned a few strategies for improving a tool's ability to facilitate understanding, we were still left with an elusive and gauzy goal. How do you know when you have understood an object of study? If you looked a little harder or tried another angle, you might discover some hidden qua l i ty -a quality that reveals the object's true nature. Then again, maybe not. Anything so hard to measure presents a p r o b l e m for technology. While "facilitating unders tanding" is a worthy goal, it is a poor guiding principle of design. As designers, we can come up with ways to help people examine their da ta and learn about it, but since we cannot measure unders tanding it is difficult to tell it we have done our job well. We do not really unders tand understanding.