Dual Transmission

Sharing the Road

I’m interested in the spaces that humans and computers share, specifically ways that data is displayed, transmitted, or stored in a way that must be effective for both parties. Sometimes systems are designed with this consideration in mind and present balanced solutions, but often one party (the human) is an afterthought. Developing new technology is hard! It should come as no surprise that usability is considered only after technical concerns are met.

A Kimball tag — Wikimedia Commons

One of the first methods of storing and processing data was in the form of punched paper cards. In the early nineteenth century Joseph Marie Jacquard perfected an automatic loom that could weave patterns according to a series of punched cards, a precursor to the mechanical computer. It was a pretty good system, and their widespread use lasted into at least the 1970s.

One advantage of using paper as a storage medium — you can write on it. Starting in the 1950s punched cards were used in retail for price tags as well as to keep track of inventory. This little piece of paper carries two layers of information, one for the computer and one for the human, mostly in case of computer malfunction or corruption of the machine-readable data. This same consideration is why the Kimball tags successor, barcodes, generally include numerical representation of the data they contain.

Research and development in the 1950s allowed banks to embed information into the checks they were already processing. Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, or MICR, is still in use, and is a great example of an elegant balance of machine- and human-readability in design. As with many other successful advances MICR was able to piggy-back on existing technology, needing only a new magnetizable ink in conjunction with a special typeface.

E-13B — Wikimedia Commons

In fact this design was so successful that it was the inspiration for a whole category of typefaces, many of which still invoke the techno-optimism of the 1950s and 1960s. A non-exhaustive list:

Westminster            Data70          Computer           Countdown
           Gemini           Orbit-B          Minicomputer

CMC-7 is another MICR typeface that is in use in much of the non-English-speaking world. It more accurately depicts the number forms but encodes its data through the use of vertical white space, similar to a barcode pattern.

CMC-7 — Wikimedia Commons

Optical Character Recognition

Another development in character recognition allowed computers to read characters optically, known as OCR. Released in 1968, the typeface called OCR-A is still in wide use today on checks, but also as an evocative display face.

OCR-A Capitals — Wikimedia Commons

OCR-B — Wikimedia Commons

The typeface designer Adrian Frutiger created OCR-B as well, which is actually the worldwide standard for optical character recognition today. One is much less likely to notice what it is, though, as it has been designed to more closely conform to normal typographic standards. It is easier to read, but also blends in with the type-environment around it.