When we do perform tasks simultaneously, all but one of them have become habitual or, to use another term favored by some psychologists, automatic. The task that we pay attention to is handled by our cognitive conscious, the automatic tasks are run by our cognitive unconscious.
This is all well known, but the implications for the design of products from cars to phones to PDAs to computer software have not been internalized by most designers and marketers of appliances that deal with information.
As a consequence, nearly every such product is designed badly, with features guaranteed to cause human error, error which could have been avoided by proper design. I will discuss how an $80,000 car, the BMW745i, nearly killed me with such a design error. I will also discuss how radically computer interfaces must be redesigned if they are to permit us to concentrate our limited attention to the task at hand, and to reduce the operation of the computer itself to habit safely.
About the speaker: Jef was a key, early Apple designer, is an influential consultant, and recently wrote The Humane Interface in Behaviour and Information Technology.