Why did early broadcast television often show images of announcers standing in a radio studio speaking into microphones?  Why did early adopters of cell phones sometimes stand in old phone booths to make calls from the street?  And why did the first websites launched by newspaper companies look like electronic versions of yesterday’s paper? [Clue: because they were.]

We think a lot about these issues at Thomson Reuters.  They are examples of what behavioral economists and psychologists call framing.  It has been demonstrated empirically that the manner in which fundamentally identical choices are presented (or framed) to humans can result in very different outcomes (See  Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, 1981. "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice." Science 211: 453-458.).

OK, enough social science, why is this important?  I believe we humans have a marked tendency to carry over the limitations of the last era’s technology to our first applications in a new domain, regardless of whether these limitations remain necessary.  It is as if our imaginations remain in blinders. 

Here is an example from the professional information world I inhabit.  The first versions of many professional database products such as our Westlaw required the user to first choose the specific database she wished to search before entering her query  Google does not require this, so why did we?  Framing.  Prior to electronic legal search, researchers like I used the law library.  If I needed to research an issue under Delaware law, I went to the appropriate shelf in the library and then chose the relevant authority.  So when this user workflow was carried over to the first electronic systems, it seemed simple enough to require the user (often the librarian in the early days) to first identify the appropriate database (the “shelf”) and then formulate his query.

Old habits die hard, but I am glad to say that the latest version of Westlaw now in beta has been freed from these old restraints.  All the complexity resides in the sophisticated search algorithms and the interface is blissfully simple and elegant.  A great deal of what we think of as innovation is really an exercise in removing our inherited blinders or jumping out of our frames.  But if it were that easy, the the first cell phone would have been an iPhone.