First there was clothing, and it was good. Then came washers and dryers, which made things better. Then, of course, came washing instructions, and that's where the trouble began.
In 1997, the Federal Trade Commission decreed that garment makers could use symbols instead of words on the laundering tags every new garment has to carry. With their various gradations and shadings, many of these federally approved pictograms are cryptic. A reasonable person would interpret the "do not bleach" symbol, for instance, as meaning "no pyramids allowed!" These elegant pictograms, developed by the insightful folks at the American Society for Testing and Materials, are a triumph of cross-cultural communication - equally incomprehensible to everyone, no matter what your mother tongue.
Language sometimes fails in the same way images do. Who among us hasn't wrestled with incoherent VCR programming instructions or a maddening software manual?
All this is a relatively new problem. Before Cissell Manufacturing introduced the first tumble dryer in 1951, for example, no one needed to know whether or not it was OK to tumble dry that sweater. They had no choice.
But for the last century or so, technology has outpaced our ability to tell one another how to use it. The globalization of production and consumption has only made things worse, requiring product instructions to aspire to a kind of commercial Esperanto that puzzles people from San Francisco to Sweden.
That's no good. Product descriptions, instruction booklets, laundry tags, user manuals and all the other detritus of new technology are the unexplored territory of modern business, the places on the map of commerce where the land seems to peter out and the space is filled with serpents. Seeing no advantage in colonizing this bleak territory, businesses long ago ceded it to a gang of attorneys and functional illiterates who produce materials few people can understand or use.
In a land of plenty where most of what people buy isn't strictly needed, the conventional wisdom is that aspirational ads are more effective selling tools than a well-wrought manual. Yet the essentially mysterious nature of many products makes people wary and actually retards the adoption of new technologies, even if they might be useful. Things we buy that flummox us undermine our faith in our own purchasing decisions and eradicate whatever feel-good glow the advertising may have induced in the first place.
The news is that change is in the wind, and it will come from that unlikeliest of quarters: the very technology that brought us the problem in the first place. Imagine, for example, that clothing carried smart tags containing laundering information in a host of languages. American washers and dryers would read and display the instructions in English, but in Paris they'd appear in French. Dryers might even issue an alarm or refuse to run if they contained an item embedded with a "do not tumble dry" chip. You might not understand the tag, in other words, but your appliances would.
