A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
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A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
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Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
#2This used to be a computer's model of a human being: http://librairie.immateriel.fr/fr/read_book/9780596518394/ch...
The iPad is really, really awesome. But. All that's really changed is that they've added an extra finger. (sure there are three- and four-finger gestures but those just boil down to a different kind of single-finger gesture)
Sadly, we're probably going to have to wait for the advent of supersubstances that can dynamically reconfigure their physical characteristics before we get beyond the finger-and-eye, which I doubt will happen in my lifetime (tears).
Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
#3Excellent Post. More of that please.
I think some sort of HUD in glasses will be the future. Doesnt take up much space (presumably) and allows for rich gesture interaction (like whats already possible with Kinect)
Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
#4Love the effort put into the presentation of this blog post.
Although I personally love all the shiny finger gestures, must agree that this "vision" is only a sexy marketing trick and contains very little actual innovation, and probably even less actual innovation that Microsoft will actually build in the near future, or the long future.
As per the abundance of motors skills that we have, it would indeed be lovely to have those utilized in the future, along with voice and vision, all combined in some complexly simple and elegant way of interacting. Baby steps at a time?
Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
#5Another avenue for substantial progress in interface design, in the same vein as the article's proposition, is tactile feedback, available today from vendors such as Senseg:
http://senseg.com/experience/senseg-demos
This technology has the capacity to bring us beyond "pictures under glass", and seems ready for integration in today's devices, with proper OS and API support.
I could see combining an e-ink display with this kind of tactile feedback surface to replace the user-exposed lower half of a laptop with a device capable of contextual interfaces. Something like this would offer great potential benefits to the user, with no apparent drawbacks.
Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
#6What about the rest of our capabilities using our other senses (sound, smell, taste)? Does anybody think that we will incorporate them into future interfaces more?
Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
#7This was similar to my own reaction [0], that these concept videos don't look far enough forward.
And, maybe because I'm just a born contrarian, as the world moves toward touch-based direct-manipulation paradigms, I've personally been moving toward a more tactile, indirect paradigm. I recently bought a mechanical-switch keyboard, for example, that I'm growing more and more fond of every day. I've also started looking for a mouse that feels better in the hand, with a better weight, and better tactility to the button clicks.
The lack of tactility in touch screen keyboards has always been especially annoying to me. There's just so much information there between my fingers and the keys. I mean, there's an entire state -- the reassuring feeling of fingers resting on keys -- that's completely missing.
I accept the compromise in a phone, something that needs to fit in my pocket so I can carry it around all the time. But this makes me lament the rise of tablet computing. This is the sort of place that I refer to when I talk about tablets privileging consumption over production.
I don't think the problem is relegated to UI hardware, though. I think part of what's holding back a lot richer and more meaningful social interaction online is the fact that current social networking paradigms map better to data than to human psychology. It's the parallel problem of fitting the tool to the problem, but not the user.[1]
I'm not sure I agree with the direction he points to (if I understand him correctly). Making our digital tools act and feel more like real, physical objects is akin to 3D skeuomorphism. It's like making a device to drive nails that looks like a human fist, but bigger and harder. Better, I think, to figure out new ways to take advantage of the full potential of our senses and bodies to manipulate digital objects in ways that aren't possible with physical objects. And, please, Minority Report is not it.
[0]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3184216
[1]: More here: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/11670022371/intimacy-is-perfo... and here: http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/12261287667/in-defense-of-the...
Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
#8This was similar to my own reaction [0], that these concept videos don't look far enough forward. And, maybe because I'm just a born contrarian, as the world moves toward touch-based direct-manipulation paradigms, I've personally been moving toward a more tactile, indirect paradigm. I recently bought a mechanical-switch keyboard, for example, that I'm growing more and more fond of every day. I've also started looking…
I really dislike the lack of tactile feedback on touch devices, as well.
There's technology out there to /provide/ tactile feedback on these devices - but it hasn't been rolled out to anything consumer yet, that I'm aware of.
I can't wait for it:
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/10/29/electrostatic-feedbac...
Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
#9What about the rest of our capabilities using our other senses (sound, smell, taste)? Does anybody think that we will incorporate them into future interfaces more?
Sound probably. But I doubt smell and taste would ever play large roles in UI design - it isn't a huge part of how we interact with the world aside from the obvious bits about eating.
Re: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
#10When you rescale the human body in proportion to how much of the brain is concerned with each part, you end up with this:
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2004/12/sensory-homunculus/
The hands are huge because so much of your brain is devoted to skillfully moving and precisely sensing things with your hands.
Your hands are basically the focus of the human body in interacting with the environment around it.
This explains how moving from buttons and sensors to a touch-sensitive experience is a major and hard-to-explain qualitative difference.
It also underscores the great point made here, that we can make devices far more suited still to the primary way we're designed to interact with the world.