Touchscreens have no hand
edwardtufte.com
Touchscreens have no hand
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Touchscreens have no hand
#2This is just a part of the world of impersonal mass production. Make everything the same. I sometimes wonder if electronics would benefit more from the world of welding and construction where the maker often leaves their personal mark somewhere on the finished product. Many hands went into the construction of a tablet but each is almost identical and has almost no hints as to its origin or the mood of the assembly line worker on that particular day or whether the sun was shining while it was on the delivery plane as it was landing. Companies often talk about 'brand identification' and 'personalization' but is it any closer to reality than the coat of fingerprint remover?
Re: Touchscreens have no hand
#3I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating. It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was allowed to simply be paint. Painting stopped being a way to represent the real world on a canvas and was allowed to be itself, the real advantages of paint came out.
Well, let's stop pretending that the tablet is a representation of the real world, and let pixels be pixels. Why pretend they're anything more than that? "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" as Magritte so eloquently put it in '28-29.
Pixels, while not having the 3 dimensional qualities of the real world, surely have many of their own unique qualities; that while we attempt to copy the real world, remain unexplored.
Re: Touchscreens have no hand
#4I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating. It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was allowed to simply be paint. Painting…
I think the fundamental problem isn't one of emulation, it's the lack of any kind of tactile feedback. I write music software and there's a world of difference between a real knob on a synthesizer or a real piano key and any representation you put on a screen. Touchscreens have unique strengths and weaknesses.
Re: Touchscreens have no hand
#5I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating. It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was allowed to simply be paint. Painting…
I think the fundamental problem isn't one of emulation, it's the lack of any kind of tactile feedback. I write music software and there's a world of difference between a real knob on a synthesizer or a real piano key and any representation you put on a screen. Touchscreens have unique strengths and weaknesses.
I'm totally with you. After I've aquired a smartphone (HTC Desire), I've come to the conclusion that the only thing that touchscreens are good for is scrolling. I hate writing on it, I hate pushing buttons and links, I hate that the virtual objects that I interact with gets occluded by my fingers, I hate that I have to hold my phone in awkward ways so I don't accidentally "push" virtual "buttons". Many of these irritations stem from the fact that the interface has no tactile feedback, and does not respond to different levels of pressure (like ordinary buttons).
Touchscreens are a regression in user interfaces, and I hope that the future will bring a comeback of more tactile input devices, like keyboards.
Re: Touchscreens have no hand
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the fundamental problem isn't one of emulation, it's the lack of any kind of tactile feedback. I write music software and there's a world of difference between a real knob on a synthesizer or a real piano key and any representation you put on a screen. Touchscreens have unique strengths and weaknesses.
I'm totally with you. After I've aquired a smartphone (HTC Desire), I've come to the conclusion that the only thing that touchscreens are good for is scrolling. I hate writing on it, I hate pushing buttons and links, I hate that the virtual objects that I interact with gets occluded by my fingers, I hate that I have to hold my phone in awkward ways so I don't accidentally "push" virtual "buttons". Many of these irrit…
This is why I got a HTC Desire Z instead of a HTC Desire.
Re: Touchscreens have no hand
#7I think he's limited himself by the idea of a physical screen but I nonetheless agree with the sentiment that we should use our computers to give us more time in the physical world, not replace it.
Re: Touchscreens have no hand
#8This is just a part of the world of impersonal mass production. Make everything the same. I sometimes wonder if electronics would benefit more from the world of welding and construction where the maker often leaves their personal mark somewhere on the finished product. Many hands went into the construction of a tablet but each is almost identical and has almost no hints as to its origin or the mood of the assembly li…
I think you touched on the underlying principle of why pictures behind glass interfaces are so popular. The only way to satisfy the mass demand and follow market rules is to master cloning of physical objects. Not everyone can afford a piano but everyone can have a piano app, because of perfect copies of software and near perfect copies of hardware.
Re: Touchscreens have no hand
#9I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating. It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was allowed to simply be paint. Painting…
> the high point of [painting and sculpture] was reached during the point of pure abstraction
On what criteria do you base this assessment? What’s an example of “pure” abstraction? Do e.g. the impressionists make the cut, or are they too representational to be part of the “high point”? What about Rodin?
Re: Touchscreens have no hand
#10The problem for me is about how we input something in the machine. iPad, Kindle, etc. are wonderful for consuming content, and this can probably be done efficiently enough with touchscreen interfaces. But producing content is one important part of the deal (specially for guys like Tufte), and in this activity the physical grain of the interface become prominent.
In my dream, I would have a phone-like thing, small enough to fit in my pocket. I would be able to put it on a flat surface and two laser rays would draw a rectangle were I would be able to draw or write. What I draw would be projected on the surface by the laser in real-time, so I'd have the feedback that is missing on electronic draw-pads. With this we would go back to hand-writing for most of us, and it would be possible to have a keyboard drawn on the surface and use fingers. The haptic feedback is the hard part, but I think laser can't "touch" you so I don't see how to do it.