A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
Watching the video of Microsoft’s Productivity Vision mainly invoked one emotion in me: apprehension. I quite agree with the author that taking “Pictures Under Glass”, magnifying them, making them 3D, and making them part of all household appliances/human interactions really is not the answer. The author comments on how our hands do so many wonderful things, like grabbing, sensing texture, and feeding us information that we take for granted. There are many more things that our brains also do, actions which would be stifled by the Vision Of The Future. For example, in the video clip, the woman arrives in an airport in Germany, taps her glasses, and immediately hears a translated version of everything around her. Firstly, phones already do this kind of work, so transferring to glasses is the sort of “meaningless step up from the status quo” the author refers to. Secondly, if someone were to go through a foreign country with all relevant information perfectly translated and projected in a hologram in front of them in real time, they would lose so much of the experience of traveling — asking what a word means, sharing a laugh over some funny mispronunciation, finding an amazing spot after getting lost, etc. It seems like these future technologies are designed to minimize mistakes, whether by finishing your sentence for you, or telling you exactly what is in your fridge, when we actually learn a lot from our mistakes. Okay, maybe it would be useful to know when something in your fridge has gone bad, but we are already able to do that with our senses of smell, touch, taste, and sight, again proving the author’s point.
Responses: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
The paragraph that stood out to me most from this reading was:
“We’ve almost given up on the body already. We sit at a desk while working, and sit on a couch while playing, and even sit while transporting ourselves between the two. We’ve had to invent this peculiar concept of artificial “exercise” to keep our bodies from atrophying altogether… Why do you want this future? Why would this be a good thing?”
This reminded me of a reading about how the education system is not designed to encourage learning and creativity. Kids naturally learn through moving their bodies, and yet after a certain age, all knowledge is expected to be obtained by sitting at a desk, only engaging the senses of sight and hearing. The ironic thing was, I was doing this reading, learning about the failings of sitting and reading to learn by sitting and reading.
I think the author’s suggestion for truly revolutionary kinesthetic interfaces might alleviate this problem. I don’t know what form it would take, but it sounds like a good opportunity to introduce natural curiosity and bodily feedback back into our daily lives and learning processes.