A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
This guy really doesn’t like screens, so much so that he calls screens “Pictures Under Glass”, meaning that they provide no connection to the task that one is performing. And to be honest, that is true. Even while typing this response, I can feel the keys under my fingertips, knowing where each key is without looking at it. I can tell exactly how much pressure I need to apply on each key for it to type something. I hear a clicking sound whenever I press a key, and I can anticipate which key produces which sound before I even press it with my fingers. I honestly love my keyboard because of how it feels to the touch, even though it’s not exactly very dynamic. I can’t say the same for my phone screen.
This guy suggests that screens were never meant to be the final all-encompassing technology of interaction design, but they are merely a transitional technology. After all, what else in the natural world do we use the gesture of sliding our fingers for? Even the act of making a sandwich requires more interaction than screens, the supposed Interface of the Future.
I find this vision of the future of interaction design very interesting, because I’ve never really thought about how much screens on handheld devices actually ignore our very hands before. I am curious to explore some other visions and ideas that consider this incapacity of screens and provide other exciting possibilities for the purpose of interaction design.
Responses
This guy mentions the idea of finger-blindness here which really caught my eye. Finger blindness, as he puts it, is when you don’t use your hands to their full potential for doing what they were meant to do (not swiping away at screens) making it harder to attach meaning and value to the act of touching something, which is a scary thought. Other than that, I love how this guy addresses these responses with humor and also makes sense at the same time. He reiterates that screens aren’t necessarily bad – for now. It’s just that we shouldn’t be limiting ourselves to just screens when we think about future advancements in technology but come up with other receptive devices that appreciate the intricacy of our hands. After all, humans deserve so much more than just screens.