A Brief Rant on The Future of Interactive Design
Firstly, its clear that the author has strong feelings about the visions that people are suggesting for the future of technology but I felt that the author described what he felt should change clearly. I personally really liked the example of a hammer where the handle is made for the human and on the other end is the actual tool. It’s a simple object but it made me realize the importance of human centered design. The author had a large emphasis on hands and basically the torso. I liked the distinction he had made between touchscreen devices and how its just a “picture under glass” meaning that there was no tactile feedback based on what part of the screen you were pressing or based on what program you were using. A personal anecdote of mine is that touch-typing on a laptop or just any physical keyboard is much, much easier than on a phone for example. It’s hard to tell which key you are pressing an often the only way of getting it right is by sheer luck. While he did not give any specific solution (which was a common response to the article) it was still necessary to outline the problem no matter how obvious it seemed.
It’s a common trope that in the future we will be interacting with holograms and swiping or touching imaginary screens in the air which we can only see when wearing some kind of glasses, which is similar to what apple are attempting with the apple vision pro. While it makes a lot of sense I’m not sure how it can be made more tactile. For one there has to be a sense of weight when interacting with something to make it more intuitive and some kind of feedback at our fingertips. I imagine a way of making some kind of tactile feedback at our fingertips could be by using some kind of glove which magically gives feedback (maybe in the future the solution will be obvious but right now its magic, at least for me). In any case I found the reading interesting and there is a lot to digest and consider despite its conciseness (I think thats a word).