Bret Victor’s “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” reads less like a complaint and more like a plea for imagination. His frustration with “pictures under glass” isn’t really about touchscreens rather about how easily we mistake convenience for progress. Victor’s argument that our hands are not just pointers but thinking tools is relatable. I’d never thought of a touchscreen as “numb,” but he’s right: sliding a finger across glass is nothing like twisting, folding, or shaping an object. He’s asking designers to respect the body’s intelligence, the millions of years of evolution that made us good at feeling, gripping, and sensing the world. I agree with him almost entirely. What unsettles me is how quickly we’ve accepted numbness as normal. We’ve trained ourselves to think that friction is a flaw when it comes to UX.
The Responses piece adds an interesting layer of humility. Victor doesn’t pretend to have the solution. He admits he was ranting, not designing one. Still, his answers to critics are telling. He pushes back against gimmicks like voice control and “waving your hands in the air,” arguing that real interaction should involve the whole body and the tactile richness of touch. I found myself nodding at his line about computers needing to adapt to our bodies, not the other way around. That’s such a simple reversal, yet it cuts right through decades of design laziness. When he compares touchscreen culture to “restricting all literature to Dr. Seuss’s vocabulary,” it’s funny, but it also nails the deeper loss: we’re settling for tools built for children, not adults.
If there’s one thing I’d question, it’s Victor’s nostalgia for physicality. I agree that touch and movement matter, but I also think the human imagination adapts. The digital world is training new forms of dexterity which are mostly mental than physical. Coding, multitasking, navigating layered interfaces – these, too, are forms of “touch,” just less visible. Maybe the future of interaction design isn’t about replacing glass with holographic clay, but about balancing sensory depth with cognitive range. Victor’s rant reminds me that design should evolve with both the hand and the mind.