A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design by Bret Victor
I usually feel very skeptical about videos, such as one that was presented by Microsoft on Productivity Future Vision. But, here are couple of points that I made on it:
- I really liked how gamification in education was presented in the video, as it feels less daunting to study for children and they feel more integrated in real life.
- It’s interesting that in all this digitalization, people still have to carry their suitcases physically, they have to wait in lines waiting for train and do other not so productive stuff. So, the video shows a reform in terms of digital devices solely. It’s a shallow vision of the future and our interaction.
- In the video, I saw future life, which lost its colors, because the main color that you can see are blue, green, white and black. There is no vividness.
- I didn’t recognize that so many devices convert what we can do to what we want to do.
- Also, you don’t really think about hands being central point of interaction. Hands our main sensors.
- Feedback from the objects that we are using usually is not verbal, but we can unconsciously feel things, especially if we remember or extensively use things. For example, I’m using a keyboard with arabic characters for writing in english, kazakh and russian languages, because my hands basically remember the location of each letter, which I’m not really aware of.
- The Pictures Under Glass concept can be applied to kids games applications, where they play being a hairdresser and cutting someone’s hair.
- After author of the article said it, I understood that the thing that seemed very strange to me about interactions shown in the video – they felt numb and senseless.
- I found pictures with hands and objects they carry kind of powerful.
- It occurred to me that dance as an activity can bring so much understanding about our daily interactions with our body, since we become more conscious about them.
- I strongly resonated with Bret’s saying that most artistic and engineering projects can’t just be described.
- I didn’t agree with one of the author’s points that if physical interactions should always be very informative and communicative, since I feel like in today’s interactions there is a lot of imagination employed by the users, hence physical may not be the only priority.
- I liked that the author addressed comments in separate article, where he also discussed concept of finger blindness, which is really fascinating.