Bret Victor’s “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” calls out future interfaces to be mere pictures under glass. He argues that this approach is ignoring the amazing capabilities of the human hands. Current trends focus too much on visual interactions, neglecting our sense of touch. Hands are powerful tools for a sense of dexterity and manipulation, something currently absent in a lot of touch based technologies. He takes inspiration from Alan Key’s early vision of the iPad, and encourages designers to explore our mediums that can potentially improve user experiences by engaging us both visually and sensually. A lot of his argument actually makes sense. It is human nature, from being babies to be attracted to bring screens, but our immediate reaction to anything is to touch it, see if it turns, or moves, or if its a switch or a knob. We always seek some sense of physical manipulation in objects, and I do think modern technologies are limiting this to a far more visual approach. Even when I type essays, I prefer using a laptop keyboard over my iPad screen, because I genuinely like the touch-and-feel of clicking and clacking on the keyboard keys- it somehow motivates me to write better. Even though this isn’t a full usage of hands and body movements, this minute degree of change in physical interaction itself makes me more interested. “With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?” – this statement really opened my eyes to how much technology has been reshaped to fit users to a limited physical experience.
In the response article, he answers some of the questions people had. I can admit that I too was unsure of the stylus situation. And I’m not sure how styluses can be made to be dynamic. I fully agree with him on the voice input part- I never found that to be appealing or better. Overall, I’d say Vistor’s rant on the future of interaction design is completely justifiable- to be futuristic doesn’t mean to be deprived of sensuality. Rather embracing the movements of our hands and channeling a sense of physical interaction can definitely aid us in improving the future of interaction.