A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
The author emphasizes that human capabilities are important when thinking about designing the future. I have to agree with this part, especially when he mentioned that humans have hundreds of degrees of freedom, which reminds me of my robotics class—our professor highlighted that robotics takes a lot from human nature, like the robotic 3 degrees of freedom (DOF) arm. So, when designing things, we can make use of human capabilities.
But this is not what the author meant; he wanted designs to make use of our already existing capabilities to interact with them. As he mentioned, a hammer’s grip is meant for a human hand. However, when it comes to the future of interactive design and technology, I have to disagree that interacting with it should require using my full human body, because not everyone is able-bodied. Technology has to be accessible to everyone—isn’t that why we have it? To provide access to more things in a more effective, optimized way?
Making mobile phone calls rather than using a phone booth, reading or listening to books and articles anywhere, anytime—before having interactive design at my fingertips, I would not be able to type on a computer; I would have to go to a bookstore and have a professional typewriter write this reading response out. Sometimes, it takes writing things out to realize how truly blessed we are to have these types of things right at our fingertips.
Then, we can adapt this technology to be used by everyone. I also want to mention that I agree that using the full immersive experience with the human body is much more entertaining and fun. So, it depends on the end-use product or idea. I do not think the author is biased, but I think the author should cover different cases where this is not necessary or makes things harder for some people. I do not think the author changed my mind, but it opened me up to more ideas and thoughts on how to truly design good products that try to include everyone. An example of an incredible inclusive interactive design is the Meta Quest 3 and 3S VR headset, which has an option to play while seated, adjust the distance between the eyes, and even add a glasses prescription. If you do not want to pay extra or share it with family members, it also has space to fit your own glasses.
I had a few questions throughout, but I eventually answered them myself by writing my thoughts out, such as: “Technology has to be accessible to everyone—isn’t that why we have it? To provide access to more things in a more effective, optimized way?” Another question I had was: isn’t a good designer someone who considers different cases to make the product or design as effective as possible?
A follow-up article
I thought the author might cover some of the questions and respond to thoughts similar to mine, but he did not. He seemed to express some dislike for “waving hands in the air” when it comes to manipulating things, because you cannot feel what you are manipulating. From an improvement point of view, I agree that this would be beneficial. However, I believe that if researchers were to receive funding for it, it would mainly come from the medical field, to help people with loss of sensation, such as from neuropathy, stroke, or spinal cord injury.
There are mainly two types of gloves; the type depends entirely on whether the goal is therapeutic improvement (relearning sensation) or sensory substitution (using technology to mimic touch), which I believe could later be used in games. It reminds me of audiobooks, which were initially made to assist people with hearing or reading difficulties in accessing information from books, but nowadays are used by a much larger audience—busy parents, people with demanding work schedules, kinesthetic learners, and many more.
A lot of the time, these types of research efforts end up helping a larger group of people than initially predicted. I believe that designers should make good use of what we have, while researchers should continue to expand on what we need and what we already know.