Microsoft recently made another one of those "
vision of the future" concept videos, and designer
Bret Victor tears it apart limb from limb. And the limb, in this case is the hand: Bret makes the case that touchscreens make pitifully insufficient use of the versatile and capable human hand. It's true: simply sliding around Pictures Under Glass (as he calls them) like in the top screengrabs from the video is such a
limited interaction, when the hand can do so many things as shown in the bottom rows of photos. Let's hope the future isn't just the same iPad-style interaction model we have now, extended to every possible surface - that's just the present, mindlessly multiplied to aggravating infinity.
Read Bret's rant, and demand something better!
. . .
3 comments:
Just gonna throw out a quick note on this, and I'd love to hear your response. Bret is doing something designers love to do: he's griping about another designer's work, and justifying his complaints by consigning the problem to his own rhetorical terms (in this case, "what is the true nature of the hands?!?"). Thus, he ignores the actual problem the original designer was trying to solve (in this case, "how do we envision the concrete reality that new designers will be working toward?")
Bret offers no suggestion whatsoever of his own... probably because such a suggestion would sound like pure science fiction. Is he suggesting interactive objects made of morphing plastics? Quantum swarms that generate haptic interfaces on the fly? Simply put, he doesn't like the Microsoft designers' solution to a straightforward problem, so he's creating a NEW problem and blaming them for not solving it.
As if to prove this point, note his follow-up: http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/responses.html
He basically walks his whole argument back and says, "Well, I really wasn't trying to offer solutions, that's not my job" (wait, isn't it? Isn't he a designer?)... and "I actually have no problem with the current technology, as a short-term solution" (news flash: your piece opened with the statement that "the current paradigm is actually terrible").
Excellent designers like Brett Victor need to avoid falling into that design trap, where you spend all your time critiquing and leave the brainstorming to someone else.
Sorry -- link to his follow-up didn't work. Maybe this will work better: http://goo.gl/qKPZo
Jesse, thanks for the very well-thought-out counterpoint! I agree with a lot of what you say, even as I stick with what I wrote in the original post - the truth is somewhere between opposing facts, perhaps? I agree that complaining about bad design is much easier than creating good design, so in that sense he takes the easy road - but his complaints are still valid. As for framing the complaints in his specific terms, I see what you mean; if I were to defend him, I guess I'd say he's just offering one fertile area of opportunity that was missed because the video stuck so closely to the iPad interaction model. There are many other missed areas, of course, but instead of doing a broad survey, he did a single in-depth example. I agree with Bret that this vision is woefully uncreative, but I agree with you that the rant is limited in scope, easy for not offering alternative solutions, and occasionally even self-contradictory. But for now, I'll settle for a rant about a flawed vision, even if the rant is flawed itself. :-)
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