A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

I understand why Bret Victor has a strong stance against using hands to manipulate Pictures Under Glass when our capabilities exceed beyond that nowadays. His rant reminded me of the movie- Wall-E; the way the development of technology focuses extensively on people’s convenience and time-effectiveness, we may be numbing our senses to the point our lives cannot sustain without technology. 

Although he pointed out the lack of acknowledgment of our capabilities in our current technological development, I still feel that we are doing a good job. The idea of technology revolving around the idea of convenience not only is extremely efficient and helpful for us, but also for those who have physical difficulties in operating something we can easily do. Touchscreens may be restricting our hands’ meticulous muscle contractions and movements, but they can certainly be useful to others who can’t perform such actions. 

However, I do feel that the so-called ‘trend’ in technology may be limiting to potential ideas and creativity; we tend to frame our expectations on existing things around us, and I think this is why we see many products in the market that are just renewed versions of the previous models.

Responses

I also think that the optimum age range of technology has widened, but toddlers and young children’s overexposure to digital screens is also very worrying.  Although they may have a head start in operating high-technology at a very young age, it reduces their eye movements which are significant during the stages of their early developments. We may be losing our capabilities one by one as our technology improves. Some technology even allows us to do things beyond our capabilities; this may be useful in the short term, but I feel that we are in a grey area between the boundaries of getting help from the technology and letting it do things for us, and I appreciate that the writer ‘ranted’ about such issue to raise awareness of the problem. Without the awareness, we are very likely to let everything be done for us without even having to move.