In his rant on the future of interaction design, Victor appreciates the dexterity of human hands and proposes a perspective on why future interfaces should go beyond the Picture Under Glass interaction paradigm.

According to Victor, hands can do two amazing things: hands feel things, and hands manipulate things. To me, I agree that it’s a pity that our sense of touch is not fully used when we are using an iPad or a laptop. As these electronic devices often generate almost no haptic feedback, sometimes it can be hard to interpret using only our vision. For example, if I press a button to launch a certain task which may take some time to process, then, without any discernible feedback on what is happening on the screen, I can become unsure about whether I have actually triggered the process or not, and thus I may repetitively press the button.

On the other hand, when it comes to hands manipulating things, Victor suggests that we should take full advantage of our dexterity, and so designers should not make things universally easy. When responding to the fact that a child can’t tie his shoelaces but can use the iPad, he seems to say that the more sophisticated the interaction is, the better the design. However, while utilizing our sense of touch can lead to better human-machine communication, I wonder how using more difficult body language can improve the current design. Perhaps difficult interactions can stimulate users and expand their cognitive capabilities, but I guess it’s still not necessary. After all, at least for all the electronic devices I can think of, they can be controlled easily by simply sliding or scrolling. Then why do we have to incorporate more gestures and make the control more complicated? Although we do have dexterous hands, this doesn’t mean that we have to use them all the time. And in some situations, our hands may be occupied and thus unable to perform sophisticated gestures. For example, when one is driving, he may not be able to type a password on his phone. Nevertheless, even though he is focused on the road, he is still able to turn on/off the car’s AC or music by simply pressing a button, provided that there is good feedback from the button (it has to be a non-visual feedback, though, perhaps a haptic one in the future) on whether the system is indeed turned on.

Unfortunately, though they are not hard to use, current UIs often lack this essential feedback to the users, which is crucial to our communication with the device. Therefore, to improve the current interaction process, we could pay more attention on how our hands feel things in order to overcome the “permanent numbness” when controlling by hand. Thus I think the way to futuristic interaction design is to focus on more tangible user interface than complicated interaction gestures.