Victor’s rant brought to mind the work of Ido Portal and the community surrounding him. Anyone familiar with his work understands that even dancers have a limited understanding of human movement, lacking attention to the development of, among other aspects, hanging. The popular specialist approach to movement, paralleling the other highly specialized industries of our society, provides little guidance for integration and development of movement into everyday life (in the same way nutrition research fails to communicate a guide to developing a healthy relationship with food). As a result of this deprioritization of movement, which Victor briefly mentions when referring to the high frequency of sitting, our most common interactions require little from our body. This reflects the idea of good design as design which requires minimal effort and thereby assumes that effort, stress, and difficulty are all to be avoided. It follows that interaction designers moving into the three-dimensional spaces rendered by AR and VR would benefit from a direct and experimental study and practice of movement as well as a serious confrontation with the fear of risk that makes our daily life monotonous and boring in the name of largely fantastical notion of “safety.” We have to start asking if we want a world where humans are reduced to drooling mouths attached to fingers or fully capable bodies able to create passwords consisting of a series of acrobatic moves, throw our digital essays at our professors for them to grade, or build collaborative three dimensional digital models in real space.

Victor also points out the mistake of glorifying design for children. I want to reiterate this point. Making addictive and repetitive tasks easily accessible to children is a crime. We ought not limit a child’s ability to function in the world because they test our patience or our temperaments. Coddling them and distracting them is the worst thing one can do not only to the child, but the entire human race and the environment in which we exist. We need focused, intelligent, emotional, strong, and capable problem-solvers. Not distracted, dumb, apathetic, weak, and paralyzed attention-seekers.