What Will Tomorrow's User Interface Look Like?

11:59 PM Dec 18, 2006

In a sense, speaking of a "user interface" commits us in advance to a perspective on data manipulation that ought not pass unscrutinized. Indeed, it is one conditioned by our present-day point-and-click experience of computing -- where the things we wish to interact with are permanently alien to ourselves and can be met only through intermediary layers. But are these layers so abstract from the information behind them and the users before them? Last week's post on musical instruments offers pause to reconsider. Is it really right at any meaningful level to say that a harp numbers among "user interfaces for generating music through the vibration of strings"? A harp's interface is one with its function, with the tone it produces: give its strings instead a piano's "interface" and you have ... a piano. The same is true of these chess pieces. The game is the interface. But that isn't true any longer by the time we come to this: Here, game and interface are distinctly different creatures. We get to the former by way of the a keyboard or (in other incarnations of the phenomenon) mouse movements, or buttons on game controllers, or cell phones keypads. We're still playing chess -- we think -- but we're also sitting and clicking. An anecdote I once heard had a writer describing her child's understanding of the mother's vocation: "Sure, I know what you do. You type." One might well laugh, but it's seductively easy to become trapped in this child's reckoning. Have a look at Chewbacca and R2-D2 playing a futuristic chess-like game from the original Star Wars: We've gained a third dimension, but despite occupying a game space much like that ancient chess board, around which the contestants are physically huddled, they game remains beyond the grasp of its players. At the lower left of the image, R2-D2 is plugging into an interface in order to move. Director and audience alike are more prepared to accept androids, interstellar travel and planet-smashing weapons than a portal joining flesh and digital information. But maybe ...

[Graphic User Interfaces] fall short of embracing the richness of human senses and skills people have developed through a lifetime of interaction with the physical world ... the use of graspable objects and ambient media will lead us to a much richer multi-sensory experience of digital information.

[Source.]

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