Hands really are amazing "tools" we all inherently own since the beginning of the humanity. It is amazing how a great variety of intricate tasks we can accomplish with our bare hands as we grasp, touch, pick, thump and performing all kinds of movements. Bret Victor's “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” is looking at today's technology innovation from a different perspective. Rather than emphasizing on the human demand(need) or functionality improvement(technology) or fancy interfaces, he inspired creators/designers to think more about untapped human capabilities like what other things our body parts, not limited to hands, can do instead of simply touching and dragging on the "Pictures on the Glass". He calls attention to our bodies' tactile abilities to feel and sense things, which can be easily ignored when we orient our technologies around glassy visual displays. He plead to not bypass some human capabilities we take for granted. As the starting point and the center for any design is human. I was interested in how he discusses the brain interface in response to others' comments. Technology should not sacrifice/decrease our bodies' capabilities, rather it should be adapted to fit our bodies and to expand our capabilities. The future of interaction design is calling for more extensive human research than ever.
Some notes from “The Art of Interactive Design” by Chris Crawford:
interactivity was the core idea of computing.
Definition: interaction is a cyclic process in which two actors alternately listen, think, and speak.
Interacting is different from reacting.
think of interactivity as a continuous variable with relative measures
The most common design error in interactive products arises from a failure to appreciate this principle. The designer does a slam-bang job with two of thethree steps but blows the third step, believing that the strengths of the first two will outweigh the weakness of the third. But one weak area in an interactive product (or a conversation) is like a weak link in a chain. The chain breaks regardless of the strength of the rest of the links.
the user interface designer considers form only and does not intrude into function, but the interactivity designer considers both form and function in creating a unified design.
Interactivity is superior to all other forms of human expression in one way: it engages the human mind more powerfully than any other form of expression.
Active, direct involvement always demands greater attention than passive observation.
It’s the Computer’s Basis of Competitive Advantage