Response to “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design”

Found this post yesterday:
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/

Summarized by…

“The next time you make a sandwich, pay attention to your hands. Seriously! Notice the myriad little tricks your fingers have for manipulating the ingredients and the utensils and all the other objects involved in this enterprise. Then compare your experience to sliding around Pictures Under Glass.

Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?

With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?”

One of the problems I have with, I’ll say, mainstream UX design today (or whatever it’s being called lately) is that there’s too much emphasis on the screen, and “new” interaction design just ends up being different ways to package a touchscreen.

It’s frustrating that most UX design is limited to wire-framing. I guess I’m still stuck this “creative technologist” rant by that W+K guy. (A Creative Technology Director at W+K rants about Creative Technologists. http://blog.wk.com/2011/10/21/why-we-are-not-hiring-creative-technologists/. Basically, he states that to be a creative technologist, you have to live and breath programming.)

Honestly, I’m not too confident that I know what a creative technologist is and I certainly don’t infer from the title “coder-only”. His rant seems so defeatist that in order to do whatever the cool new thing is you had to be a coder…which is yet another screen.

Yeah, you have to use a computer to code, and many new interfaces (i.e., projections, sound-design, electronics/pcomp) sometimes require serious coding. But, coming originally from the dance world, and living in the real world, I know that screens are just a small part of what’s out there. Sometimes I feel that that gets forgotten with most types of interaction design.