Ladies and gentlemen, the culture has peaked.

May 7 2009
by

One of the best articles I’ve read in a while. Found it from Bruce Sterling’s blog.

Read the article here.

I think this applies to almost everything. All the things around us are just becoming glossified repetitions of the old. Real innovation is just gone, vanished like a fart in the wind. Touchscreens, sure. Gesture controls, oh yeah. 3D TVs, absolutely, Augmented realities, of course. But what the hell are they for? Nobody buys Blu-rays, because nobody needs them, sure they have niche market, but it’s definitely not a thing that there is demand for in a bigger market. In my opinion, this recession is justified. There is a lot of hype, but zero action.

from: Interaction Design

2 Comments leave a new comment!
May 8 2009
Keith Lang permalink

I certainly understand your frustration Mikko . But let’s have a look back:
Massive investments in computing from the US government for war purposes made the initial leaps in computing possible

– ENIAC was built for artillery trajectory computation (first programmable digital computer)
– Whirlwind/SAGE build for US air defense (first interactive computer)
– Silicon Valley was funded largely by US gov war efforts for Radar analysis (transistors etc.)
– This included much of SRI’s funding (the mouse, personal computing)

I don’t know if this ‘pure research’ funding is still happening. However, the work done at Xerox PARC and Apple was obviously funded privately, and represents a huge amount of innovation, so it’s not a necessary thing.

One of the bigger problems these days is patents. Unless you’re a big player, able to swap patents like baseball cards, then it seems to me (although I’ve not tried) that it would be hard to enter the field of hardware, especially in touch interfaces, haptics, gesture controlled devices.

There *is* great innovation happening in the social space — facebook, twitter etc. is genuine innovation in computing, it just doesn’t smell like solder. And there are some big leaps to come in the detail of how we interact with machines using multi-touch, haptics, 3D cameras, location and context-aware computing. It take times – the mouse was decades old before it achieved wide commercial success.

May 8 2009
Mikko permalink

I agree completely with you about the patents issue. The most innovation to UI is already happening in the open-source movement, not in Cupertino or Redmond (who both take stuff from the *nix world and give them fancy names and a whole lot of IP stuff). Innovation, it seems, is moving from giants to tribes, where the patents don’t exist, it’s just taking its time to get there. But, my point was that there seems to be a whole lot of “fake” innovation, like aformentioned blu-ray, that really is, in my opinion, putting glittery lipstick on a pig. Innovation for the sake of making more money, without even questioning whether it’s needed. Also you are correct about the social aspect of computing, which neatly ties in with the giants to tribes ideology. Centralized resources are getting weaker as people are starting take most of the network they have built around them. Dare I predict the death of corporation? And now I feel like Karl Marx, oh dear.

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