Who killed the future?

April 8 2010

Whatever happened to the future? Somewhere along the way imagination from design has gotten lost or disappeared. Everyone just keeps treading the same beaten path over and over again. If you take a look at the stuff from the 50’s on paleofuture.com, you will notice that some of those things have been made some way or another. The scope of imagination they had was way better than what I see today. Everything is just a slight improvement of the previous nowadays, nothing new or futuristic appears. Interaction designers job is to make things more accessible, intuitive and more natural or that’s what is being forced in to our heads. I actually disagree, I think we (or some of us) are dumbing down stuff, leading to the death of abstract thinking. While in some cases intuitiveness is desirable, (driving and other things requiring fast reaction) mostly it is purely unnecessary. Take computers for example. Not so long ago, before Windows, the most popular OS was MS-DOS, where you typed the commands you wanted the computer do. Not very intuitive, but people coped with that. Now we have the iPad, which is extremely simple to use. No commands, no navigation, just a few buttons on a touch-screen. Intuitive? Yes. Necessary? No. Desirable? Yes and no. I can’t imagine what to do with an iPad, I can download stuff, maybe draw something on the screen with my finger. But… here’s the thing, I will never get lost in the device, I can’t solve the problem of man vs. machine, which happens quite a lot with Windows and DOS, because the machine has been made to be on my level. Why is it that interaction designer hmm.. legends say that all interactions should be intuitive and natural. I think they are seeing humans as mindless idiots trying to survive in a world built by engineers, who, by the way, are not humans. What if instead of dumbing things down, we think 40 years ahead and try to imagine what we can do. I don’t want the flattest TV ever made with a one-button remote. I want 3D projections that I can feel and smell and taste, and I don’t care if the remote has 893 buttons on it. And I don’t want the world’s most intuitive screen I can read books from. I already have books. I want a device that can put me in hypnosis and upload entire books direct to my brain in seconds and let me imagine the world their way. I don’t want to be told how to get from A to B by a soft spoken female voice. I, as a human being possess something extraordinary called sense of direction, which extremely seldom fails me. Instead, I want to hear ghosts around me telling me of places most secret. And I want my damn flying car already!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq2GWRG8s0s]

April 8 2010
Alejandro permalink

It’s interesting that I just read this other blog post: http://lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns-learning-office-into.html that shares some of the same insights about the dumbing down of the interaction design.
I think this is shows more general problem in our world, were everything is built for the lowest common denominator (technology, media, etc) and we are losing the ability to exploit the tremendous human potential that we all carry within us.

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