About four years ago I ran into this lovely blog post from designer Bret Victor, titled: A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design. It struck a particular chord with me and my developing dissatisfaction with the interactive experience we see in the classroom.
When we consider the type of play and tactile exploration of the world we experience when we are really young and then put that against the way we interact with devices and screens nowadays. As Victor explains much of the discussion about interaction and user interface and experience design misses something fundamental.
In this rant, I’m not going to talk about human needs. Everyone talks about that; it’s the single most popular conversation topic in history.
And I’m not going to talk about technology. That’s the easy part, in a sense, because we control it. Technology can be invented; human nature is something we’re stuck with.
I’m going to talk about that neglected third factor, human capabilities. What people can do. Because if a tool isn’t designed to be used by a person, it can’t be a very good tool, right?
As he progresses through the post he helps the reader, well in fact, reminds the reader about our amazing our hands are. The tools we use to interact and manipulate so many different objects around us everyday. And it is this dexterity and capability we underplay with our current designs of the digital interface.
I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.
Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.
Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.
And it was this image below from Bret Victor’s post that immediately made me think of the complexity of how we manipulate and sense the world around us with our hands. The variations are huge.
So where does that leave us in learning and education? How does this make us rethink the way we are working digitally in the classroom?
I for one maintain a healthy dissatisfaction for the classroom technologies we see. But specifically how our children are physically interacting with these technologies and their associated resources. I imagine a time when the human capability Victor refers to and how children use it to learn about the world, forms a much stronger part of their technology experience.
Interestingly after nearly four years (since the original rant from Bret Victor) the challenge hasn’t changed. Our “Pictures under glass” experiences are more refined than ever, but the integration of meaningful tactility and the convergence of complex haptics seems just as far away. I wonder when we will see a shift from refining the visual to exploring the tactility of our interaction experience.
Image from Bret Victor’s post A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
