Future Interfaces: A Failure of Imagination?
Thanks to our friend TiVo, my wife and I have been catching up on some shows we missed the first time around. Among them is Star Trek: Enterprise, the prequel series to the original Trek. One of the difficulties the writers ran into with Enterprise is that although the story is set about a century before the original series, the actual show aired more than 30 years later.
Screen, Circa 2150?
Of course, to Trek's credit, we're all familiar with the many futuristic innovations the show created: transporters, replicators, warp drive, etc. If we can imagine these technologies, though, why do we have such a failure of imagination when it comes to our computers and how we interact with them? Sure, the computers in Trek do eventually learn to talk, and that's certainly a plus for usability, but all of the things we tend to imagine well are obvious extensions of what we already do. We can see ourselves traveling faster and farther and making meals out of thin air, but we can't seem to quite make the quantum leap beyond our current modes of operation.
The desktop computer itself, let alone our arsenal of mini-gadgets, has been around barely 30 years, and it was virtually unimaginable a century ago. The internet has revolutionized our lives in less than a decade. Are we capable of looking forward another 100-150 years? Yes, it's easy to imagine that the technology we have now will get smaller and faster, but how will we use it to make our lives better? Isn't that the ultimate question of usability and interface design?
Dr. Pete
· Tuesday, September 18Thanks, Joshua; that's a fascinating video. Maybe Apple would've had a better reaction if they hadn't paired their optimistic vision of the hi-tech future with animations of the rapid destruction of the earth :)
Seriously, though, futurism is a hard game for corporations to play; there's a fine line between a vision and a promise in the eyes of consumers. On the other hand, I have every confidence that all of the advances in that video are achievable in the relatively near future.
Overall, though, I'm just surprised that, given the rapid advances we've seen in the past couple of decades, our broader vision seems so limited. I suppose it's not a requirement of usability, but part of understanding what people want (for me) is trying to think about what they'll want down the road.
Kevin
· Tuesday, September 18As humans continue to innovate, at some point, we're going to hit maximum usability for whatever we're trying to do. In the case of electronic display screens, other than increasing resolution and refresh rate, I don't think much more can be done. Its goal is to convey digital visual information to the user as quickly and easily as possible, and other than possibly holograms and a direct brain jack a-la "The Matrix," there's no way to improve on this. I wouldn't be surprised if people trying to improve on this end up rolling back their changes, because at some point, adding more features or redesigning anything reduces usability. Come to think about it, it would be funny to watch Picard hail someone and then shove a plug into the back of his head.
I might be thinking too narrow-mindedly, and admittedly, a lot of advances come from pushing these boundaries, but in the end, all you can do is make things bigger and faster. "Innovation" becomes an issue of who makes the fastest processor or fastest warp drive, but they're still processors and warp drives...
Dr. Pete
· Thursday, September 20Kevin, I'd be happy to see that "maximum usability" day come, but I imagine we're a long way from it. Just about when we top out one technology, a completely different one will come along, and the usability questions start all over.
Innovation-wise, my curiosity is more along the qualitative and quantitative. Sure, everything technological will get smaller and faster, but how will we change the way we work, etc.? What's the next thing that will be as revolutionary as the internet that we haven't even imagined?
Joshua Ledwell
· Tuesday, September 18Interesting post. Two observations for you:
1. I was reading about a computer imagination project similar to what you're describing. In 1988, Apple produced a video clip for employees only called Knowledge Navigator:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5144094928842683632
The story goes that Apple overreached, and really damaged morale with a vision that was so far ahead of reality.
2. You would think inventing computer advances would be the province of science-fiction writers, but these days, many of them have been seduced by William Gibson's observation about the future. "The future is already here," he said, "it's just not evenly distributed."