Reading notes of “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” by Bret Victor

Summary

A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities. A tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. A great tool is designed to fit both sides.

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?

Hands feel things, and hands manipulate things.

Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade. Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness

When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat. Our fingers have an incredibly rich and expressive repertoire, and we improvise from it constantly without the slightest thought.

We live in a three-dimensional world. Our hands are designed for moving and rotating objects in three dimensions, for picking up objects and placing them over, under, beside, and inside each other. No creature on earth has a dexterity that compares to ours.

Are they attached to anything? Yes — you’ve got arms! And shoulders, and a torso, and legs, and feet! And they all move!

My thoughts

I agree with Bret Victor on his explanation about the tools and power of hands. Indeed, our hands have tactile richness for the tools and outside world. However, I think it is not fair to compare “touchscreen” with hand. It is already a big step for us to throw away the keyboard and mouse for iPhone and iPad.

Overall, this article gives me lots of thinking about things I am going to design & build in the future. One really needs to think about human capacity and powerful body part, we need to think about eyesight & hearing & smell & touch & human imagination before inventing anything for human!

[1] Bret Victor, A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design