Only Kinect

It is now commonly known that the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard layout was designed to make typing slower (because early mechanical typewriters were prone to jamming). What is not generally acknowledged is that this seemingly contradictory approach to design is not the exception, but the rule.

First, let’s be honest about ourselves — about humans. We are magnificent. These astounding brains, coupled with these eyes, ears, hands, language, sense of proprioception, facial expressiveness (I could go on), creates an astonishingly rich package. There is something almost dizzyingly wonderful about the ways that humans communicate with each other, using our minds to control our muscles and interpret our perceptions with a degree of subtlety and effortlessness that we too often take for granted.

Yet as engineers, we are limited. We cannot create anything as wonderful as ourselves, and so we compromise. Our vehicles lack the supreme holonomic grace, balance and flexibility of our own natural movement, so to compensate we make them fast. Our networks of computers are incapable of true thought, reason or judgement, so we compensate by giving them vast powers to sift through data and find patterns by brute force.

We tend not to notice the limitations of our own tools, because our fantastically protean brains and bodies adapt to any tool so quickly that we often overlook the tool’s limitation. Take, for example, the standard Graphical User Interface — buttons, sliders, icons, pull-down menus, all those things you control with mouse or touch screen.

Like the QWERTY keyboard before it, the GUI is, quite literally, designed to cripple us. It deliberately makes us slow, inefficient, clumsy, awkward. You probably think I’m being facetious, but I’m not. After all, from the point of view of any major software company designing interface tools for office workers, the last thing you want is an optimal interface.

No, you want to slow people down, to force them to do exactly one thing at a time. While a software user is pressing a button or changing a slider, they cannot do anything else. This is a very useful design quality in extremely large software systems targeted for purchase by financial institutions and other major corporate clients employing thousands of office workers. The more you can control and restrict the possible things a user can do at once, the more reliably you can guarantee a measurable and repeatable level of productivity.

Apple and its competitors are currently playing an analogous game in the arena of multitouch tablets. As we all learn the pinch gesture, the two finger swipe, the tap and drag, we gradually come to believe that this is what good tactile expression is. But of course exactly the opposite is true. We are in fact being trained to think of a crippling level of inexpressiveness as acceptable.

To realize this is true, think of all the expressiveness and subtlety that your hands and fingers are actually capable of, when playing a guitar or violin, when sculpting in clay, even when simply turning the pages of a book. We are being taught that to access the world of software and shared information, we must abandon all of that power within our own bodies and minds.

The only recent interface I’ve seen that bucks this trend is Microsoft’s Kinect. Of the crop of human/computer interface products out there, only Kinect seems to have the potential, over time, to evolve in a way that does justice to the vast power of human expressiveness.

And so I am encouraged that one day soon we will get over our foolishness. We will embrace our birthright, and design computational interfaces that make full use of gesture, touch, hearing, vision, facial expression, body language, line of sight, proprioception, rhythm, balance, language, and the many other things we use to communicate with each other.

And then things will start to get interesting.