We tend to forget that there is nothing “natural” about clothing, or chairs, or books, or the many other age-old technologies that we rely upon. We often need to be reminded that these are highly evolved technologies, precisely because successful technologies become invisible. In fact, a good indication of the success of a technology is how invisible it has become.
You never “access your clothing”, or “interface with a chair”, or “activate a book”. You get dressed, sit down and read.
I am conscious, as my colleagues and I develop new ways for humans to interact with information, that the best innovations, the ones that have a shot at being of use to future generations, are not going to be the flashiest or the most clever. Rather, they will be the ones that succeed in being so useful that they become invisible as they fade gracefully into the fabric of our daily lives, until they seem to be reality itself.
As you suggest, the language matters too: bonkersworld.net
🙂
You mean, that isn’t the way everyone looks at the world? 😉
Agreed. Many have said that over the years and that’s what we wrote in our second paper on PolySocial Reality which was published this summer:
“Our approach considers design challenges for successfully developing and integrating pervasive technologies into culture and society. This is particularly challenging, since pervasive technologies as services are most successful when transparent, invisible, over- looked, unacknowledged and seemingly forgotten by the very groups that embrace their usage and development.”
and
“The key things to remember when developing these systems is that one is designing an invisible service that functions best when it is forgotten. This is the purest vision of ease-of-use in design, and the one most envied and aspired to. The sensored planet, the physical network, and the pervasive technologies that will get us there, have a clean slate to reinvent design, to that of invisible, temporal, elegance.
As a society, the benefits of clear, respondent design, provide us a platform from which to evolve in to larger, more functioning social groups, to save resources, and to more thoughtfully integrate our sense of place and non-place within ourselves also at a transparent, ubiquitous level.”
Paper: http://anthropunk.com/Files/Applin_Fischer_PervasiveComputingInTimeAndSpace.pdf
Yes, exactly, and very well said!!!
This is the very same quality that I was going for in the early work on the Pad zooming interface. Perceptually, it is ideally perceived as just a part of our own physical world, the way a piece of paper or a whiteboard is part of our world.
In the paper, we use automatic supermarket doors as a textbook example of this idea, not necessarily things that are literally computer UI’s like PAD is/was, but I can see how that might apply.
At any rate, it seems we are, indeed, in agreement!