To round out this series of posts on the possible future of user interfaces, I must say it’s great fun to try to look ahead and try to predict what might happen in the years to come. Of course you never really know. As the great user interface imagineer J. K. Rowling once said: “Predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.”
Indeed. Sometimes you may get the big picture right, but not the details. For example, here is a magazine advert from 1965 for a very future-looking vision from Western Electric:
We now know, forty five years later, that such a product never took the world by storm. And yet, all those years ago that team of Western Electric designers had hit upon an essential grain of truth: That eventually, as outlandish as it might have seemed to most people even recently, the television and the telephone would converge in the consumer marketplace:
Sometimes the dreamers have it right.
And on that hopeful note we leave this topic — but we may return to it again after a time.
After all, you never know what might happen in the future. 🙂
And human beings will evolve with it too! A friends’ 3yr old can take a picture on iPhone camera with ONE hand, but has never seen a video cassette asking “Is that a book?”