Human Frogger
Can I imagine an interface consisting of computational elements, digital semantics, networks that bridge and connect social elements that do not consist of screens and keys? Can the imagination of digital kids imagine a different set of interaction rituals that are not just about touching little plastic squares and staring at glowing, power-hungry screens? Or is it just inconceivable that digital kids could know anything else — the ones who have only ever known millions of colors and 1280×800 and learned to touch-type when they were 4. Can human-scale time, physical movement through urban paths, suburban cul-de-sacs or backcountry trails contain elements of possibility for digital experiences that are not just the hackneyed PDA/GPS/GSM tour guide blindly explicating the relevance of this or that locale? What do you even call that, when all the possibility for anything new has been bled out from all the idioms surrounding computation? Does anyone else think it’s positively moronic and fully lacking in any foresight that “mobile computers” are just little, battery draining desktop computers?? I heard of a project meant to research mobile computing that was precisely a mindless projects to get mobile phones handle advertising presentation technologies. I mean..
“Can the imagination of digital kids imagine a different set of interaction rituals that are not just about touching little plastic squares and staring at glowing, power-hungry screens?”
Given that the electronic screen is seemingly the highest bandwidth input interface to the human mind that we have now (only slightly behind auditory, but with training audio is very high bandwidth as well), I expect that you’d have to carefully define the information you intend to exchange with a human in order to make the changes you seem to suggest.
One can communicate with morse code, but at a rate far slower and with less information (emotion, etc) than video, for instance.
Getting information into a human isn’t terribly hard, even over low bandwidth channels. Getting information from a human into a device is, currently, terribly slow even with voice recognition, ideal keyboards, and tablet input, nevermind phone keypad manipulations.
-Adam
>Does anyone else think it’s positively moronic and fully lacking in any foresight that “mobile computers” are just little, battery draining desktop computers??
At least one other person, yes.
Adam, I follow you, but I think you’re considering the question in a very instrumental way. Bandwidth and display and Claude Shannon-style information theory or something. I’m trying to imagine an entirely different perspective that doesn’t operate by the tired models of human-machine assemblages. For instance, this idea of reconfiguring the human-machine imbrication that Lucy Suchman describes in the last chapters of her recently re-edited “Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions”. Creating “new things” requires some sort of new basis for talking about (language) and imagining what “mobile computing” might be. In my estimation, and based on my experience, the idea of a display and little chicklet keys is so heavy with conservative assumptions about what the computing experience might be that it’s simply not possible to do much that is sufficiently innovative and unique in terms of the practice of some newly configured mobile computing. It’ll be something like..call your friend only with video calling. Or, call your friend and see where they are on a map. These are just incremental shifts, and less interesting to me than something that is so different as to even be confusing and difficult to interpret initially. It requires lots of imagination to dispense with existing ideas and assumptions, but it is perhaps more intriguing to think of the possibilities for very good reasons, such as creating more habitable worlds, or a social context for mitigating intolerance to difference or for revealing the coincidence of common concerns across different cultures. If we work around themes like this as motivators for redesigning mobile computing, rather than using the motivation of selling more plastic junk that’ll never recycle, or for selling more advertising for crappy movies and coffee, then we’re doing the Good Work of Good Design as I feel it was meant to be interpreted. Otherwise, we’re creating surface and appearance designs that resonate with our own selfishness and vanity, rather than respect for larger questions that design at all levels needs to engage.