Interaction design. What’s next? Gesture and voice, I have argued, aren’t the key in and of themselves. Instead, what really matters going forward is how our design shapes culture, our habits and habitat.  What is going to happen?  I have a couple of guesses based on work that started in the nineties.

Havard Starfish -- a soft multigait robot

The first clue is this starfish robot. Recently unveiled by Robert Shepherd et al., it reminded me of work two decades ago by Tom Ngo and Joe Marks (now at Disney but then they were at Harvard, too).  Ngo and Marks programmed animated creatures that learned how to move.  The creatures would inch along or attempt to turn cartwheels.  You really wanted them to succeed. The starfish robot is similarly mesmerizing as it creeps and wiggles around obstacles.  And it’s soft!  It’s also white like something that crawled out from under a rock — a visceral reaction that matters, too, though it’s hard to believe that particular design stroke was intentional.

The second clue lies in an article that’s being passed around.  A self-described rant by Bret Victor on the future of interaction design, it says current HCI (= innovation in “pictures under glass) misses the opportunity for Tangible Interaction:

There is a smattering of active research in related areas. It’s been smattering along for decades. This research has always been fairly marginalized, and still is.

Roboticists and inventors of Tangible Interaction might take umbrage at the ‘smattering’ bit, but the rant serves as a great reminder that not all interaction design is about screens and icons.  A better overview than Victor’s Wikipedia source, by the way, is Tangible Interaction by Eva Hornecker, even though she dates the genesis of the work a little late. (She does gesture to Durrell Bishop’s 1992 marble answering machine but misses Pierre Wellner’s 1991 Digital Desk.)  This work from the early nineties went beyond the human capabilities Victor writes about–grasping and manipulating objects–and pushed an integral part of the computation onto objects in the everyday world.

There’s one more clue.  It’s in an article that I think is unpublished called “Beauty in Usability: Forget About Ease Of Use!” by Kees Overbeeke and colleagues (possibly written in 2000.)  They stress the necessity to include perceptual-motor skills and emotional skills in human-product interaction. The brilliant takeaway are these admonitions to designers:

1.Don’t think affordances, think temptation.
2.Don’t think beauty in appearance, think beauty in interaction.
3.Don’t think ease of use, think enjoyment of the experience.

What do this three-part recipe and these three clues mean for future practice and products?  Imagine soft computers, forming part of the world around you, tempting, beautifully reactive and effective, that make you smile.  (Or shudder … robotic white gooshy worms…)

Does anyone have a picture of the Vogue-worthy glove telephone designed by Lorna Ross in 1994? Until then, picture that alluring glove in your mind.