For a second there I thought the lady's menu actually teleported her breakfast immediately.

Gahd, aside from tech considerations, the assumptions in the video! The economic assumptions (there are going to be very, very few jobs like this, and very few people who even have jobs as they grow more and more unecessary) and the gender assumptions (despite Mom's business trip to Johannesburg, apparently important enough to fly there in an age when she can be represented seamlessly in video meetings, she can still choose a cupcake recipe for Sally's bake sale!) UGH.

That was a terrific read, really. THanks, BP. To the brilliant and simple critique, I'll add that I don't want to spend the future staring at screens. I want to get AWAY from screens. My eyes are already tired of looking at nearly everything on a screen. THey want to look at other things too - things with dimension, depth, unconstrained color, motion in space. I don't want to be tethered all the time in order to do the basic functions of living and enjoying.

A few years ago I went to a terrific workshop on science and inquiry learning. The day was spent in groups with each group given a "Mystery box" at the beginning of the day. Each box was different and each was totally sealed. We went through a series of investigations of the box, without opening it, and brainstormed the incredibly long list of things we could do to learn more about the contents of the box without opening it. WE revisited the boxes periodically throughout the day. Only at the end of the day did we open them to see whether our predictions were right. The main point of the day, though, was to notice and attend to the profound capbilities of our bodies and brains. We know the world through all our senses, and our senses are incredibly finely tuned to provide feedback on actions we take and substances we interact with. Our minds can generate infinite ideas and our bodies can test them and observe the results. Understanding ourselves as highly optimized learning and creativity machines was a pretty powerful outcome of this workshop and the reason I remember it vividly (even the contents of my box) eight or nine years later, when countless other Power-Point-yadda-yadda workshops have faded in memory. COmputer user interfaces and 90% of applied computing is pretty feeble, comparatively.

yeah I loved this (shared it on twitter/fb/g+/tumblr) and you're right the writing style is appealing too. It's not really my style--I'm not good at choosing images etc. (not to mention where from?)--but there's something to learn from this manifesto style document, no comments below, just a sharing link under it all.

I noticed these couple future interface videos from MSFT on mefi (and Nokia elsewhere) and a lot of the comments were the kinda Apple-fanboy stuff that just annoys me (jeering at MS, Nokia) whereas Miko you point out the main thing that alienates me about these: the economic and social behaviors of these 'productive' people. There's nothing happy about doing all this flying about, the necessity of people to have your biodata before you go to them so they can be friendly, etc. etc. It's not organic. It seems like mid-culture stuff to me... the way you go from markets → malls → back to markets, integrated cities → fetishising big highways, office complexes and suburbs → becoming re-interested in integrated cities.. similarly this kinda flying around doing sales presentations is a great thing to aspire to when you're an intern but eventually what you really want to do is not sleep at hotels that much

Microsoft has been touting this 'screens everywhere!' thing for a long time, touch surfaces etc and I guess I don't get it. What if I don't want my table to be a screen? Give me a good wood table that needs some oiling polishing and reworking every decade... that good millienia-old feel. I'll put my touch interface device on top of it.

Well, I think you could make the case that a swiping finger is just a modified precision grip, and that pretty much guts the rant.

I could also add: fingerpainting and writing on dusty windshields are powerful. There's many more examples though, like doing many sliding puzzles, or sorting small objects (dump your change jar out on the table and sort them; you're doing to be doing a lot of pointing and dragging). But the huge one is plain old simple picking; point to what you want; point where you want something to go.

I could also also add: he focuses on grips that are manipulation, but for handheld devices the grip is going to be carrying and examination. You see a neat-looking rock in the stream bed, you want to pick it up, turn it over in your hand, examine the lines on it. I bet you're cradling it in your hand, using your thumb to rotate it so you can see different parts of it.

I kind of agreed with the premise of the rant before I started reading, but by the end of it I agreed less. Like that silly post on MeFi about affordability, it seemed like someone who'd got turned around and forgot what the purpose of these devices and what kind of thing belongs in the real world, and what exactly is the nature of things in the virtual world.

My problem with the video is that it seemed like a strange affluence fantasy. I almost expected it to be a Mercedes ad.

I want to see the technological future of the drones who put together the actual presentations which the business people can oh-so-productively tweak. In real life I abhor the tweak-happy managers who usually seem to disdain getting their hands dirty in a meaningful way. There's invariably some overworked and underpaid person below them whose creativity and hard work is being passed off as the manager's. But fortunately the manager doesn't have to deal with that person.

Much like the bellhop in the video, whom technology has empowered to more perfectly serve.

But these people aren't monsters. They donate money! To virtual people, who are suitably distant and grubby, and who have the decency to turn and offer a personal thank you when their pittance is received.

I have a similar rant -- not just about the limited use of hands, but about the limited interpretation of "interaction design." It seems that people have been interpreting this as "interface design," whereas the original vision of this field (Terry Winograd's) was to design technology that fit seamlessly into how people work, move, think, etc.

It seems very impoverished to reduce this to swiping a screen. Which is where this guy's rant kicks in, I suppose.

it is impoverished. It's a very narrow type of interaction. Exceedingly narrow and quite boring and repetitive.

You see a neat-looking rock in the stream bed, you want to pick it up, turn it over in your hand, examine the lines on it. I bet you're cradling it in your hand, using your thumb to rotate it so you can see different parts of it.

Sure, but it just proves his point. That's already a hundred times more complicated and dimensional than any screen interaction.

There's a lack of diversity in the ways we imagine using technology, a paucity of imagination in reducing everything to the flat sliding screen.

On my facebook tonight there was this.

Like that silly post on MeFi about affordability,

What does this refer to?

fleacircus the thing is, why is the virtual world in a screen? We could use more single-purpose devices that are still electronic and connected. Ambient devices, things that go in your shoes, things that are your alarm clock, things that you can hold as a pen. Diffuse technology

Sure, but it just proves his point. That's already a hundred times more complicated and dimensional than any screen interaction.

I was referring to the interactions with the smartphone-like objects they had in the video (and with current real smartphones). Thumb-swiping, rotation, looking closer either via holding it closer or by zooming. The video also demonstrates: tilting to see different views of statistical data, flipping over to the back side for special information, and I think maybe squeezing them (not sure). iPhones can do shaking and rotating too. And these are real objects that have heft in your hand and other buttons I presume.

How useful that is I don't know, but I think it's closer to a magic rock than a reductive dismissal about swiping a screen in a way that's not even a real grip *snort*.

(The MeFi post was about affordance, not affordability, sorry: here though the silliness I was referring to was more in the MeFi discussion about confusing virtual objects with real world objects.)

why is the virtual world in a screen?

Screens are versatile and can display lots of things. I guess you can have a bunch of real-world inputs that will do very specific things to the virtual world but they will be special purpose and expensive and inconvenient and inflexible---and you still probably need a display so you can see what changes you made to the virtual world or to configure your electronic pen. What input do you use to control the display and configure? I don't cherish the tactile experience of DIP switches.

Even right now you may be using this mouse-thing to control a pointer (OMG SHOULD BE A GRIPPER) to do various things indirectly to the virtual world. Aren't some of those things done better by actually pointing with your finger, naturally, to the display of the virtual world itself instead of interacting by proxy? Ultimately those physical objects are a lie; the display is as close as you can get to the virtual world, and the the more directly you can interface with the display the more direct and intuitive and better it is.

Anyway... I think touch-screens are excellent general-purpose replacements for mice, and have a lot of versatility besides. They're not everything. I hate touchscreen keboyard controls, but I can still buy a keyboard, or a graphics tablet or whatever. The flip side of it is that you have something like the previous Kindle generation, where it's just absolutely stupid that I have a full-on qwerty keyboard on them. The touch-screen keyboard for occasional input that can double as extra display space... That's just flat out better.

So I guess I just don't understand where the rant is coming from. I don't see the problem. Touchscreens on virtual displays are powerful and have very, very good uses. They are not in and of themselves bad though they may be faddishly featured in bad designs, sure, okay. I'd probably agree with more targeted rants about those specific crappy things.

I was referring to the interactions with the smartphone-like objects they had in the video (and with current real smartphones).

I got what you were referring to, but the fact is that picking a stone from the water will deliver to you orders of magnitude more information about an object than the same hand motions used on the screen. You can judge weight, variable density, dampness, temperature, much more subtle gradations of color, texture - sliminess or roughness,

I think that touchscreens are fine, but the point of the rant is that they are a basic technology. They probably aren't going away and there's no need to rush to their defense. I agree with Firas, though, that projecting them into the future in this universally intgrative way is "mid-culture." That's not likely how it's going to be. Instead, people with real imagination will find ways to either design interfaces that work much better with our own sophisticated information-gathering abilities, or in many cases return to the analog/physical interaction systems that provided more and better feedback in the first place. Most likely those will sometimes be enhanced with and integrated into screen-based display technology.

That's the point of the blog post - recognizing that flat touchscreen technology is impressive but has serious limits, which we should recognize in design, rather than simplistically extrapolating it to every possible scenario as if it's the only thing we can possibly imagine. The blog post indicts the paucity of imagination that suggests the solution to every real-world problem and interaction is a version of a flat touchscreen. On its face, that is indeed ridiculous. They are useful but not transformative, and not always - maybe not even most of the time - an improvement over an analog system.