Emmanuel Quartey

Bret Victor gives voice to something that has bothered me for a while. The Minority Report-style vision of the technology of the future we’re being sold? He calls that Pictures Under Glass, and he is begging us to imagine a better world for ourselves - one where technology fully engages the capacity of our hands to feel (texture, temperature, weight etc.) and to manipulate (grip, pinch, cradle etc.) things.

This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world.

The most important thing to realize about the future is that it’s a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.

Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people.

Why stop with our hands? If interaction design can be more than swiping a finger on a screen, maybe we should be asking what we could be doing with our arms, our legs, our entire bodies…

With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?

(first saw this on Ryan’s twitter)