My colleague Roger Thompson sent along a URL today that had me thinking. It pointed to a self-described “rant” about the lack of imagination in user interface design. The particular target of his invective was a video produced by Microsoft that provided a vision for how we would work in the future.
In a nutshell, the author of the post (Bret Victor) was pointing out how beggarly this vision was. All it did was extrapolate out from where we are now — and not very far, either. This future world is offers mostly finger-swiping on flatscreens. Sure, you could swipe things from one device to another, like from a phone to a flat panel display on a wall, but that’s no big innovation. This, he posits, is nothing more than pictures under glass.
Meanwhile, as Victor took some pains pointing out, human hands are capable of much, much more than finger-swiping. The repertoire of hand manipulations include: power grip, precision grip, hook grip, and scissor grip. None of these are used in current interfaces. Where, he implicitly asks, is true innovation?
I feel the same way about libraries. Even in this “digital revolution” we remain mired in how we did things in the past — we’re just trying to do them slightly different online. True imagination — not simply extrapolating out the present — is rare. We would do well to seek it out, foster it, pay attention to it, and attempt it ourselves.
About Roy Tennant
Mark Rolston – at Thursday’s GigaOm RoadMap conference – offered some out-there possibilities. He should satisfy your appetite for the imaginative. Imagine a library building that itself is a computer, with sensors and projectors on the walls and ceilings, responding to gesture and voice commands to put displays onto various surfaces. (You get into your car to operate it – why not get into a computer?) On a large, public building scale, it’s something that nobody could have at home, or of course carry with them. Members’ mobile devices could interact with it. A clicks & bricks theme park whose theme is The Life of the Mind! http://bit.ly/w0HCzL
I find one of the biggest problems is that pack mentality substitutes for imagination. If you ask people — actually they’ll tell you even without asking — how they’re innovating, they’ll run through half a dozen items that are neither innovative nor ultimately even worth pursuing.
Then every two or three years, they’ll finally realize this themselves. They’ll discard the old worn out “innovations” and replace them with freshly minted new ones.
It’s a never-ending cycle.
This is exactly where my own experience in Second Life comes in. Never mind the nay-sayers who feel the thing to be a waste of time – Second Life immediately had me doing a compare-contrast with ‘real world’ libraries, outreach, user services, and collections. Without access to subscription dbs or a solid reference collection, I myself was the interface for global patrons. With every evidence that building an island did not guarantee a patron presence, I was embedded (and self-embedded) within the population.
As an example: I realized that while I could replicate to look of light fixtures, they were purely aesthetic, as I had the capability of making any surface emit its own light. An information object could be a cigarette that when touched, led the reader through a decision-tree process to reader-tailored information about smoking, cessation, adverse effects, medications, legislation, and more. Instead of appealing to current users, I did research to identify consumer self-help groups, and worked to build a coalition of self-help groups, then guided my own behavior by learning about their information needs.
The result was astounding in ways I am still learning about. In order to free ourselves from old models, we need to be able to step away – and look back, and look around us – in order to look forward. Otherwise, we see our changing context for practice through the filter of all we know, and it biases our sense of options.