We WANT the touchwall, but do we NEED it?
Last week Bill Gates introduced the touchwall. A glimpse of the future? We’ve seen this before. Tom Cruise as Chief John Anderton slides through vast amounts of data using his hands in the Minority Report. But do we really NEED this piece of technology to enhance our interface capabilities or do we WANT this because it looks so cool in Minority Report?
We WANT it!
In Foresight and Hindsight: The Case of the Telephone Ithiel del Sola Pool et al. take a closer look at the predictions made about the social effect of the telephone. Predictions made by inventors and big telephone companies had a big chance of becoming reality. They created a future, sold it to the public and they went on inventing this future.
This concept is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. We see Cruise flicking through all sorts of data using his hands and fingers. We think: “That’s great! I want that to be a wall in my living room!” and six years after the movie has been released we see this becoming reality. And we WANT it!
Do we NEED it?
But do we actually NEED this piece of technology? Is this going to break us free from the desktop interface? Jakob Nielsen and Don Gentner made a claim against the desktop interface back in 1996 in their article The Anti-mac Interface: “We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore.” (Gentner and Nielsen, 1996:1). One of their main arguments is that we ignore the value of language:
“The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It’s as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts. We have lost all the power of language…” (Gentner and Nielsen, 1996:3)
Although the technique is very cool we still need to consider: Is this a step forward or is this a step backward?
Sources
Pool, I. de Sola et al. “Foresight and Hindsight: The Case of the Telephone” The Social Impact of the Telephone. Ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1977.
Gentner, Don and Jakob Nielsen. “The Anti-Mac Interface”. 1996. Link to the article. (PDF)
