A Rant on the Future of Interaction Design was very insightful in its critique towards how we have defaulted to limiting interaction design behind digital screens. The author urged us to think about how human capabilities are much more intricate and how we rarely notice the diverse ways through which we interact with the world. 

 

It is rare that we do see any vision of the future that doesn’t promote various iterations of the touch-to-digital screen based model. I liked how the author held up examples of every possible way our hands help us everyday and how far digital interactions are from that nature. The other takeaway for me was the way the author brought up tools and how they are meant to augment human capabilities, not limit them the way our everyday tools have done so for the past decade.

 

It reminded me of how children now have vastly different experiences growing up interacting with a digital screen more than pondering upon how their natural abilities could be amplified through them, or even without them.

 

What I found interesting was the emphasis on how the way a prototype is described, such as low or high fidelity, and how that can alter the way test users might interact with it. If a prototype looks detailed, or resembles a finished product, it might restrict suggestions to minor alterations. At the same time, something easy to mock up such as paper prototypes, could give the impression that this project might not have had a lot of time invested behind it yet. The authors used the example of the 3D space planning application to very aptly relay how the exploration of role, look-and-feel and implementation was done parallelly through very different prototypes. The approach for each of their presentation was different and could prove to be helpful with my own prototyping pursuits.

 

What I do question is the cost associated with running this kind of parallel testing because it might seem resource intensive. Especially when I consider the inception of the iPhone, an invention that was as revolutionary as the author of the first article implores designers to shift towards. A company as big as Apple could spare the resources to teams working parallelly on different parts of the product. It could be a very different scenario going through with a complex new idea that has limited manpower.