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The
missing link
So
it sounds like a great and rosy picture. Well it appears that the
markets already believe it. However, the great missing piece of
all this, is the unspoken truth behind all the...
"you
do this", "the device does that"
Interaction
Design!
Oh
yes. Everyone assumes that this problem will be solved. Well, if
you're reading this then you like me are probably one of the people
who have to solve this problem and help smooth the path to the next
generation of world economy and all the new found wealth that it
generates. We are that little bit of grease for the Friction Free
Economy.
Before
I make some predictions for Interaction Design, let's take a look
at where some more efficiencies are coming from. Many of these will
help to highlight the information problems of the future.
Being
Digital
The
title of Nicholas Negropante's book was well chosen. In the 21st
Century, everything will be digital. Chromosome 22 is already digital.
Within 10 years all its 23 cousins will be too, so will all those
of the dog. Many other animals' gene pools will be going digital
too. These will be available on the internet - GCML (Genetic Code
Markup Language) anyone?
What
else will be digital? Well, all music, all movies, in fact all broadcast
media. This will have a profound impact on businesses. The record
company business model has been blown apart by the MP3 initiative.
Expect to see the same for movies too. Funnily enough all of this
means more economic efficiency. Record companies are an inefficiency
in the economy. The most efficient model is that the producer (the
band) can interact directly, through friction free marketing, with
the consumer (the music listener). Going Digital makes the economy
more efficient and adds wealth.
What
else will be digital? You will be! and so will your whole life!
Invasion of privacy? Yes, indeed.
Firstly,
your genetic code will be digital, probably sampled before you were
born. Gattaca style genetic finger printing will be common as a
form of ID. And your life? Well, most public places in the UK are
already in close-circuit TV. This reduces crime. Expect it to happen
everywhere. Many UK TV cameras already digitise and use the internet
to send their information. Apparently , there is a system which
uses face recognition to spot known criminals in London and then
follow their movements around the city. Wow!
No
more secrets!
But
it doesn't stop there. No. Your handphone will have GPS and so will
your car. This will happen sooner than you think. Tracking a phone
or a car live from the internet will be possible. Your wife and
kids can follow you as you drive to work. Then you have to consider,
pay-for-use road networks. A device in your car transponds with
a device by the roadside. The best of these is running in Singapore.
There are other schemes including one in Dallas. The In Car Unit
is keyed to the car and the car is keyed to you. The authorities
know where you go and when and how fast you drive.
Then
there is the in-car telemetry which will use satellite or GCM communications.
It will continually feedback to the manufacturer, just like a Grand
Prix car does today. It will tell you when you need a service, it
will tell the manufacturer when you are going to breakdown and what
has failed. A tow truck will be waiting. More of that economic efficiency!
Scared
yet?
Again
in Singapore already, your train and bus ticket is capable of telling
the authorities exactly when and where you boarded a vehicle and
when and where you got off. Most of your movements, most of the
time. Prepaid cards are appearing all over the world. The passenger
movement data is important for providing data to improve the service
- number of trains or buses, when, where, how often, how big. This
data is improving the economic efficiency by keeping people moving
but it's also allowing the authorities to monitor your life.
Scared
yet?
All
your domestic appliances will do the same. What if your wife leaves
you a dinner at home, but you ate out and fed the meal to the dog.
She'll know because the microwave will tell her that you didn't
use it when you got home.
Then
there is your medical history. That will be digital too and it will
be on-line. You visit the toilet, it will sample your stool, test
it and send the results to your clinic. Your Doctor will call you
to tell you that you're sick before you know it. You have got a
viral Infection (flu)? Well, your office ID card will be barred
and you will have to work from home until you are clear of infection.
Scared
yet?
Everything
you ever do, from first discovery as a foetus will be digital and
someone somewhere will have it stored, probably on a tape in a bank
of tapes so huge that no one will ever see it but it will be there,
your whole life in 1's and 0's. Being Digital!
Welcome
to the economic efficiency of the 21st Century. Fancy running for
public office?
What
about encryption?
Well
first off the authorities are intent on having the key. Even though
encryption keys keep getting longer, machines can break them eventually.
The definition of "Strong Encryption" is simply that it
takes a while to break the key - maybe a few years. Less than a
lifetime for sure.
Even
if that is inconvenient for people well they probably don't have
too many decades to wait for Quantum Computing. Suddenly things
aren't 1's and 0's anymore but an infinitesimal set of possibilities
lying between 0 and 1. What this means for encryption is simple.
The end of encryption! A Quantum Computer knows the
key immediately because all answers exist. It's just a case of matching
the pattern. Quantum Computing promises fast and efficient answers
to many of the known problems - encryption is one of them. Expect
governments to take control of this technology as it gets closer
to a reality and not just a lab experiment.
Still
fancy running for public office?
Already,
it's reported that standards in public life are at an all time high.
Despite what the American population may feel about its President,
the reality is that people are behaving better because if they don't
the whole world will know. This trend will continue because technology
will make it easier and easier to track people and know what they
are doing even as they are doing it.
The
potential for misuse of the technology and the information is enormous.
The potential for faking something is enormous. With the power of
government who could stop the authorities from inventing a fake
record of your life? How do you disprove that you drove down a certain
highway, entered a certain building, made a certain transaction,
when the digital record said you did?
Bucky
Balls and Hydrogen Tubes
A
lot is going to change in old technologies too. The information
age makes them more efficient and the extra wealth makes experimentation,
discovery and fundamental science cheaper and easier.
Expect
continued growth in materials science. Materials Science is what
brought you Lycra, Teflon, Carbon Fibre, Super Glue and Post-IT
Notes. Remember those geeky kids who preferred Chemistry in High
School? Well ladies, you have them to thank for the new found confidence
to be achieved with your new seamless underwear. Yep, glue together
clothing is all the rage in the 21st century. Expect to see a lot
of new materials with new properties. Expect to see them wired to
the internet too. Yes, even how you sweat will be digital too.
The
big economic engine of the early 20th century - the automobile -
will be changing too. Not just all that information age technology
but fundamental construction too. Not fanciful notions such as flying
cars, but faster, cheaper, lighter cars. Cars made from aluminium
honeycomb - like the Audi A8, and then later cars made from Carbon
Fibre. But that's just the first 20 years. The big boom is in Carbon
atom manipulation. Enter the Bucky Ball.
The
Bucky Ball is a natural occurring form of carbon, like diamond but
in a ring. Its discovery has caused a revelation in materials science.
Now scientists think they can build all sorts of stuff from basic
carbon atoms. The biggest frenzy is all about Carbon Tubes. Why?
A Carbon Tube is big enough and small enough to fill it up with
free floating hydrogen atoms. Cool huh? Remember the Hindenberg
Airship? Well, it didn't catch on because it caught fire. Hydrogen
has been considered a dangerous substance ever since. However, it
is the ultimate fuel. Mix with Oxygen, get a big energy release
and the noxious substance that results is only Water. Nice. An ecologically
friendly fuel. So you build a car's fuel tank from atomically constructed
Carbon Tubes, and fill up with Hydrogen at the local gas station
(yes it finally is gas). The engine mixes the hydrogen with oxygen
from the air and you really are running on rocket fuel.
If
you can build a gas tank, why not build the whole car from carbon?
Well yes that too. This technology relies on something called nano-technology.
William Gibson fans will know this stuff. Nano machines are little
devices which construct things at atomic level and apparently it
is already a demonstrable technology. One Grand Prix team is already
running a clutch said to be constructed by "micro-machines".
I don't know what that means but it sounds like the start of something.
20 years hence, this nano-machine stuff ought to be commercial.
So Diamond isn't a good long term investment. De Beers are probably
not too happy. Lexus owners, on the other hand, can eagerly await
their new diamond shelled model. That is a good one up, to the guy
with the all aluminium Audi A8 in the next driveway :-) Diamond
is really the ultimate construction fabric. It's lightweight, it
rugged and it looks great.
It
doesn't take a whole lot of extrapolation to put the pieces of the
jigsaw together and say: 1. Everything is Digital; 2. Nano-machines
can build anything from atoms up; 3. Information is ubiquitious;
4. Manufacturing becomes almost free. What does that mean?
Well
for a start you don't buy a car from a dealer, who buys it from
a distributor, who buys it from a manufacturer. Nope! The manufacturer
is only the designer. The added value is in the design. The dealer
is only a conduit for local service. You buy your car on the internet,
you collect it from the dealer, who manufacturers it for you in
his nano-machine shop from raw carbon. The electronic transaction
pays a design usage fee for downloading the design as an XML DTD
from the Designer e.g. Ford.
The
improved economic efficiency of all of this is staggering.
We
could carry on and talk about cloning and all the stuff that can
be done once we have decoded the genome. But we won't!
Scared
yet?
Interaction
in the 21st Century
Almost
everything discussed above involves advanced interaction with very
advanced information devices. Think of the difficulty in choosing
a car at the moment. Think of all the questions those on-line sites
ask you: colour; interior; CD Player; CD Changer; Cassette; Cup
Holders; Tinted glass or privacy glass? The list is endless. Now
imagine a friction free manufacturing economy where there are 2
million global car designers offering you 20 million models of car
with more than 2 billion possible option combinations. Sounds preposterous?
Hmmm. David Bowie has said that within 3 years he believes that
there will be 200,000 record labels on the net offering 2 million
bands and say 10 million collections of music. That's what happens
when marketing and fulfillment become friction free.
So
what this tells me is that the degree of difficulty for interaction
design is going to rise by at least an order of magnitude and probably
several. Firstly, there is the number of devices - or modes of interaction.
This is going to grow from the current 2 - GUI and Web Browser to
perhaps 20 including Palmtop, phone, in-car navigation system, in-house
control system and so on. How many modes of interaction are going
to be involved may be less. We may see several devices using the
same modes. An in-car navigation system may end up sounding or looking
just like an in-house system. Who knows?
Prediction
1
What
is clear to me is that these modes are specialist areas and therefore
I believe that we will soon see specialisation in both Interaction
Design and Usability Engineering. There will be those who specialise
in hand phones, those who are best with PDAs, those better with
voice driven systems and so on.
Prediction
2
Also
voice is back! Much maligned when it was first introduced into OS2
as part of the operating system, voice control and recognition is
here and here to stay. At the very least it's essential for cars,
at least as long as the driver is still in manual control of the
vehicle.
Prediction
3
The
amount of information available for browsing and analysis is going
up by several orders of magnitude. New navigation, searching, filtering,
querying and analysis methods are required to make all of this manageable.
Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Based systems will play a
big part in this. Pattern matching of movement patterns, purchasing
options, health and life-style choice, genetic makeup, location,
religion, schooling, all of these will be used to narrow down the
choices you are offered to a manageable level.
Prediction
4
Social
Interaction will become common place on-line and most people will
meet and chat up their mates in a virtual environment first. What
this means for the human is that on-line social skills will need
to be greatly enhanced. What it means for Interaction Designers
is that mechanisms for allowing all the many wonders of human expression
and language will need to be made available. The current :-), :-O
and :-( are really not sufficient. The subtlety of a raised eyebrow,
a coy smile, a knowing stare, a blush. This is one of the greatest
challenges for the interaction designer over the coming decades.
Prediction
5
Eye
based control will become essential. The look, the squint of an
eye, it's the fastest navigation system known to man. Speed always
has been and will remain the most important part of interaction.
The eye provides this. Whether this will be with spectacles as IBM
is predicting, I don't know. Will we all be specky geeks despite
the fact that most vision problems will have been cured or removed
from the gene pool?
Prediction
6
Response
times have to get faster. Already response times are too slow. With
data going up by several orders of magnitude so too will communication
systems have to rise to the challenge. Expect continued innovation
in this area but keeping up will be harder than we imagine. I think
that some of the big science spending will need to go into this
area. So it's a job for the server-side boys to solve but the Interaction
Designers will be demanding big results.
Prediction
7
Implants!
This one scares me to death but it's going to happen. It will remain
a specialist and niche choice I believe but the obvious military
advantages are huge. Some humans will be modified and enhanced with
implants which plug them straight into the web. Neuromancer here
we come! Thought interaction. My ultimate dream, a system that can
second guess what I need, but what a price to pay for it.
Prediction
8
The
Interaction and User Interface content of a technology system will
continue to grow. User Interface is usually at least 50% of the
effort in an IT system, to do it properly. Some say 80%. With all
these additional modes, modalities and the huge increase in Interaction
Complexity expect it to rise. Within 10 years I expect every IT
person to claim User Interface is at least 80% of the effort involved
in delivery of systems and others to state that it was as much as
99%.
Prediction
9
Interaction
Designers will become as commonplace as psychologists. Their role
is to understand how we interact with the machines and how we understand
each other. The shrinks of the Internet century.
They
will also exhibit the usual bell curve of good, average and poor
practitioners. Overall, the number of bad interaction designers
around is going to grow a lot. This means a lot of badly designed
systems out there. Corollary: A lot of unhappy users.
Prediction
10
Cognitive
Friction related stress injury will become a major contributor to
lost work days in the developed world (which will be almost all
of the world).
Prediction
11
Lawyers
will emerge who specialise in Cognitive Friction based group actions.
Prediction
12
Interaction
Designers will need professional indemnity insurance just like medical
doctors do. And it won't be cheap.
Conclusion
The
children of the 21st Century will interact with computers more or
less from the moment of conception until the moment of cremation.
From before birth until after death, their whole lives will be digital.
The Iain M. Banks world of the Culture will have arrived. Everything
is known, recorded and available for public inspection. Everything
can be faked and nothing can be trusted. By the end of the century,
the human existence will be a co-existence with the computer. We
won't even think of it as Interaction anymore.
Scares
me to death.
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