how you survived the war
Kind of an embarrassment of riches in my cubicle at the moment…though I’m sure it’s nowhere near the concentration of monitors Paul has–I hear that he has at least half a dozen displaying various weather radar maps and schematics from divers areas. But I do enjoy having multiple screens. The closer I can get to the interface in the film Minority Report, the better.
Interface design is one of the big challenges of industrial design. Think about what we have to do just to communicate via a computer versus communicating with our friends in “real life…” At least on the phone we have the benefit of voice inflection–trying to get a point across with these machines means we have to squeeze our thoughts through our fingers onto keyboards with keys that were expressly designed to slow down our communication speed. And then reading it on a screen–using only one of our senses when face-to-face conversation involves sight, sound, gestures, sometimes contact and all the rest. It’s a complete bottleneck. At least with an interface like, for instance, the one displayed in several scenes in The Matrix: Revolutions, where the operators used intuitive movements and so much more of the available space around them… I witness those things and get excited about the prospect of technological progress in that way–the potential for increased efficiency, the sheer intuitiveness of it all… It’s an industrial designer’s dream.
Maybe a better way to approach the issue would be to imagine a world without computers, but the knowledge that they could be and had to be invented–starting with a completely blank slate (and we may be the last generation that can easily imagine such a scenario), would you really design a computer with a screen the size of a large piece of paper, with a little plastic lump with two buttons on in to your right and a plastic tray festooned with little lettered squares under your fingertips? I surely wouldn’t. We get used to these things far too easily and become so entrenched in the technological status quo. Infrastructure pops up and our habits dig in all the more, when really we should be learning, growing, moving, progressing…
…And in a perfect world we would be, and there would be nothing to fear from the movement. But human nature being what it is, doubts, hesitations and reservations appear in lock step with every bit of philosophical prodding. And the human mind so easily falls into the trap of thinking because we can do something, we must do it. Technological progress gets corrupted just as easily as the next thing without the filter, the foundation of a biblical worldview to rein it in. This is essential.
* * * * *
Lots of web goings-on these days. I finally purchased a separate hosting account for sufferndesign.com, so that’s up and running, and the full ImageWorks site is up, both “sides” designed by yours truly. Not only that, I’m doing a bit of reverse engineering on a e-commerce template purchased by the company in order to incorporate the look and feel of the current site, with which management is very pleased. It involves dealing with a lot of server-side code, something I don’t have a whole lot of experience with, and it’s .asp (Microsoft’s proprietary server-side web language) to boot, so I’m not a fan of that… But while it’s a challenge, it’s not insurmountable. Onward…
I love you and am so proud to be married to you.
Thank you, sweetie. I love you.