In 1985, author William Gibson coined the word “cyberspace” in his sci-fi novel “Neuromancer.” From there Gibson went on to write down his visions for a connected, advanced human future. But in his recent novels, “Pattern Recognition” and “Spook Country,” Gibson isn’t writing about the science fiction of the future; now he’s writing about the science fiction of the present. This is partly because the rapid innovations in today’s technology are steadily turning fact into fiction.
One of those innovations — a revolutionary one — is happening in interaction design.
That’s what Dan Saffer said last night after showing some inspired and innovative examples of gestural device interfaces at his presentation “Tap is the New Click” (or his alternate title, “Tap that Interface”) for the SF chapter of IxDA at Adobe last night. From familiar examples like iPhones, Wiis, airport ticketing kiosks, and automatic bathroom fixtures to cool, to “Star Trek-ish” examples like a touchless TV remote designed for wet kitchen hands, patio seats that light up when sat upon, or an entire glass wall surface enabled for collaborative use by a crowd, Dan showed some a range of devices that are operated simply through human body language — devices that make the sci-fi writer’s job that much harder.
Dan’s presentation explored a lot of the topics he covers in his new book, “Designing Gestural Interfaces.” He talked about how touch targets, like the keys of an iPhone, can be designed to adaptively adjust to ensure completion of a task. And he talked through some of the variety of ways an interaction design might document or demonstrate gesturally triggered functionality; a sketched storyboard sequence, for example, could be used to depict a user’s gestures in one panel and the device response in the next.
Based on the event turn out, there’s huge community interest in this topic. More than 150 people turned up at Adobe (which might be an IxDA SF record), and after Dan’s presentation there was a great series of questions aimed at identifying and understanding the limits of this relatively new direction for interface design. For example, most of today’s gestural designs rely on visual invitations to interact; how should gestural design address issues of accessibility? How does the health and physical condition of users come into play for a design? And how many gestures is it reasonable to expect users to remember? (Dan has addressed this last part in a recent Kicker Studio blog post.)
As a consumer I’m excited about the possibilities. I’ve got a Wii and an iPhone, and I’m still keeping an eye out for a toilet seat like the one I had in a Kyoto hotel: It automatically opened when I walked into the bathroom. And as a designer, I’m curious about new gestural interface examples and the use of interaction patterns like some of the ones Dan cited from his book.
For those interested in doing some explorations for design for iPhone apps, there’s some great Omnigraffle stencils to get you started in the Yahoo Design Pattern Library, and Dan’s also shared a useful set of gestural design shapes.
