To Make Tech Design Human Again, Look to the Past

The landscape of interaction design is a mess. But messes have a way of also bringing about opportunities, dont they?

Examples abound of inappropriate and unnecessary technology masquerading as innovation. Look at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show from last month; it featured a bewildering array of innovation box-checking, ranging from touchscreen fridges to dashboards that take your hands off the wheel and eyes off the road. But any modern innovation manager can slap a touchscreen on a product and tell you what it adds over its analog counterpart. I believe its just as important to consider what is being lost.

Consumers have grown weary of novelty. People crave meaning in their products and humanness in their interactions. From unnecessarily curved screens, to cups that tell you what you know you just poured into them, we interaction designers are as culpable as anyone in the marketing chain in proposing solutions in search of problems. And admitting that we have a problem is just the first step: The future of interaction design will be about making it human (again).

I want interaction designers to remember where we came from in order to stay mindful of where were going. In the early 20th century, interaction design wasnt much of a career because there simply wasnt any need for it. Mechanical devices were controlled physically and directly, period. A lathe handle turned a gear that turned the lathe in the same direction. You could design the handle to fit the human hand a bit better, but otherwise you didnt have to solve any deep cognitive interaction problems such as, How will this interface be understood, and valued by the user? What role does metaphor play? What does this interaction say about our brand?

An early example of interaction design that resembles what we do today is the typewriter. You remember those, dont you? They were like a word processor and a printer all in one, but with infinite battery life.

Though strictly mechanical, typewriters do, after all, have a one-to-one relationship between buttons (aka keys) and their actions. Nonetheless, somebody thought to layout those buttons in a very specific non-linear way and in an abstract order according to letter frequency in the English languageitself an abstract concept. The layout also took into consideration tactile human factors such as physical reach of average fingers and the distance between each button. Theres a reason Q and Z are so awkward to get to and ASDF are not.

This innovation was further humanized with the introduction of a patented key curvature that subtly mirrors your finger shape. Here we have an early example of human interaction, and one whose near-perfect design has barely changed in 140 years. Even though a typewriter is quite an abstract device, weve come to see it as natural, human, primitive, and even emotive.

Human interaction is so basic and natural and yet as our tools have evolved, weve struggled with the conversation between abstract and tangiblebetween digital and analog. I cant think of a more abstract invention or one that highlights this dialog better than the personal computer. Computers of the mid-century could compute anything todays machines can, just more slowly. But, in hindsight, speed wasnt the barrier to mass adoption. The real problem was that humankind had invented the most powerful machine in the history of history and yet almost nobody knew how to use it, or really even cared.

The breakthrough moment for the digital age wasnt just the addition of monitors and keyboards, nor was it the miniaturization that semiconductors introduced, astounding though that was. As I see it, the real coming-of-age moment was an idea alone. An idea born in the 1970s and which would humanize this beast and turn it into everyones current superpower. The Graphic User Interface; the greatest idea in interaction design. Ever.

The first GUI came from Xeroxs astonishingly overlooked Palo Alto Research Center, where I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall (or beanbag chair). The history of PARC and how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs appropriated everything of value away from Xerox is by now well known (and if not, watch Triumph of the Nerds immediately). Suffice it to say that everything we now know as modern computing: the networked office, tablets, icons, menus, email (and this list goes on) was hatched then and there. But at the top of that list is the GUI and the deceptively simple introduction of the Desktop Metaphor.

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To Make Tech Design Human Again, Look to the Past