So Gen X were slackers and Gen Y are kickin’ it? There are some nice statistics on Steven Johnson’s blog that show that our new Web medium is encouraging participation and entrepreneurship. Kids rule! —give them video games. And maybe Johnson is right in his tome “Everything Bad is Good For You” that this development has more to do with a generation that has grown up with interactive mediums (i.e. video games and the web) than a generation that grew up with a passive medium (i.e. television).

On a slightly related note, Mr. Johnson just came down here to Clemson to give the opening talk to the freshman class, who were required to read “The Ghost Map” over the summer as their first assignment as Clemson University students. I’ve seen Steven Johnson speak before up in New York, and his style (and level of nervousness) have really improved. I thought the points that he made about what went into the book were enlightening beyond the text, and from what I’ve gathered from the faculty here, there are quite a few students who now intend to go into sanitation engineering—you know, at least for the next 14 months or so. Freshman—you’ve gotta’ love ‘em.

I have to confess that I have not read “The Ghost Map” just yet—still slogging through Pinker’s Book (and being made fun of by the rest of the Psychology department for it). But even without reading it, I suspect it may be one of his better books. I’ve read them all, with the exception of said historical narrative, and the last two, Mind Wide Open and Everything Bad is Good For You had the information but not insight—the big insight. I don’t know how else to put that. Both Interface Culture and Emergence literally changed my world view. They influenced where I was heading with my own academic pursuits.

Let’s put it this way, great ideas are obvious after the fact. Once you see all the connections, it just becomes very obvious to you, that yes, this is the way things work or function. And I have to say that having worked with computer interfaces all my early adult life, I was still surprised when Johnson pointed out just how much influence the GUI had on society. It was astounding, and I think most people still don’t realize the impact. And it was equally astounding when he revealed how simple automatons could create immensely complex systems. I am still influenced by that particular work when I look at something like Danny Hillis’ Freebase.

Of course, Johnson isn’t inventing any of these theories or ideas. A lot of people complained in the case of Emergence that he really hadn’t explained the matter of emergence deeply enough. ((Although his critics all equally failed to explain what exactly they themselves were talking about)) But the critics really miss the point here, and it’s something he discusses in interface culture (somewhat) and discussed a great deal in his lecture. We live in a world of experts, and we need synthesists—people who don’t just understand the theories of the day, but that can reach across disciplines and what he calls the Long Zoom in order to pull these theories together and find revelations in the matrix of the information. I do think he generally accomplishes that. It would appear (from my mother and father’s reactions to the book) that he also did that with The Ghost Map.

My father is a mathematician here at Clemson, and I used to look at my father’s generation and think that we really needed more people like Steven Johnson, synthesists who would pull the data together. But something else that Johnson mentions in Emergence about the web has gotten me thinking slightly differently. My father’s generation really did need big visionaries who could see across wide swaths of disciplines, but this next generation, growing up on the web—they all have that ability already. Granted, watching them use Facebook in the library, I’m not particularly given over to a utopian optimism about the future of science, but you have to think that the nature of an interactive medium in the lives of these young scientists is going to make them a lot more aware of what is going on elsewhere in their discipline and in science in general. And that will make them synthesists inherent.

1. Build giant displays with multiple projectors. Translation: Bigger screens will change modern computing! Really? Really. That’s funny because a friend of mine actually uses a 40″ flat panel LCD for his home computer and as far as I can tell, he computes the same as me. Granted, this projector-jumble software will be great in 5 years when High School kids can pick up junked projectors and use them together at a party. But the projectors will be junk because of massive OLEDs, digital paper or laser displays (set to come out next year). Regardless of the state of the projector market though, I fail to see how larger screens “change modern computing.”

2. The mid-air mouse. The mouse is dead! It really doesn’t matter if you can hold it. 3rd generation interfaces are making tactile digital information that you directly interact with a reality, and 4th generation interfaces will bring that tactile aspect into 3 dimensions. ((For those keeping count, the first generation computer interface was the command-line or language use interface or LUI. The second generation interface was the graphic user interface, or the GUI. I don’t know if that means that we will call tactile user interfaces TUIs, but I think we should because it’s the only thing that sounds even more silly than GUI.)) Interfaces that require the removal of elements of the direct manipulation of reality we already possess are no longer necessary. The mouse works on a two dimensional plane, and is located in a physically different place than the symbols that represent your data. Technology is evolving toward the way that humans interact with reality. That is largely due to the fact that technology’s form factors can change relatively faster than our own. And that extra degree of freedom in the third dimension and that direct (as opposed to space-shifted) access to symbols will be the future. We’ll be interacting directly with our data, either on a screen with multi-touch or gestures or in augmented reality with direct manipulation. You don’t need a mouse for reality, why would you need one for augmented reality? For that, you have hands. This “midair mouse” will go the way of tablet input—a curiosity. It will not change modern computing.

3. Quantum computing. Highly theoretical. 20 years away. I can see how this changes the future of computing, but how does this have any affect on modern computing. Incidentally, they never explain why they call Quantum Computing the “perfect machine”. Quantum computer software will still have bugs. Quantum bugs. It’s funny if you say it out loud. And they will not change modern computing.

4. Extreme peer-to-peer. Dumbest. Idea. Ever. Do we seriously want the network to be aware of what content we’re requesting!? Not only is this a complete invitation to re-invent DRM and make it work on lower levels of the network, it’s just a dumb way to handle privacy. Encrypt the network, then we’ll talk. Besides, when it comes to the battle of technologies, dumb brute force solutions tend to be implemented more often. Who cares if you’re shipping out the same 6,000 copies of a movie file when the pipes are fat enough to push terabits? This development will not change modern computing because the first ISP network tech that tries to implement it is going to get stabbed with a fork. By me.

5. Man-made brain. Good. You can build an artificial mouse brain with a massive, massive supercomputer. Because mice, really, when you think about it, have done more than any other animal in human history to advance human technology.

I fail to understand how editors (as opposed to say, mail clerks) of a computer magazine could really not be able to see the obvious trends in modern computing right now. Sure, screen real estate will continue to increase (until screens mostly disappear) but that’s really no different than predicting that CPUs will double in power ever 18 months. ((A prediction so reliable it’s referred to as Moore’s Law. Of course, it’s not a law, it’s an observation, but “law” is more fun to say.)) Data is going to become tactile. If you want to guess at what engineering developments are really going to matter to modern computing, that’s really all you need to worry about.

“It’s interesting to note that several of these expectations stem from searches being based on loaded results from another server and the necessity of typing in a full query before seeing any results. “Live” searches such as the one in Apple spotlight and some being implemented via AJAX on the web change this. Here’s one example. On my blog, I’ve made the argument several times that search engines should also be capable of chatbot behavior. It should engage this behavior when an intelligible phrase would allow it to walk users through to more accurate information. Google’s “Did you mean?” functionality is a good start but lots more could be done with it. Combine that functionality with live search and I think the result would be very powerful.

Powerful is maybe even an understatement. A well-thought out chat/search bot with live results and recommendation capabilities could be insanely great. I’ve learned enough about web services that it may be time I start thinking about building this concept in Flash.

Blaze says,

The one group that has emerged is the information architect/interaction/experience designer, a set that seemingly seeks obscurity through a constant renaming process. There is no question though this is a subculture, and they tend to focus on a space Johnson quite accurately brought to the for, text as interface. But as an “interface subculture” I find them rather lacking.

He couldn’t be more right about the constant state of flux of names in this particular design field. Just to add to the information architect/interaction/experience designer pile, I’ve also heard of interaction designers, virtual architects and interface architects. Many people aren’t seeing what I see due to this very over-atomized or over-categorized concept of media and interface. Let me briefly deconstruct the way I see the world of media and then I’ll try to give some good examples of where I think the interface avant-garde are in operation.

The first concept that needs clarification in my mind is media. I’ve heard the internet referred to as a medium, as well as the computer. I don’t think either of these categorizations are quite correct. Media was originally defined by Marshall McLuhan in his book Understanding Media quite simply and elegantly as “extensions of man”. For example, audio-video is an extension of your vision and hearing. Audio is merely an extension of your hearing. The television, quicktime, windows media players, iPods and computer monitors are all mechanisms for the delivery and manipulation of media. This is why I think that referring to the internet or the computer as a medium is a mistake. The truth is, you can’t sense anything about the Internet. It’s really just a delivery mechanism for information that becomes media once it is formatted in a way in which you can perceive it. The web is a medium and in fact can be referred to as multimedia because of it use of various media such as text, video, and sound.

If you begin with the notion that media are merely extensions of human senses then you can begin to see where interface comes into play — generally speaking interfaces allow for the manipulation of media. Interaction with media is most often an extension of the tactile and visual senses through a graphic user interface (GUI) and this particular interface is the direct manipulation of perceived objects in the visual and tactile media. Looked at in this fashion, the concept of the interface is not at all limited to a graphic user interface. As I have argued before, I believe that bots are re-establishing an old kind of interface, one that I refer to as the Language User Interface (LUI). After all, McLuhan defined speech as humanity’s earliest medium. A speech-based interface for the maniuplation of any medium would seem a natural occurrence and in fact I would say that though the language was somewhat obscured, the command-line interface was the first interface (for computers, at least). Generally speaking then, there are media, they can be combined in presentation, contained within one another and there are various interfaces for their manipulation.

It’s interesting to note that interfaces generally have to compensate for the loss of one medium or another. When all the media of reality are present in a virtual form, the interface is in its most “natural” or a transparent state. I dream of an interface that is basically my office. You walk into your office, dawn a pair of gloves and pair of glasses and a headset (for sound and voice) and sit down to your desk. When the computer boots, the documents you were working appear where you left them, in the room, on the desk or wherever. When you speak with someone, they appear in the room with you and you appear to them in their room. Of course, because we’re dealing with an interface and not reality there’s other kinds of magic that can occur. You don’t have to get up from your desk to get a reference; you gesture at the symbolic bookmark you’ve left behind once before and the reference comes to your hands. A web page link would fetch a document for you and if you needed to fill out a form, you would simply fill it out. Plus, of course, there’s the addition of the LUI so that if you couldn’t remember where you put something, you ask your bot or agent “Where is the blog entry I wrote on the interface avant-garde?” I could go on and on but what I’m merely trying to point out is that the interface is as wide a concept as media — in many ways it is media’s parallel — and the GUI, the LUI and other interface types are all facets of a single concept.

With this picture in mind, take a look at the art world. The true avant-garde of interfaces (as oppopsed to the avant-garde of media) would not be doing new things with the GUI. In avant-garde-speak the GUI is “tired”. I would argue that chatbot creators and the makers of bots such as SmarterChild are re-inventing the LUI and making it English language based. Now instead of some obscure command like grep *.mov / you can type something more like “Where are all my movie files?” or in the case of SmarterChild, “I want to see the movie The Life Aquatic.” Since it likely already knows your zip code (or you can tell it different in your query) it fetches the listings of the movie at the nearest time at the nearest theater. But as I said, this is a re-invention of an interface type — it’s not really new.

And there’s also a lot happening in the video game industry in this regard. The joystick isn’t a new tool for interface manipulation, but the combination of the joystick with the headset is. There is no doubt that going online and playing with, while talking to, friends is a new kind of experience. I can always tell because when my friends see me do it they seem baffled. “You’re talking to the game?” “No, I’m talking to Mike, my friend in Atlanta.” This statement is usually followed by a long “oooooooh.” And then they watch, generally engrossed by the fact that the other players on the screen aren’t just a bunch of programs but people from all over the country participating in a virtual place. Friends of mine who have had no interest whatsoever in video games or violence have wanted to try Halo 2 out.

So the LUI is really the re-invention of or a smarter version of the command-line. Online games like Halo are combining old interfaces into a new experience. I would call this avant-garde but I could see where others might not. Some would say that if there is an avant-garde of the interface, they have to be doing something entirely different. So if this is the definition of avant-garde then perhaps the canvas of the interface avant-garde has pretty much been used up. So far every human sense has been translated into media (even smell) and as far as I understand the concept of the interface, almost all media (except for the olfactory-based media) have tools for interaction at this point. An olfactory interface would be avant-garde but I do not know of one. Beyond that, all interface development will necessarily be some combination of existing interfaces.

This state of affairs in the “art of the interface” makes sense when one looks at a parallel situation one medium in particular: the visual. Johnson also posits in his book that the engineer and artist are closer together than they have been in the past. I think this is only due to the fact that the interaction with media was new. The tactile medium was coming into existence. Once, we would have considered an artist as both artist and engineer. They would have had to manufacture the canvas and they would have had to make their own brushes and paints. Over time, however, the “trade” of making brushes and paints was commoditized and the visual artist was left to consider only the manipulation of the media itself. I’m over-generalizing here of course, there are all kinds of anomalies but there is a general trend that shows that serious invention and modern art, the total disregard of representing reality and dimension, didn’t happen until long after the engineering of materials had generally faded into the background. To be sure, to manufacture one’s own brushes and paint is still an art but it’s not really avant-garde. In the same way, the avant-garde of modern art lies in the media but maybe not in the interface or maybe not in the interface for too much longer.

Eventually the interface should just go away. In the fictional virtual operating system I mentioned above the interface is almost non-existent. In the world of the Matrix, the interface is non-existent — or rather, totally transparent. I’ve always considered that the goal of the interface designer should be to make it transparent. For that to occur, the interface avant-garde may have come and gone and just hardly anyone noticed. Douglas Engelbart was the interface avant-garde. And as is typical with the avant-garde they only become so after the fact. From here on out, the interface and its manipulation will largely be relegated to the engineers dealing with the hardware, while the artists start to play with the new matrices of interactive media available to them through their primary tool, the code.

Take the above user problem and imagine how a user with an english speaking bot in his computer could accomplish what they want. Even if the “English” that the bot spoke were slightly restricted and simple, there are a number of tasks that are far simpler as a result. I, for instance, have been using SmarterChild for quite some time now and it has proven to be invaluable at some tasks. This is primarily for three reasons. One is that my chat window is virtually open all the time. The second reason is that I can use (and remember) the simple commands that it acccepts (like “spell presient” and it will figure out what I mean). Three is that it remembers things about me and makes other tasks easier. I don’t look up movie times on the web anymore. I just instant message SmarterChild: “I want to see a movie” — he knows the drill.

[1/24/05 - note: No sooner had I posted this entry than I found a similar article over at o'reilly that asks the question "Are chabots the command line of the future?"]