This isn’t my dream interface.
I came up with the idea for the theme of this one in the shower. I recorded a voice note of the headline that came to me. “The Future Better Figure Out Its Interfaces.” The Apple Watch dictation ended up recording “The future better figure out what’s in your faces.”
Two layers of funny in that. And so appropriate.
I’ve been reading a book on design I bought a year ago: The Design of Everyday Things. I was drawn to it because of a recommendation years before, I don’t remember where. But I’ve always been curious about the delicate dance that happens when we interact with new interfaces and devices.
The author, Don Norman, gets into a bunch in this book, and I’m only about a quarter of the way in. But I already see something that’s hitting me. A sense that good product designs present signs of how to interact, and a clear map that your brain can internalize of how the experience or the product is meant to work.
And…my mind leaped. To smart glasses, and the Products We’re Not Using (yet).
Because…to me…VR and AR, and smart glasses, for all they’ve been fascinating, they don’t seem to have evolved a perfect interface that makes them intuitive all the time.
And I think about AI, too. AI, which so many times seems to me like a blank box, an open menu with seemingly infinite affordances but few signifiers. Can I do anything at all with AI? No, I can’t. But where does the interface, and my map of How AI Works, allow me to understand it better? Honestly, most of the time, I can’t.
I often feel bad that I “don’t know how to use AI better,” that I have a certain lingering sense of feeling like an AI idiot despite being a tech journalist. But…also, according to Norman, it’s AI that’s doing a bad job at helping me understand how to use it.
I know how to use smart glasses and sniff my way around new AR and VR headsets, but that’s also because I’ve accumulated a lot of experiential knowledge of setting up new XR devices. My mental map is large. But for most people, is that the case? No.
I keep thinking that’s there some sort of new wave of technology on the horizon…an evolution past phones…something where AR/VR, AI, more advanced sensors, these enable us to transcend or augment what’s possible with our already-pretty-virtual, already very online and augmented existence. But I haven’t seen the interface for that materialize. Lately, we’re seeing big tech start to shift into a philosophy of just making all these technologies feel like extensions of the phones and computers we use.
But that’s also an admission that the new interfaces for these new products were never well formed.
But being an extension of what we already know isn’t the answer, either. There has to be a new. A map to begin to learn again. Doesn’t there?
I feel trapped in the interfaces of the devices I already use. I just bring up the same things over and over again on my phone. Shouldn’t I use this little black box of possibilities to do all the other things I can do with it? I don’t. That’s the internet, too. So many millions of destinations, and I keep repeating myself. Is that the flow of things? Lock patterns in, revisit, repeat?
I’ve been playing a lot of video games this week. Metroid Prime 4, slipping back into a mental map of what Metroid used to be for me. I found myself having moments I forgot what the map was. Then I got into a flow again. But video games, that’s their great strength. They know how to build a powerful interface.
Sektori, a game I didn’t even know existed until midweek, is also tapping into an old mental map for me. Geometry Wars, or arcade shooters. I’m being sucked deep into its flow.
And Sonic Racing Crossworlds, which runs nicely on the Switch 2, and feels split between Kirby Air Riders and Mario Mart World. I’m sinking into its rulesets.
I spent time playing Seafarers of Catan with the family, and didn’t know its rules. By playing it for a while, the models sunk in.
I’m practicing a new magic trick, learning different moves than my ingrained ones I’ve internalized from decades ago. My procedural memory isn’t built for this yet. Norman suggests that we develop a subconscious way of navigating when we internalize the map.
Is it all about just getting used to new things, internalizing new maps?
There’s magic in the learning process, and magic in the moment where the learning doesn’t even seem to happen. When should the journey require effort, and when should it be the work of the device to meet us more than halfway?
Forgive me on my very drifty entry to The Intertwixt. I almost didn’t write this one at all. But what I’m wondering now is, how do we make new systems that form better mental maps? How do we avoid the locked-in old ones, or the shitty new ones? I feel old and lost. Will tech rescue me? Of course not. But I do think there’s a fantasy of escape, transformation and transcendence baked into every gadget purchase. Like a magic trick I purchase, hoping that I’ll discover something that gives me just enough of a lift out of the life I’ve defined.
That’s it. Just a few thoughts. A meditation. No answers. Just reflecting. On systems. Ones that seem to work, and ones that seem broken.
If you want, use this time to reflect on what it is that makes things work, and what we want in the first place. That’s what I’ll be doing.