With new tech, there’s new challenges to previously invisible and unknown divisions in our lives. The old debate was the “intrusion” of public life on the television into our private lives: the public/private border.

Or take the kind of thinking computing requires. What do I want to do? Which program do I use? Where do I save the file? What name do I save it under? Not only is there so much overhead to simple operations, there’s a “breaking” element: you must submit to the method and means of the software.

But what about how all the information of the world that is so readily available?
Certainly it is as accurate and misleading as hearsay and public opinion has always been. The question any kid and college student asks now becomes more substantial: “Why do I need to learn it if I can just find it?” Simply, you are able to process life and information in new and creative ways which is not yet on the internet. Education is now more than ever in need of validating itself beyond simple cognitive knowledge or even comprehension.

Now, with the latest tech-idea, there’s one more facet of our lives being edited out: imagination. While the example in the link shows an informational search and presentation (which of course is helpful), this could certainly be applied for works of fiction or history. Not to induce fear, but parents will have to allow space for a child’s free imagination and subjective sympathy and identification with characters in written story. Such experiences are quite human, very non-analytic and much more than informational.

Augmented reality is a geek-dream, and it’s entirely about information. Even if augmented reality is about narrative, it’s knowledge of the narrative which is being conveyed. Without space for imagination and wonder, humanity is slowly retracted, and with such, AI can make a clean entrance. Lowered standards for humanity with higher and more complex informational, creative computing allows for direct HCI.

AI that consistently passes the Turing test, and virtual worlds where the represented life allows for full bredth of human desire: from virtual flying to presumed amoral behavior, the soul is lost and humanity is in need of redefinition again.

Ahh, the future

InfoWorld has a great write-up about a data-center project & what they learned from it. I’ve summarized and abstracted it here:

When you don’t know, you trust.
Differing experiences & personalities will trust different things:
D: themselves
I:  people: what they can get others to do/say.
S: what others say/face-value?
C: the information: their mind/face-value of what others say. They will not try to influence or change.

Details always trip you up:
Practical: some times things just don’t work.
–Execution problem
Idealism: some times you just didn’t think or plan enough (and you could have).
–Information problem

Consequences:
Think + Do everyone’s job in the process, from vendor information, estimations, ordering, manufacturing, shipping; environmental surroundings; temporal surroundings (future-proofing)

Information Errors can be minimized by having a diverse enough team that can think through each step, and communicate (listen!) enough to take each info-tid-bit to heart. Most personalities aren’t capable of valuing this, and those that are, aren’t usually forceful or influential enough to make their case known. Solution? Humility.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this, but just in case:
http://www.dontclick.it/

Something inside me revolts against not clicking– and it’s causal expectation: I must do something active in order to do something. But honestly, I ‘get’ it. Having to click everything all the time creates a command/dominance facade, as if the user really had control of their computer; hence all the HCI(Human-computer-interaction) frustrations/rage. We’d all like to think that we’re in control of our computers, when in reality, even the development team who built the software are under the rule of the almighty strict language syntax & debugger.

Dontclick.it is a great testbed for low-command HCI, and I wish it could take it a few steps further:

What about ‘mouse-attraction’.. giving gravity values to elements. I don’t mean 10,000 units that would disallow ANY mouse movement, but a 0-to-1 point scale that would still allow for pixel-width mouse intervals.

Lack of borders/boundaries is also tough.  Many times on the site you’re thrown into another undesired world based simply on a lack of clear borders: the padding around the text is unknown to the user, the multitude of gradients (why not use ‘em as a visual timer– the stronger the gradient, the less time you have before action?)..

As well, for some users like myself who REALLY like to use the mouse to track their reading, this design implementation on the front page drives us up a wall. But that is rule-changable, and honestly, just a front-page issue - the rest of the site is well done.

Finally, X windows generically supports this kind of HCI, and since seeing this site, I’ve been using mouse-over window focusing for a few months. It drives my girlfriend batty to use it, but with repeated use, (and a HORRID Macbook mouse-button), it’s worth keeping.

My specific XFCE implementation allows for, what is in no uncertain terms: GRACE! If I mouse-over something else, that something else will alight in focus for a second before fully coming into focus cuing me to say, “Do you want to focus on this window?” And if I don’t, in the brief second, I can move back and never lose window focus.

Back 10 yrs ago when the ‘net was getting a-rollin’ I had all the dreams of what it is now: http uploads (WebDAV), in-browser OS/applications (AJAX), Web-storage/backup.. you name it, I was dreamin’ it. And that’s a cool thing to know that I was “on to something,” so long as I don’t get bitter over it.

Well, now today Slashdot has an article about
what I was just talking to a Berlin friend about what his company does. There goes that idea.

So it’s not that I’m bitter, but honestly, how are ‘the little guys’ in small business capable of coping? There’s no chance at competing unless ya grab a VC & start hiring a storm of geniuses. (Oddly enough, isn’t this what Mr. Holland’s Opus is about??) The other option is to just hack on your own ideas quietly for your own pleasure, patiently knowing no one else will see them, and by the time you build it, it’ll be passe. It’s heavy unfulfillment in light of the external world, but in light of the internal self, it’s enabling: “I’m a stud.. if only they knew.”