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October 02, 2007

In An Age Of Gestural Interface, What Happens When You're A Clutz?

This morning, I was listening to the latest Read/WriteTalk episode...an interview with Adaptive Path's experience design director Dan Saffer...about Mr. Saffer's "call to arms" for interaction designers "around coming up with a set of gestural patterns for touch interactions" laid out in an Adaptive Path blog post:

"If you are anything like me, you've at one point or another admired the hell out of the group of interaction designers who, back in the 1960s and 70s, pretty much came up with the modern set of interaction paradigms that we've used ever since. Guys like Larry Tesler (cut-and-paste), Doug Engelbart (selecting, point and click, windows), and Tim Mott (the desktop metaphor).

We have a similar opportunity in front of us now, to define the interaction paradigms for the next several decades (at least) in the form of defining gestural and touch interactions."

It got me thinking:  in this future where creative maestros stand before expansive touch-screen table displays smoothly gesticulating their left hand across a high-resolution image triggering a blur effect while multiple fingers of their right hand twitch and spread, adjusting finer details...where do I fit in?  I am possibly the least ambidextrous person I know (hyperbole:  I have never asked about acquaintances' multi-handedness).  Never have I been able to even begin to play the piano...the one time I tried (a humiliating seventh-grade music class talent show), I found both hands, instead of complimenting one another's parts instead haltingly moved towards mirroring one another.  Gesturing in multiple ways, to me, has always felt like I was hyper-extending my nervous system.

Am I curse to forever use a mouse...or a glorified faux-gesture based mouse paradigm resulting in an awkward (yet wireless!) hunt-and-peck?

Maybe by then we'll all have advanced neuro-processors installed that will give us hyper-human ambidexterity...and I will become the piano-slash-word-processing impresario I have always (or not really) dreamed of becoming.

Clampants | October 2, 2007 01:11 PM