Tabs, Pads, and Boards (and Dots)

It would be difficult to name a more influential article written in the last 20 years in HCI or Interaction Design than the late Mark Weiser’s The Computer for the 21st Century. Starting with its now-infamous first sentence (“The most profound technologies are those that disappear.”), the article has had a profound impact on how we think about computers and, really, about the future itself.

One of the sections of the article that seem to have been forgotten (or at least under-discussed) is Weiser’s notion of the three kinds of products that make up an ubicomp world: Tabs (“inch-scale machines that approximate active Post-It notes”), Pads (“foot-scale ones that behave something like a sheet of paper (or a book or a magazine)”), and Boards (“yard-scale displays that are the equivalent of a blackboard or bulletin board”). Oddly missing from this list is something let’s call Dots: tiny, nearly- or completely-invisible devices that allow for control of objects in the room without a screen.

What’s interesting is how close we are now to this reality, laid out in 1991. We have tabs (you might know them as mobile phones). We’re getting close to pads with tablet PCs and devices like Plastic Logic’s Dossier. And we’re clearly making significant headway on the boards front, as witnessed by the work of tons of people, including Perceptive Pixel, Microsoft Surface, and most recently g-speak from Oblong.

Dots too have arrived. As proof, simply walk into a public restroom these days and wash your hands or get a paper towel without ever having to touch anything.

What seems to be missing here in the sea of ubicomp products, and what Mike Kuniavsky was talking about in this post is a translation service to get the objects to talk to each other in a fluid natural way. Even though my mobile phone (tab) and my semi-pad-like laptop are both made by Apple, moving things from one to the other is still a chore and certainly not seamless. And I have no idea how I’d get a picture from my phone onto a large Oblong screen (a board). Dots could play a role here by projecting into physical spaces information about what objects are in the room and the protocol to engage with them. But then, of course, the dot would need its own protocol itself, which could simply be the good ole internet, acting as a glue again.

Or, of course, our objects could always be broadcasting and receiving in order to act as a swarm network, which has definite power-consumption issues, but might make sense, particularly in certain controlled environments.

But Weiser’s future is here. It’s just in pieces, waiting to be loosely joined.

This was written by Dan Saffer. Posted on Wednesday, November 19, 2008, at 10:36 am. Filed under Interaction Design, Technology. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.