So why is it that no one has created a compelling demonstration of the value of a haptic devices through audio and visual channels?

I understand the challenge that comes with communicating tactile feedback through non-tactile mediums, but this is nothing that designers haven’t seen before. After all, smell is an integral part of the food industry, but that hasn’t stopped creative folks from finding ways to convey the spirit of a dish with less than the full sensory toolset. In culinary circles, the Macro lens often comes to the rescue, allowing photographers to create luscious imagery (food porn) that offsets the fact that we can’t utilize our other senses. But no one has done the same with Haptics. I’d like to see that change. There are only so many people you can reach with an in-person demo.

So this is an open call for Haptic Porn. If you find any instances that clearly demonstrate the value of a haptic device, please let me know. In the mean time, we may just need to create it ourselves.

In fact, there’s not much to say about this book except it is filled with nuggets of wisdom from leaders in the graphic design field, some of my personal favorites I’m quoting below:

“I don’t think design involves that much creativity. It involves creativity in the way doing a crossword puzzle involves creativity. You need some imagination and knowledge. I think of artists as creative because they have to invent something out of nothing. I think designers design because they can’t invent something out of nothing.” Michael Bierut

“I found a particular path: To continually discard a lot of the things I knew how to do in favor of finding out what I didn’t. I think this is the way you stay alive professionally.” Milton Glaser

“We’re often not making things better, we’re just making things different.” Peter Saville (as a criticism)

“I think designers who aren’t selfish do really awful work. I think there needs to be a motivation at the core of the work. There needs to be a motivation for the designer to go beyond the point where most people would stop.” Paul Sahre

“I interview the clients. I’ve got to understand what the problem is from their point of view. And then you have to not believe them.” Stephen Doyle

“Design is a way into learning about, supporting, improving, and magnifying the world.” Abbott Miller

“I am convinced the solution is always in the problem.” Massimo Vignelli

One thing that was nice to read was that all of these designers, no matter how experienced, no matter how successful, all battle self-doubt and fight to remain relevant. If you enjoy reading about the passions and philosophies of creative people, I recommend this book.

On a personal note, I was surprised to find that two of the interviewed designers (Jessica Helfand and Steff Geisbuhler) are both cellists like me. Wonder if there is some sort of cello-design connection?

nanoTouch is a project from Microsoft Research that notes, “the key to touch-enabling very small devices is to use touch on the device backside.” PDF. (via Touch User Interface)

Noriyo Asano tipped me off to another example from Japan. Bandai (known for its Tamagochi products) has just released a toy called Tuttuki Bako, which means “a box for poking.”

Apparently, this pattern isn’t emerging any longer. Look for it on a device near you soon.

Think about the number of times you’re pulling out of a driveway/garage or into an intersection and there are cars on either side of you, blocking your view. The hood of your car gets into the street or intersection long before you, in some cars by almost a meter. Having cameras on either side of the car would effectively be like the old trick of using a mirror to peer around corners. You’d get a view out into the street before you pull out into it. Assuredly, hundreds if not thousands of accidents could be prevented this way.

Of course, once you get cameras there, they can be turned into sensors, to avoid collisions (via warning feedback) and possibly even be aware of weather and traffic conditions. They could be networked to send anonymous weather or traffic data to a service, or even be more hooked into the operations of the car to adjust the car’s performance based on traffic and weather.

All that being said, with the launch of HP’s TouchSmart and TX2 computers, I’m occasionally asked what a purely touchscreen system would be like for a desktop. (It’s rumored that Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel is currently working on one, and of course, the iPhone, Instinct, Dare, et al have touchscreen OSes for mobile.) With the publication of my book Designing Gestural Interfaces last week, I thought I would discuss what some desktop concepts could be like.

Let’s first look at what operating systems do. They let users:

• store data
• organize data
• display data
• move data between applications
• connect to other devices or networks
• launch applications
• switch applications
• change hardware settings

That’s pretty much the core functionality. It’s surprisingly little, but it does encompass a lot. How would this set of functionality work with a touchscreen? First some principles:

• Nothing overly strenuous. People will be using it all day, so few or no reaches, held positions, or overly-repetitive gestures. This also means that systems like the TouchSmart probably won’t work well, as it requires constant reaching to manipulate.
• Awareness of limitations of fingers. Touch targets have to be larger than they are for a cursor. Menus need to move from the top of the screen to the bottom to reduce screen coverage.
• Take advantage of spatial layouts. We’re used to moving things around on our physical desktops with our hands, why not our digital desktops?
• Man does not live by touch alone. Probably a keyboard and, yes, possibly a mouse or stylus might make sense as part of a desktop system. Use touch for what it is good at doing.

Here are some concepts built with these principles in mind:

Propped-Up Tablet
For touchscreens, keeping the screen as close as possible while still allowing for wrist support is important. Thus, this idea of a large screen that rests on the desktop at an angle. It’s as though your laptop had lost its keyboard, grown taller, and the processor had moved behind the screen.

Circling for Multiple-Select
While the touchscreen will work as we’ve come to expect, some additions such as circling multiple items with a finger to select them will be necessary.

File Piles
In addition to folders, piles of files that can be flipped through with flicks of the finger. Tap a file to open it.

Making the Invisible Physical
Some items that are invisible on current desktop systems might have to be made visible in order to be manipulated, such as items put onto the clipboard.

Fluid Borders
Users should be able to push piles and files off to one side, off the screen (effectively hiding it, or onto multiple monitors). Brushing multiple fingers across the screen moves it around to spaces that cannot be seen. The screen becomes a window into a bigger desktop.

Haptics Keyboard When You Need It
Since touchscreens aren’t naturally great for text entry, a keyboard that takes advantage of haptics (to stimulate key presses) could appear onscreen as necessary. Of course, for writing and longer text tasks, a full keyboard can be hooked up.

Of course, these are just concepts that would have to be prototyped and tested. But it might start us all thinking about what it would be like if our lap or desktop was touchscreen-based.

All images by Tom.

If you’ve never seen the demo, I highly recommend watching at least part of it. The way it is filmed makes it seem like a message beamed from a space station in the future.

The amazing thing about the demo is just the sheer number of new paradigms introduced. The demo showed off a mouse, a GUI, windowing, videoconferencing, hypertext, word processing, and email. That is, pretty much everything that personal computing has been based on these last 40 years. We should all take a moment and wonder at how much Engelbart’s vision of the future has come to pass and how much because of that, the world has changed. Kicker Studio is about a mile away from where the demo was done, and now, 40 years later, we’re surrounded by hundreds of companies like ours whose existence is predicated almost entirely on the computing paradigms Engelbart laid out.

As Wendy Ju writes in “The Mouse, The Demo, and the Big Idea” in HCI Remixed regarding The Mother of All Demos:

[T]his is part of the power of the Big Idea. It doesn’t even have to be right. It just has to compel us to go out and do stuff, stuff that is different from what everyone else wants to do. We can make our work valuable to those who only have the vaguest inkling at what we’re getting at. Time will sort the good from the bad. And, sometimes, when all is said and done, our Big Ideas might just buy us a slice of immortality.

One footnote: Engelbart might have bought a slice of immortality, but he never received any royalties for the mouse, as his patent ran out before it became widely used in personal computers.