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“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

– Steve Jobs

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15

Mar
2009

In Blog

By phil

microsoft future 2019 – not so original

On 15, Mar 2009 | In Blog | By phil

The Microsoft Office Labs Vision 2019 video recently shown at the Wharton Business Technology Conference, by Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop (text of speech), does a good job of showing potential modes of interacting with embedded and ubiquitous multi-touch displays. But how original is it? My students in Art Center College of Design’s graduate Media Design Program have been working on ideas like this for many years, and have made speculative videos like this, as well as working prototypes and real projects. See below for several examples, as well as some thoughts on where future interfaces should go – is Microsoft just proposing another version of windows?

Update: Behind the scenes of the making of the video

[flashvideo file=videos/msofficelabs2019.flv  image=videos/microsoftnews.jpg  width=600 height=400 /]

Microsoft Office Lab’s Vision 2019 video

beyondthefold1

MDP Alumni Sebastian Bettencourt’s Beyond The Fold Newspaper Project

 

Here are links to several of my students’ past projects:

In my current New Ecology of Things class, and in my upcoming research, we are working on an in-depth exploration of how people can work, play, and be entertained using digital affordances, yet moving away from the “mouse crouch” of sitting at a computer. One difference I have from the Microsoft vision is this: I believe each different activity can have its own set of affordances rather than the seeming standard ones envisioned in the Microsoft video. For example, writing an essay should be quite different from say, designing a website. I call this approach “anti-homogenous.” What we don’t need is a new ubiquitous interface and set of gestures. What we do need is gaining back some of the benefits of work and play spaces that are suited to the activity at hand.

This line of thinking was inspired by an article in Metropolis Magazine by John Hokenberry on an excellent new photography book by Michael Wolf called The Transparent City. The photos are studies of high-rises in Chicago, and show the uniformity of our current workplaces. An excerpt from the article:

The steel mill can’t be confused with the meatpacking plant or the typewriter-assembly factory. But here one has no idea of what goods or (more likely) services emerge from these cubicles and boardrooms.

Microsoft is proposing a new way of working, but in many ways, it is reproducing the idea of one-size-fits-all that’s embodied by operating systems like Windows. I’m not saying that Microsoft got it all wrong, they did a very good job up to a point. But perhaps we need to think beyond the homogenous approach. Instead, people need to be able to create their own work/play spaces that afford the kind of activities they are doing at the moment.  What would that heterogenous approach look like?

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