Pictures under glass

If you’ve never read Bret Victor’s Rant on the Future of Interaction Design, now is a great time. Victor rails against what he calls “pictures under glass”, or the pervasive vision of the future which involves touch screens for everything. He points out that humans interact with the world in amazing ways, specifically through our hands, and pictures under glass takes almost no advantage of our remarkable capabilities. Victor says:

“To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.”

This sort of thinking is inspiring in a world that seems to be building pictures under glass as fast as it can.