Design is Beautiful

Being in the field of touch design I try to somewhat keep up with new touch technology. I’ve noticed a surprising trend when people talk about NUI, Touch, and Touch systems that seems to be discussed with ignorance of other devices. When touch is introduced to a system, the designers generally seem to what to have everything happen through finger-input touch (as opposed to stylus or other inputs). With this line of interaction, people have to be able to handle all their normal mouse and keyboard operations now through finger-input. I was originally sold on this line of thought, but now I’m no longer sure. When the mouse was invented, it didn’t do everything the keyboard did; for example text input. Similarly the keyboard hasn’t been upgraded to really allow for free form cursor movement. They are nice compliments to each other.

However with the introduction of touch, designers feel the need that this new computer interaction system will be a one stop shop for everything we currently do with computers. I’ve been thinking more and more about how touch should be considered one type of input in an ecosystem of input devices, and not the method for *all input. While touch may come to that one day, that doesn’t seem to be now. The first step just seems to be overcoming terrible driver issues with touch, and that doesn’t seem like it will be solved anytime soon

Then you have people who hock touch as the next cool thing, but don’t really taken advantage of it cough*TouchSmart*cough, but I’ll come back to that. It will be interesting to see where this all goes in 5 years, and it’s interesting to be one of the people who will help drive it.