Design in Philadelphia October 4, 2016 October is the season for Design Philadelphia: an annual 10-day festival showcasing and celebrating our city’s creative economy. In this month’s podcast, we’ve highlighted a few perspectives on design and it’s relevance and application to a variety of problems, from consumer products to healthcare. Good design is a moving target. This is especially evident in our tech-driven devices that are changing so rapidly. The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) pursues research on how technology can best enable human efforts. Things have evolved tremendously since the days of command-line interfaces. Graphical user interfaces using windows, icons, menus, and a mouse pointer, opened up computing to a broad audience in the 1980s and 90s. It was clear that such graphical interfaces were vastly more intuitive, making computing more accessible to all. We’re in the midst of another major shift: from pointer-based displays to touch-based devices. While both desktops and smartphones are computers, we use mobile touch screens very differently. Early touch interfaces were flawed because they took traditional interface elements and tried to shrink them down to a smaller screen. But designs have evolved to incorporate large touch targets and intuitive gestures, and now smartphones are, by far, the most commonly used computing devices on the planet. There’s much activity, speculation and hype around the next potential interface shift: perhaps it will be gesture, gaze, voice, or direct brain-computer interfaces. But remember, it was more than 20 years between the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 to the touch interface popularized by iPhone in 2007. These landmark products required more than just new concepts, but huge advances in display, sensing, manufacturing, and power technologies to support new forms and modes of interaction. Now, I don’t know what the next interface paradigm will be, and we probably have a ways to go before we get there. but I am certain that it will require contributions from a variety of disciplines. And I think that’s the most important aspect of good design: it draws knowledge from many different fields, so it is constantly evolving and adapting to match the needs and capabilities of our time. Youngmoo Kim, Director
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