Hi
My name is Srikanth Jalasutram and I am a graduate student of design at Georgia Tech I used to live in India, But design brought me to this side of the planet
I believe that the age of medium-specific design professions is over. The new designers need to think beyond graphics,products and architecture beause the problems they encounter are no longer simple.
The dots they need to connect today are farther flung.
In a world where information flows fluidly, design expertise needs to be eqaully dynamic and be applied to a much wider gamut of problems/contexts
I am currently interning at GE appliances, louisville, KY for the next 333 days
"Objects are like people. They’re living, breathing things that have knowledge inside them about how to do things and have memory inside them so they can remember things. And rather than interacting with them at a very low level, you interact with them at a very high level of abstraction, like we’re doing right here. Here’s an example: If I’m your laundry object, you can give me your dirty clothes and send me a message that says, “Can you get my clothes laundered, please.” I happen to know where the best laundry place in San Francisco is. And I speak English, and I have dollars in my pockets. So I go out and hail a taxicab and tell the driver to take me to this place in San Francisco. I go get your clothes laundered, I jump back in the cab, I get back here. I give you your clean clothes and say, “Here are your clean clothes.” You have no idea how I did that. You have no knowledge of the laundry place. Maybe you speak French, and you can’t even hail a taxi. You can’t pay for one, you don’t have dollars in your pocket. Yet I knew how to do all of that. And you didn’t have to know any of it. All that complexity was hidden inside of me, and we were able to interact at a very high level of abstraction. That’s what objects are. They encapsulate complexity, and the interfaces to that complexity are high level."
—
Steve jobs, explaining what object oriented software is..
Ted, i think mark weiser was bang on. I also feel he echoed the vision/work of people like Jef Raskin, who saw computers becoming information appliances, with the singular purpose of displaying information in myriad forms.
With the iphone and more specifically Iphone OS, apple has started to fulfill this very vision. The idea is to create an invisible OS that lets information be the centerpiece of user attention and manipulation. An OS that senses context of use (based on human interaction with the device) ,fades in/out appropriately, and can be device independant.
This is very interesting.
And what is even more interesting to me is how Apple is executing this plan. Conventional wisdom suggested simplifying the complex, resource/feature heavy desktop OS’es and trying to push them onto the phones and pads. I mean every other phone and tablet manufacturer has tried doing that. BUT apple has gained an upper hand by focussing their time and energy into
a.dumping their desktop OS for their phone and pad, and
b.Inventing the interactions and information manipulation methods (pinch, zoom, stacks, swipes) for the small devices ,and finally
c.Starting on the OS with the smallest screen and then porting it onto a bigger screen.
Keeping these in mind, I am willing to bet that the future versions of OSX will be radically similar to the iphone/ipad OS we see and use today.More resolution independent and contextual.
As screens get bigger and thinner, and processors cheaper and smaller, computers will be absorbed and embedded into architecture.These are truly the beginnings of a new era in modern computing.
AND BTW.. Microsoft,hp and others still don’t get it, while google has begun to race ahead with android.
To my tech friends: (with and without a capital ‘T’). I was struck today watching the announcement of the iPad, that Apple is fulfilling the rather specific prediction of tangible/ubiquitous computing forefathers Hiroshi Ishii and Mark Weiser of MIT.
In his Sept. 1991 paper titled “The Computer for the 21st Century”, Mark Weiser identifies the following characteristics of future computing. Note the description and names of the things too (tabs=iphone, pads=ipad, boards=_______)
“The Computer for the 21st Century” by Mark Weiser
Summary: Make computers an invisible part of people’s life by seamlessly integrating them into the world.
divert attention from a single box (like a monitor) and make the system aware of its surrounding
create tabs, pads, and boards that scale in different sizes (from post-it sizes to blackboard sizes)
pads are a cross between paper and laptop (think of them as “scrap computers”)
they need to be cheap, low- power computers (this is easy for the smaller tabs, not so easy for the bigger ones)
they also need to have software for ubiquitous applications and a network that ties all the tabs together but this is a bit difficult right now with operating systems that don’t have different hardware & software configurations for changing surroundings
this type of ubiquitous computing will prevent information overload and make more information available at our fingertips at any time, anywhere
".. In the logic of the Net there is a shift from nouns to verbs. Economists now reckon that commercial products are best treated as though they were services. It’s not what you sell a customer, its what you do for them. It’s not what something is, it’s what it is connected to, what it does. Flows become more important than resources. Behavior counts."
— Kevin Kelly,founder of WIRED.. in his book Out of Control : The new biology of machines..
"I would still have a corner of my heart that was just print because I’m in love with the craftsmanship of print. But I have to say I’m intoxicated by the speed of the web, by the capacity to do things."
