Do you ever think about how funny it is to hold down an app on your phone, wait for it to jiggle, and then reposition it?
Maybe not, but I think it’s important to realize that the convention of holding down a jiggling app to reposition it was a created one. It’s a convention that we were actually taught somewhere along the lines, either from Steve Jobs at a keynote, or a friend who showed you at home. It’s conventions like these that make up our current language of interaction with our smart phones.
This is why the video below caught my attention. It’s Microsoft’s demo of the latest Hololens, their augmented reality headset. I saw how Microsoft is creating a language for augmented reality interactions that has continued to be refined since the first release of Hololens, 3 years ago. The gestures used to control the device are becoming more natural as the device conforms to the user, and not the user to the device.
It’s just a taste of a new era of technology and a part of a greater movement to put humans at the center of design. To me, the great news is: people who are creative - painters, dancers, sculptors, or those who work with their hands - outside of an office environment, will no longer have to conform to digital tools to create digitally, the tools will conform to them.