interfaces

hello hello! it has been a while since i have blogged. unfortunately (because i know you're all dying to see more of my fantastic writing :P) this will not be a particularly long post. but i hope it is of some interest.

i think media technology is fascinating. and i'm not talking about media as in the news (tv, newspaper, etc), i'm talking about user interfaces and visualizations that allow us to interact with information in new and innovative ways. one easy example of this is the gestural interface used in the move Minority Report; this interface allowed tom cruise to interact with data streaming from the minds of the prescient in a new and very tangible way.

and this idea, of interacting with information and data, is fascinating. because what this really means is that we are using the computer as an extension of our minds. after all, the computer is simply a tool. and when we start thinking about new visualizations and data representations, we are simply trying to make the computer a better tool by improving the way it interfaces with the human brain.

and when you start thinking about the computer as simply an additional aid to the human brain and human computation, things become very interesting. because then, not only is it important to improve the performance of the computer (processing speed, hard drive, cache size, etc), but it is also important to improve the user interface so that the human user can utilize those resources to the fullest.

therein lies the fascination of media and user interfaces. when you improve an interface or create a new way of visualizing and manipulating data, you have created a closer link between the computer and the human. you have removed more "noise" from the interaction between the computer's brain and the human's brain, allowing them to understand each other better and allowing the human a greater grasp of the computers tools. (now this is of course arguable; there are many in computer science who, being very literate in computer function, would much rather do things very close to the computer's way, ie through command lines and UNIX thinking, instead of adding extra implementation to make the computer meet him/her halfway)

now i have either fascinated you as well or bored you, but i'll leave you with this. imagine a point in the future where the user interface has developed to a point at which the user can intuitively harness the computation powers of a computer without any learning curve whatsoever. what do we do with such "limitless" power? and what does that mean for us as humans?