Consider the human interface with the digital world.  For most people in the developed world, the PC or laptop is still the primary internet access device.  But at a global level, this is set to change.  For one, the mobile phone is taking over as the primary access device.  Partly, this is because there are many more mobile phones out there compared to PCs, especially in the developing world.   But the mobile phone has also become a much more powerful and convenient tool for accessing the net.  Screens are bigger, the touch interface is vastly improved (faster, multi-touch) and critically, the operating systems were opened up to third-party developers leading to an explosion in the amount of ‘services’, from games and social network apps to various business tools and location-based services, that can be accessed via the mobile phone.  Most of the tools that people access the internet for—e.g. email, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google, etc—are now available as customised mobile applications.  

 

The recent launch of Apple’s iPad is set to change the interface landscape yet again.  This concept of a portable screen or tablet with a multi-touch interface—and its immediate success—is showing that the way we use computers may have become somewhat outdated.  The keyboard, mouse and graphical interface (i.e., interacting with programs by clicking on graphical icons) that we have become accustomed too has indeed been with us for several decades, and was designed for a pre-internet era.  The iPad and the many competitors it will spawn are offering us a more intuitive or natural means of interacting with information and technology.  Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine asks us not to think of them as tablets or fancy e-readers, but as ‘windows that you carry.’  These are mobile ‘windows’ that are aware of where they are in time and space.  Look through the ‘window’ at the world around you and you’ll be offered alternative or enhanced versions of reality.  It is a window to the people you communicate with.  It is a window that will accelerate the process of convergence between book, TV , internet, social networks and much else.  Kevin Kelly: ‘You get TV you read, books you watch, movies you touch.’  And Bob Stein, in the same Wired issue; ‘a book is becoming a “place” where people congregate.’  

 

The tablet is also a window that watches.  With a built-in camera it watches you and the world around you.  But also the interface is watching you.  The old computer only ‘sees’ your fingertips via the keyword, but the tablets sense your gestures: tap, roll, tilt and shake this window to the digital world.

 

The iPad is one of the most hyped new technology products in recent years; rightly so, because it should be a game changer of note.  It sold more than one million copies in the first month after its launch in the U.S.  As I write, people are mobbing the stores in Sydney and Tokyo for the international launch.  Competing products will not be far off.  And One-Laptop-Per-Child has a tablet version of its XO computer on the cards for 2012. Millions of children in Africa will be tapping and drumming their tablets, and may never have to bother with a PC.

 

Obviously, the tablet will not be the only user interface technology.  Many interfaces will simply be built into the devices and tools we use, such as household appliances and vehicles.  And many of us will of course remain reliant on a keyboard-enabled device.   New devices will emerge too, which today are still difficult to conceptualise.  Research teams like the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT are exploring new ways in which humans and computers could interact.  A key departing point for such research is the idea that a computer is no longer a distinct object, but is a source of intelligence that is embedded in our environment.  As such, we need an interface that is able to access that intelligence in an intuitive, natural manner.  One of the recent projects by the Fluid Interfaces Group illustrates this point well.  SixthSense basically combines a mobile computing device with a projector and camera.  The camera sees what you see and tracks your hand gestures, which the computer interprets as instructions for applications. The projector projects information on any surface around you, including parts of your body.  The possible applications are mind-boggling.  Some of the experimental applications: draw an @ on your wrist to check your mail or a circle to check the time (the camera projects your email and an analogue watch on your wrist); take photos by making a ‘framing’ gesture; project a large map on any surface and zoom in and out using hand gestures; project extra information about products in the supermarket; or project video news on a regular newspaper.

In a 2007 blog post, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote that “in the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildly differing devices which will give us access to the system.”  Berners-Lee used the example of booking a flight to illustrate his point.

 

 

The idea of the web as a graph, a “Giant Global Graph”, is a fascinating way of conceptualising the future of the web.  It integrates both a vision on social networks and the semantic web.  Much has been said and written about the social web and Web 2.0.  The impact of the social networks, micro-blogging and social bookmarking platforms has of course been pivotal to making the web social.  Also, it is probably correct that we are still in the early stages of this ‘social’ evolution.  Facebook, the biggest network, has about 500 million users, which is a lot, but there are nearly 2 billion internet users out there and 4 billion mobile phone users.  Clearly there is still plenty of potential for growth. Also, there is still much room for integrating the ‘social graph’—i.e. the core network data (who is connected to who)—in the rest of the web.  Facebook started out as a site you went to; to check out your ‘wall’ and the newsfeed about what your friends had been up to.  But increasingly, Facebook (and Twitter etc) is an application that is built into other content sites. Similar to the way that Google has evolved into the web’s search infrastructure (built into your browser), so Facebook and its cohorts are building the web’s social infrastructure. We don’t just search for online content anymore; now we also read/view/listen to what our network suggests.  We’ve become a ‘sharing and forwarding’ society. With Facebook running into a storm of trouble over its privacy policies, the key question today is whether the social graph will migrate to a more open and distributed infrastructure such as OneSocialWeb, Diaspora and AppleSeed.  But whatever the fate of Facebook, the social graph will remain and expand as the world’s population comes online.  

 

The point being made by Berners-Lee is that the social graph is just one aspect of the Giant Global Graph. The semantic web points to the other part of the puzzle.  Much of the web content around today is generated by automated publishing software that extracts information from databases. The problem is that in the process of web publishing, much of the contextual and semantic information linked to the published piece of information (via it being in a structured database) is lost. The semantic web is a vision of a web that is published with much more metadata, to an extent where websites become readable by machines. Thus, Berners-Lee is interested in his flight’s URI (Unified Resource Identifier), because that is the key to integrating all the possible tasks (and services) related to that flight. No longer does Berners-Lee have to hop from one website to another to search, analyse and links different bits of information; the applications will do it for him. In this vision, the web is no longer a fragmented mass of information, but a giant database on which a myriad of different applications can be built. It is a vision that fits squarely with the working assumption of the Fluid Interfaces Group, that the computer has become a source of intelligence that is embedded in our environment.

These are exciting changes, the repercussions of which we can barely imagine. Which prompts the question whether we are coping with the changes that have occurred?  Indeed, some people are beginning to question whether our educational system has adapted to these changes. Are our children being taught to navigate (and contribute to) the global graph as intelligent critical thinkers, or are they learning rote much of the knowledge one can find online? Others, like Laurent Haug or Ron Tolido, wonder whether we have lost control over technology, that instead of it being useful it has become invasive, interruptive and possibly even disruptive (to our ability to think). Yet others, such as Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn of game developer studio Tale of Tales, point to the fact that the digital world has become a part of our reality and as such has become a cultural medium. They appeal for digital content that is culturally relevant and capable of enriching our lives.  Indeed, it probably is in the interaction between technology, art and design—as is being pioneered at the Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design—that we should look for much of the innovation that will impact upon as, and be meaningful for us as human beings.