Hybrid Design

“We need augmentation, not automation.” – Donald A. Norman

In his 1883 book «Le Vingtième Siècle» (The Twentieth Century) Albert Robida demonstrated not only a set of visionary technologies but most importantly delivered by showing a worse-case scenario possible risks of those technologies.
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An image that you can see frequently is this of two people (mostly teenagers) listening to music or talking to somebody in a collaborative way. Even though it isn’t entirely new it touches several fields from collaborative usage and behaviors to sonic augmented reality.

Convincing new technologies which enter the mainstream market have the power to change the behavior of those using them. Even though this might only be a temporary change, as you don’t see anyone anymore bending to their belt to see their pager, it quickly stands for a certain type of lifestyle and level of knowledge or sophistication.
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First of all, this isn’t a great new idea but rather one of this “wouldn’t it be cool if…” things that come into use in one of a thousand cases, randomly and unknowingly. As if one of those intelligent kitchens would calculate correctly that you feel like strawberry-icecream-sandwich with extra chocolate topping even though it’s 8 a.m. on christmas day and even though you never ate something like that before.

 

 
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*Some quick thoughts on media:

These days the Personal Computer turned 30 (since its mainstream breakthrough / IBM 5150). But what sounds like a young lads celebration rather tastes like a requiem mass. Even if that is pretty dramatic to say it is also true. But what does this tell about hardware media as carrier of information and culture? It seems like the end of monolithic machines and concepts in general with the PC as figurehead to be the last of their kind.

 
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One of the core elements of designing good interactions is the un-wrapping of simple human gestures without inventing artificial ones. This means to shift complexity rather to the inherent operations of a computational system instead of to the outside where a person interacts. What this means will be briefly discussed here.
 

 
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Les affiches en goguettes / Georges Méliès / 1905

 
Georges Méliès’ film would be a great augmented reality application. The viewer sees the people coming to life and even interacting with each other. This was, besides other films, an inspiration for the Colors issue #76 from 2009.
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New trends emerge in architecture. Old styles are left behind and architects now go for the ultra-modern look, the futuristic style of buildings. They shouldn’t be blamed for this, don’t get me wrong, I actually admire this attitude…[http://www.designyourway.net/]

2001: A Space Odyssey / Stanley Kubrick / 1968
 
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