Take a close look at the video above and you'll notice one common thread about the future of interaction design — hands. The video suggests that we'll be primarily interacting with devices with our hands in the future.
Bret Victor recently published an nice little rant about this video, concluding that hands are the future of interaction design. It caught our eye and we loved the emotion behind the article. We partially agree with Bret. While we already use our hands to interact with devices today, we cannot forget about other types of interactions.
Our Voices
Our voices are pretty wicked. Get this, the human voice can produce sounds ranging from 60 to 7000hz. We can make some 40 distinct sounds in English to make more than 200,000 words. What can we do so that users can interact with devices using their voice alone? We're already seeing that with the latest iPhone.
Our Minds?
What would an interaction with our minds look like? Our minds are faster than anything else that we can interact with (much faster than our hands or our voice). We are getting closer to interacting with our minds directly. Such interactions, if possible, will be lightning fast.
The challenge for us as product designers is exploring and considering all types of interactions when we think about the future. It's not enough to focus solely on hands. We need to look at the problem holistically. These hypothetical visions of the future may be imaginary right now, but they are they only thing that inspires us to explore the possibilities of making them a reality.