Digital Design Is Still a Child

Humanity has been pretty good at graphic design for quite some time now (though we may have called it something else early on). The same goes for packaging design. Sure there have been plenty of innovations along the way such as the printing press, photography and modern day packaging technology, but still.

I guess you could say that interaction design was born at the same time as the first stick n' stone tools, but more systematic and advanced interaction design can perhaps be considered approximately as old as the industrial revolution.

Digital interaction design, meaning design for interacting with computers, is young. DID aimed at the general public, is really young. Born by Xerox Parc and Apple (and copied by Microsoft), the window-based interaction model still prevails.

But being this young, I think we've only seen the first beginnings of a huge market for digital design (including DID). The move towards digital media is natural and inevitable, and we're still stuck i a design world that is very static. We're moving towards a "one machine"-world, where we'll interact with data in different ways, not neccessarily web pages. RSS-readers is an early example of this.

The more basic question of how to interact with data through a "browser" is one that many are trying to answer. Not least the people of Mozilla labs. They have suggested a model for a future browser that looks like this (corny film, but you'll get the point):


Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Can you imagine your grandmother trying to work this interface? Neither can I. I think that they have made the classic mistake of being too complicated and too techy. But that might just be me.

But if you spot a good digital design agency with razor sharp DID-skills, give me a call. I want to buy some stock and get rich.