The nice folks at Ambidextrous Magazine asked me to contribute an essay on magic as a metaphor for ubiquitous computing user experience design to Issue 6, which launches this week. This essay fleshes out my October dorkbot presentation. Here's the premise
What’s missing in this technological vision, however, is a consistent design language that explains how these devices work to the people who will use them. No common verbal, visual, or interaction techniques have emerged to help users navigate a world filled with augmented devices.
[...]
This is where magic can help us. The desktop metaphor is largely inadequate to describe the wide range of form factors and functionality possible with devices that do not have screens or pointers. Mobile phone screens hardly resemble 1970s offices (the inspiration for the desktop metaphor). A shoe that dynamically changes its functionality using sensors and a small CPU looks even less like an office. And yet nothing currently is replacing the desktop metaphor.
I then go on to define what a magic metaphor for ubicomp user experience could contain and how it structures the design process. For me, the point of metaphor is to communicate a set of concepts not just to users but also to developers, designers, marketers, and CEOs. In other words, metaphors ease the creation of consistent experiences by providing a useful set of constraints and a shared visual, behavioral, and verbal vocabulary.
The full text of my piece is here (224K PDF), but you should go out and get the magazine. Ambidextrous is always full of great stuff.
So I enjoy a good number of your posts and the magic thing is curious as a handle for pervasive computing (we should have a separate discussion about the lameness of terminology currently for the emerging mesozoic period of the information age we're entering but I guess that's what we've got for now) but I wonder where physics fits into it (being the opposite of magic in some ways since physics is about trusted and tangible properties of things and magic is about voodoo, poking things with a stick and a sense of wonder and later questing to understand something that if truly magic is not supposed to be comprehensible). In our labs (yeah I'll admit one of the founders was from the xerox PARC mafia of the 70s) much of our ubicomp research centers on finding the right balance of physics AND magic (physics because we as humans have evolved pretty good ways of turning physics into tool making for a few hundred thousand years... I think that's because trusting something won't magically do something leads to being able to build stuff out of it that still works tomorrow) and magic because frankly just recapitulating the real world in the information space seems kinda lame (not to mention your point of distancing things from ordinary objects nor losing the benefits of the new kinds of things we can do in the information space).