(Thanks to Tinker for the picture)
This is more of what I meant to say at Lift. (Part One is here). And it explains why I was messing around with this Big Red Button.
Clearly lots of the future is going to be about screens. Touch and screens. That's not a bad thing, that's full of enormously exciting possibilities. But if it's all we do we're going to be missing something; we're going to be missing most of our bodies and most of our senses. Even something like Project Natal - which is ostensibly about the body, feels, to me, more to do with disembodiment. It seems like an intermediate step on the way to total mind interface; where we just slide under the glass and live there forever. That seems to be what the designers are after.
Presentations and PowerPoint are an example. Conference organisers and software/hardware makers seem determined to promote a fantasy that the slides control themselves. They want the computer off the stage, hidden, they want the controller as small as possible. Again, they seem to be working towards an ideal state where the slides are advanced by an inflection in the speaker's mind.
This reinforces, and is reinforced by, a particular school of presentations/talks which imagines them as an exchange of minds facilitated by language, occasionally supported by imagery. Which, to me, always seems like such a waste, like taking a talking head off telly and going to see it live. This gets even worse when it's on a big conference stage like at Lift or dConstruct or somewhere. You're on this big, bare, dark, platform, normally lit like Derek Jacobi doing a soliloquy. There are a few great actors in the world who can fill a space like that with 40 minutes of compellingness just using the power of their voice and their words. I know I can't. And I've not seen many non-professionals who can.
We should be thinking of all the things we can to make ourselves more watchable. And, for me, one of those things, is to engage physically with our materials - our presentation, our slides. We should be performing PowerPoint not just showing it. You ought to be able to buy a PowerPoint Hero controller that gets you engaged the way a Guitar Hero controller does.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but being completely devoid of ideas for Lift, and having come to know Alex and the Tinker crew I thought I'd ask them if they could build an elementary version of this idea, so at least I'd have something new. Specifically I asked them for a Big Red Button that does nothing but advance the slides when you press it. Something mechanical with physical feedback and resistance. They kindly and expertly delivered exactly that.
And it works as I'd imagined. It makes you want to thump it. You lift your hand and bang it down. So if you're stuck in droning mind-meld mode for a moment you're soon jolted out of it by the movement and physicality. And your audience is reminded that they're watching a physical being not just an avatar.
It's a lovely thing, but I think it's just a beginning. Why do presentations have to be composed of serial images anyway? Maybe if we think beyond the slide advance button we can think of other interactions and other physical interaction ideas. What about a set of PowerPoint pedals, like guitar pedals, or a Keynote wand. Or something.
Anyway. Perhaps it's best I didn't try and say all that. I'm still not sure it makes sense.