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Vol.30 No.1, January 1998
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Something tremendously powerful is happening.
Enormous changes are underway which may soon give rise to an unprecedented era of creative expression. This era will usher in extraordinary demands for new means and methods of expression, interaction and communication. It will forge entirely new types of thinkers, whose kaleidoscopic manipulation of digital media will culminate in an explosive proliferation of innovative discoveries. This time may come to be known as The Orchestration Age.
As a thirty-something, I can remember the early days of handheld technology and the first Texas Instruments calculator my father brought home from work. It was worth nearly $800.00 and that was in the early 1970s. It was heavy, black, about the size of a Newton, had tiny plastic bubble keys and a small one-line, red LED screen. My brothers and I were fascinated not so much by the range of mathematical functions it offered, nor that it had a programmable memory, but in the discovery that it could display the words HELLO and SHELL OIL on its tiny screen as we punched in the alpha-numeric sequences 07734 or 710 77342 and viewed the display upside-down. Forget about adding numbers; we wanted to communicate, to be expressive.
During The Information Age, people have been intent on mining information, on discovering new domains and expanding previous boundaries. The results of these activities are staggering, both in quality and most certainly in volume. Throughout the world, the forefathers (and foremothers) of information production (of whom some of us may still claim membership) diligently mined, documented and archived deep silos of specialized information. These vast reservoirs of information needed storage, organization, management and manipulation to be shared in an intelligible way, and the computer industry was born. Meanwhile, the telecommunications industry was securing a fibre optic infrastructure for high bandwidth digital transmission. Servers laden with digital information waited patiently for a time of ubiquitous access, for electronic queries which could bring them to life and clone copies for digital transport over a global information highway to millions of expectant and curious users. Connectivity through networks of optical fibre, coax cable, twisted pair and wireless transmission technologies has finally enabled this access for users on the emerging public Internet and private Intranets, signifying the initial shift into The Orchestration Age.
New users quickly become digital sorcerers. Younger generations (for whom the computer is as familiar as the teddy bear) now take for granted an infinite wellspring of on-line information, and can assimilate ever-changing technologies as easily as trying on -- and kicking off -- new pairs of shoes. Researchers and designers observe with disbelief the speed at which today's youth establish symbiotic relationships with new video games, personal digital assistants, mobile phones, computers and software applications. This phenomenon may be attributed in part to the concerted efforts and expertise of researchers and user-centered designers, but perhaps is more likely due to the intimate familiarity derived from simply living with technology.
Early examples of Internet and Intranet sites are remarkably uninhibited, both in content and especially in appearance, incorporating vibrant colors, mixtures of fonts, freely juxtaposed graphics, video clips, sound and animation, unconstrained by and actually transcending traditional rules of design, organization and communication. These nebular sites may very well be indicators of what is to come in the future, acting as early examples of individual and collective experimentation and expression. Unlike the advent of desktop publishing, when non-visual technology-illiterate people were rather abruptly given access to tools for producing graphical documents, new generations of users are multimedia-literate, gliding with ease along each new wave or ripple of innovation. These users have sophisticated attitudes and capabilities regarding digital manipulation, along with higher and higher expectations for a kaleidoscopic range of tools to orchestrate and communicate their subjective and collective paradigms.
From immersion in clouds of digital sorcery will rise entirely new types of users with hybrid styles of cognition. These new thinkers will not only orchestrate but lead and drive the developments of The Orchestration Age. New categories and labels will materialize to describe these emergent thinking styles. Generalized job titles such as IT Engineer or Interaction Designer will disappear and be replaced by more specific titles which reflect thinking styles and approaches toward information orchestration. Imagine the skill sets and tools necessary to support such job description titles as Inferential Data Specialist, Deductive Constraint Expert, Salient Prioritor, Macro Pattern Structure Analyst, Functional Mapmaker or General Associator.
As masters of digital manipulation, future users in The Orchestration Age will embrace and evolve new cognitive styles to perceive and actively orchestrate information in completely unique ways. They will insist on having user interfaces and digital tools for manipulating diverse forms of media in ways never before seen and yet to be imagined. Younger generations will expect simple, graceful access to electronic tools which offer greater and greater sophistication and technological wizardry. The consequences of these user expectations will drive and stimulate the design and development of user interfaces yet to come.
The Orchestration Age will be a time when people are both cognitively and technologically equipped to draw on the vast reserves mined and stored during The Information Age. The communications infrastructure underlying the Internet has linked together and made accessible bridges across and gateways into deep reserves of specialized information in ways never before possible. Multimedia-literate users will retrieve, marry up and orchestrate these reserves in ways which will both drive demand for new forms of interaction and redefine current notions of creative expression. New thinking styles will simultaneously evolve, triggering innovative discoveries at a rate and on a scale which will eclipse the collective imagination of today's knowledge-workers. Anticipate a proliferation of orchestrated digital media, drawing on varied sources, comparing, contrasting and merging disciplines, elucidating patterns of commonalty and convergence, resulting in a barrage of new concepts which will transverse known categories and smelt radically new metaphors.
So far, electronic tools and devices have enabled people to begin extending their means and range of communication, observation, influence and, perhaps most exciting of all, creative expression. Something tremendously powerful is happening as the technological possibilities widen and expectations build on each of these fronts. With the coming changes, future generations of technology users will want tools which offer the continuing promise of unlimited capabilities, driven by a desire to be not only omniscient and omnipresent but omnific (all-creating) as well, as they conduct digital information during The Orchestration Age.
Kim Vonder Haar is a Visual Interaction Designer with Nortel, a global telecommunications corporation. At Nortel, within the Corporate Design Group based in Harlow (UK), Kim designs visionary and next generation visual and speech interaction prototypes for telecommunication products. Kim holds an MSc in Cognitive Science and Intelligent Computing from the University of Westminster (London) and a BFA (Hons) in Graphic Design from Colorado State University.
Kim Vonder Haar
Visual Interaction Designer
Nortel Advanced Technology Corporate Design Group
London Road
Harlow CM17 9NA
UK
tel. +44 01279 40 3690
email: vonder@nortel.co.uk
Visual Interaction Design is a Special Interest Area of SIGCHI focusing on the visual aspects of interaction in interface design. The goals of the Visual Interaction Design Special Interest Area are to act as a focal point for visual interaction design interest within SIGCHI, to advance visual interaction design as an integral component of HCI, and to integrate visual interaction design with the rest of SIGCHI.
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Vol.30 No.1, January 1998 |
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