Designing for imaginary needs
Rob Tannen on Designing for Humans, has blogged some notes about designing interactions with imaginary objects - inspired by Bruce Sterling’s imaginary gadgets series.
I particularly liked his intuition that the Wii controller was in some way inspired by the lightsabre!
The image is a much-blogged one from the showreel of Mark Coleran, one of the most prolific designers of imaginary interfaces for the film industry.
The thing I like most about the imaginary gadget concept is precisely what Sterling talks about in his second installment, The Brazen Head. The unrealised object is capable of fulfilling imaginary needs without the messy business of actually building the technology to do so. The freedom that this introduces to think about what unconstrained needs might be is liberating and productive.
This is exactly what a prototype does, turning imaginary needs into living, breathings ones. The technology can follow.
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