History & Future of Interaction Design Pt. II: The Future
Automations for my friends is a project conceived for Paul Pangaro’s fall 2023 course: History and Future of Interaction Design. I’m choosing to take on a concept of adding automations to our friends’ technology as an act of friendship. This project was initially inspired by Bill Atkinson’s “Hypercard” as well as a precursor prototype designed with my friend Bryce Li.
How did we reach automations for my friends? Atkinson “admitted” that where he missed out with Hypercard was that it was confined to hard drives. If he had pushed it toward an opposing direction, it may have become the World Wide Web.
A similar modern conception of Hypercard, by Apple, is the Shortcuts app that comes on every iPhone. Shortcuts lets you create your own “automations” with a block style pseudo-code interface.
The same way Hypercard could have become the web, what potential does Shortcuts have if it moved off one’s own personal device?
What kinds of automations would it be meaningful to create for my friends?
I started off by interviewing my friend, Michelle, a “Shortcuts super user”.
Main Insights:
- The most useful shortcuts are the ones that run in the background and “wait”, aka the ones that are most “automated” (vs. the ones that require manual activation)
- Giving someone permissions to view your live data (ie. location) is an act of “letting someone into your life” — an act of care and sign of friendship in a world unavoidable of technology + surveillance.
A decisive point in this project was expanding the scope to cover technology outside of personal devices. What new opportunities do we have when taking control over technologies in our surrounding environments?
