In 2006, Cheryl and I had the pleasure of welcoming ilana, our first daughter, to this world. It's been amazing to see her personality develop since "daddy ordered me on his iPhone" as she would genuinely say a few weeks after speaking.
What has amazed me the most so far is how ilana has been intuitively connected to the current forms of technology. Very early on, she enjoyed coming up with new digital paintings on the screen of my phone as a way to fall asleep at night. She got a "touch" for it right away.
The other day, I realized that she was able to browse princesses' videos off YouTube by herself (which urged me to think content control earlier than I would have ever anticipated...). Any form of mouse, the legacy one with an electronic tail, or the fingertip one which is poised to becoming the regular way to go, has not managed to escape from her use for too long apparently. She also figured out on her own how to unlock my phone by swipping her finger across the screen, browse the many panels of apps (before 4.0) by sliding them out one after the other from her fingertip before getting to her favorite Sponge Bob apps, clicking on them and playing with them!
Do kids have the notion of Singularity intuitively coined into their DNA, or instead, are the Steve Jobs and co. driving disruptive innovations that make the user experience intuitively simple, even for kids?
Or could it be a combination of the two?
Well, I would vote for both, and I believe that the forms in which information will be delivered to us will increasingly look like electronic Play-Doh that will meet the unmet of our long-tail socio-cultural specificies as humans.
What's amazing about this electronic Play-Doh, let's call it "epdo", is that not only will epdo allow us to shape it the way we want, create its color the way we want to enhance and adapt its daily physical usability to our needs but also will epdo empower us to assign an ambient scent to each app, a seasonal temperature and proper level of epdo humidity, and other untangibles that will take our daily emotional usability to unprecedented heights. Let's dream!
A few years ago, as I was having that train of thoughts in a boring class as I was studying in Boston, I realized that some people already had overlapping ideas to some extent. The Morph concept was one of these representations:
Morph Concept by Nokia
In 2020, ilana will be 14 and she will still be playing with epdo!
She will never have known the complexity of the Email tyrannosaurus that drove the adoption of the Internet almost three decades before, she will be openly and securely living her physical and digital social lives flipping from one to the other through body language connectors.
Is that a dream?
Food for thought... I'll follow this one!
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