Why Siftables Excite Me
Posted on | February 20, 2009 | 4 Comments
I first saw Siftables at TED 2009, where David Merrill demonstrated them. I immediately tweeted, “Omg. Siftables are awesome. Google it, watch videos. #ted.” Here’s the talk:
My reaction was not unique. David was quite popular for the remainder of the event. There’s something about Siftables that taps into the “Well, duh” reaction, when you see something new that seems so obvious, which feels so inevitable. We had a couple of the folks from Tacolab, the creators of Siftables, over to Adaptive Path a week ago, and since then I’ve been trying to figure out what makes them so special.
We’re in an exciting time in human-computer interaction. There’s a lot of movement to get beyond the keyboard + mouse and towards new methods of interaction and input, whether it’s Wii-motes, iPhone’s touchscreen, or the Microsoft Surface table of CNN’s Magic Wall. And while I’m intrigued by all those tools, Siftables actually opens up a whole new avenue of inquiry.
See, one thing we’re still really stuck on is the Single Screen Interface. All of this activity is still geared toward a single display, whether a TV, mobile device, a computer screen, or a wall. (Seeing Siftables made me only even more frustrated with iPhone, because there’s no reason iPhones shouldn’t be able to directly engage with one another (I mean, even the original Palm Pilots allowed infrared beaming!). Instead, iPhones are isolated, attention-greedy devices.)
Siftables begins to suggest what happens when your computers are small, fast, cheap, and out of control (I very much think of Rodney Brooks’ comments in Errol Morris’ superb film, Fast Cheap and Out of Control.) There’s a whole new opportunity for connection, interaction, swarming, meshing, and emergence.
Importantly, the form of Siftables also speaks to *fun*. They’re blocks, and, as kids know, blocks are fun. The immediate impulse of anyone interacting with Siftables is to *play* with them.
For some reason I can’t quite figure, when I began to think of applications for Siftables, my mind went back, way back, to 1984, and Rocky’s Boots, an educational software title for the Apple II that taught basic computer logic through graphic assemblage of logic circuits. It would be awesome to physically build such circuitry with Siftables, and take advantage of their interactive nature. I then mused on whether you could program Siftables with a visual programming language on the Siftables, and then my head went all recursive and I had to do a hard reboot, probably with alcohol.
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February 20th, 2009 @ 5:01 pm
Jeevan here, one of the creators of Siftables. Thanks for the supportive analysis! If it’s cool, I’d like to link to a recent blog post I wrote:
http://blog.tacolab.com/2009/02/multi-object-gesture/
I’m using the term “multi-object gesture” to try and sketch out the space in which new interfaces like siftables might live – one where interfaces are distributed across physical objects that are aware of each other and the physical world. I’m trying to capture, like Peter here, what is the thing in Siftables that captures people’s imagination, and based on that, what its possibilities are.
February 21st, 2009 @ 10:55 pm
This is so interesting – thanks for sharing. New interfaces that unshackle us from the computer are needed to move computing into the next generation.
February 23rd, 2009 @ 12:48 am
This is a fantastic product you’ve built Jeevan. Absolutely love it
February 23rd, 2009 @ 5:16 am
Peter, excellent point about our Single Screen world. It’s curious that we’ve done our best to pack features into that one screen, employing all sorts of metaphors to make it usable. And then something literal comes along–like physical objects with their own screens & abilities–and it’s jaw-dropping!
I’m very excited to follow Merrill’s project.