Maya on Interaction

The most demented thing about technology is that its functionality is sometimes in your imagination.

The commercial specs for an iPod are all about storage capacity and accessories. In one of the most inspired uses of the iPod I’ve heard of, it defends a fellow in a street attack. The user’s success has nothing to do with a technical specification and everything to do with a robust imagination.

For some years I have been cultivating an intricate imaginary relationship with an icon of awayness.

This is him:
His intent expression and elegant bone structure swept me less than his apparant sincerity and high principles. These virtues radiate from him, as you can see. I can’t remember what colour his eyes were because it’s not altogether clear from the angle of the portrait. If memory serves, they were sweet. You probably can’t see deep compassion in them but I’m sure you can’t see an absence of it either.

Information is scant compared to the world it describes. So specs are inherently vague. So we fill in the blanks. We create functionality by imagining as we deal with people and things. We construct weapons out of iPods and secret soulmates out of VOIP client icons.

We need to use our imagination in order to make some things work but we can’t make everything work by imagining. If you are imaginative, an iPod is a brilliant anti-theft device. But no VOIP client - no matter how mindblowingly good its UI team is - will treat you like a lady. (Although one smart sista who knows her way around a configuration can work a bit of loving into default messages like ‘Logging in…’. She might be available for consulting.)

So when on your birthday, a Skype icon just calls to say ‘I don’t love you’, no contortion of the imagination can preserve the notion that you are in a nurturing relationship with it. Coherence breaks down - just before a picnic to which you’ve invited all your friends (apart from the caller, who, as iconography suggests, is exempt by his very nature from turning up.)

The point is that coherence arises out of a good fit between information and imagination. It breaks down when one runs wildly from the other. When a mugger retreats as a result of your imaginative act of defence, it’s a fit. When a gentleman you adore retreats as a result of your imaginative act of defence, its time to realign information and imagination.

(And what better venue for realignment than a picnic?)

The bottom line:

Bad: trying to be soulmates with a component of a user interface.
Good: smacking a mugger on the head with an iPod