Touchscreens have no hand | Hacker News Reader

Touchscreens have no hand

edwardtufte.com

60 pointsyarone14 comments

I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating. It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was allowed to simply be paint. Painting stopped being a way to represent the real world on a canvas and was allowed to be itself, the real advantages of paint came out.

Well, let's stop pretending that the tablet is a representation of the real world, and let pixels be pixels. Why pretend they're anything more than that? "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" as Magritte so eloquently put it in '28-29.

Pixels, while not having the 3 dimensional qualities of the real world, surely have many of their own unique qualities; that while we attempt to copy the real world, remain unexplored.

I think the fundamental problem isn't one of emulation, it's the lack of any kind of tactile feedback. I write music software and there's a world of difference between a real knob on a synthesizer or a real piano key and any representation you put on a screen. Touchscreens have unique strengths and weaknesses.

I'm totally with you. After I've aquired a smartphone (HTC Desire), I've come to the conclusion that the only thing that touchscreens are good for is scrolling. I hate writing on it, I hate pushing buttons and links, I hate that the virtual objects that I interact with gets occluded by my fingers, I hate that I have to hold my phone in awkward ways so I don't accidentally "push" virtual "buttons". Many of these irritations stem from the fact that the interface has no tactile feedback, and does not respond to different levels of pressure (like ordinary buttons).

Touchscreens are a regression in user interfaces, and I hope that the future will bring a comeback of more tactile input devices, like keyboards.

I think touchscreens are going to become the cheap, ubiquitous, lowest-common-denominator interface for general tasks. But I agree that they're really not that interesting for anything more than browsing. You'll notice that most apps don't go far beyond basic tap, pan, swipe and pinch gestures because anything more complex is too awkward and error-prone. That leaves a lot of the expressive potential of the human hand untapped.

This is why I got a HTC Desire Z instead of a HTC Desire.

This has been Tufte's point since long before iPhones and iPads made touch screens so popular. He wrote a whole book called "Escaping Flatland" after all.

It's not at all that he doesn't appreciate the potential of pixels---he's been a long advocate of pushing them to perform at the levels he desires---but instead that he believes that the information lost in graphs, charts, interfaces is incredible. He is constantly studying methods to attain significant data density in graphic representation.

His argument here is that we have so many sensory signals we pay attention to naturally and garner great amounts of information from. Touch screens manage to interact with just one or two of them.

It ends quaintly, too. Not with a call to arms to improve touchscreens, but more like Brett Victor's essay, with a call to remember to appreciate the physicality of the world.

> the high point of [painting and sculpture] was reached during the point of pure abstraction

On what criteria do you base this assessment? What’s an example of “pure” abstraction? Do e.g. the impressionists make the cut, or are they too representational to be part of the “high point”? What about Rodin?

I'd go with either Mondrian, or Pollock myself. Impressionists, such as Monet began working towards abstraction for sure, but for Monet, it was more about capturing the fleeting nature of light on a canvas, however still within the confines of a landscape.

Surely painting as a pure form of expression, unbridled by anything more than simply paint, reached it's high point with the likes of Mondrian, Pollock, Kandinsky etc during the early 20th century. When composition, colour and form were key and principle elements of the canvas, not nature, and the natural world around. They may have drawn inspiration from the world around but they did not seek to visual represent it on the canvas per se.

This is just a part of the world of impersonal mass production. Make everything the same. I sometimes wonder if electronics would benefit more from the world of welding and construction where the maker often leaves their personal mark somewhere on the finished product. Many hands went into the construction of a tablet but each is almost identical and has almost no hints as to its origin or the mood of the assembly line worker on that particular day or whether the sun was shining while it was on the delivery plane as it was landing. Companies often talk about 'brand identification' and 'personalization' but is it any closer to reality than the coat of fingerprint remover?

I think you touched on the underlying principle of why pictures behind glass interfaces are so popular. The only way to satisfy the mass demand and follow market rules is to master cloning of physical objects. Not everyone can afford a piano but everyone can have a piano app, because of perfect copies of software and near perfect copies of hardware.

The problem for me is about how we input something in the machine. iPad, Kindle, etc. are wonderful for consuming content, and this can probably be done efficiently enough with touchscreen interfaces. But producing content is one important part of the deal (specially for guys like Tufte), and in this activity the physical grain of the interface become prominent.

In my dream, I would have a phone-like thing, small enough to fit in my pocket. I would be able to put it on a flat surface and two laser rays would draw a rectangle were I would be able to draw or write. What I draw would be projected on the surface by the laser in real-time, so I'd have the feedback that is missing on electronic draw-pads. With this we would go back to hand-writing for most of us, and it would be possible to have a keyboard drawn on the surface and use fingers. The haptic feedback is the hard part, but I think laser can't "touch" you so I don't see how to do it.

Can you just add in a laser keyboard there? Handwriting is slow and my hand gets sore.

I think he's limited himself by the idea of a physical screen but I nonetheless agree with the sentiment that we should use our computers to give us more time in the physical world, not replace it.

Why do I get the feeling he's telling me to get off his lawn? I found Bret Victor's article informative and inspiring. This just feels like a grumpy rant, and it adds nothing.

On the matter of digital surfaces, I found the description of an object which changed surfaces in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth fascinating. It essentially "worked" by transmitting electric pulses through the skin that simulated the feelings - the actual object didn't change. I wonder if there's research in that area.

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