Disclaimer: I am an interaction designer who cares deeply about this topic, but want to push on the boundary of the discourse rather than falling into easy clichés. The thoughts below are not meant in the spirit of being a takedown, but rather attempts at drawing a map to help answer the question "how can we go beyond?"<p>These kind of rants on interaction design come up very regularly; you can find some going back half a century ago (eg see the whole field of "tangible interfaces"). Or, another somewhat more recent classic (2011): <a href="https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/" rel="nofollow">https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...</a><p>These visions are all rooted in a stereotypification and glorification of pre-computer work - keyboards, mice, and touchscreens are clunky, limited, unexpressive; while dirty paintbrushes, chunky buttons and levers, etc. take advantage of the whole human body and turn work into a transcendental kinetic experience.<p>Yet the demos that come out of these visions of interaction design somehow always to fall along the same lines. If digital, they usually involve infinite canvas, boxes and arrows, etc. If physical, they're about shuffling board game like cards and tokens that quickly get unwieldy. All the while they fail to capture what makes digital interfaces (which are at their core non spatial/non embodied) so powerful and why they have been so successful in most every discipline.<p>The illustrations in the article are unwittingly a great example of the foundational contradiction within the premise: did the author decide to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours hunched over with felt and knitting needles to produce the dozens of embedded images, or did they generate them all with AI in a few hours? If the tactility and creativity that comes with real world materials is so desirable, then why did they make that choice? The answer, I think, is quite obvious - because while messing with felt and needles is a fun way to relax, it's not something you want to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours doing when you have deadlines to worry about.