For my fifth impulse, I have chosen the feedback from my final Crit talk with Martin Kaltenbrunner, who had some interesting insights on the topics I am interested in. My starting point for the thesis is currently a growing frustration with the “screen-as-default” trend. We’ve reached a point where efficiency and friction-less design are the ultimate goals, often leading to mindless interaction and digital fatigue.
In our meeting, we discussed the “blind urge” to digitalize everything, often driven mainly by economic reasons rather than a fulfilling, well-suited user experience. Mr. Kaltenbrunner suggested a specific research process to help me narrow down my scope. Instead of just looking at the “now,” I could compare three states:
Pre-Digital: How did we solve this task physically? What did interfaces used to look like?
Absolute Digitalization: The current state (mostly touchscreens)
Post-Digital / Hybrid: A new solution that doesn’t just “go back” to the old ways but uses the best of both worlds and considers the use case and its requirements. (Not the screen as one-for-all solution)
The goal isn’t nostalgia, but rather finding a “Post-Digital” development that acknowledges the digital but brings back the haptic, tangible quality of the physical.
The main takeaway and my current challenge is that I really need to pin down a specific use case. While my interest in tangible interfaces is broad, we did come to the conclusion to avoid overdone examples like car interfaces and instead find a niche where the shift to screens has genuinely made the experience worse (maybe going back to educational topics and school environments). I’m looking for a situation where losing friction and diversity has led to a loss of focus, and where a hybrid, tangible solution would actually provide more value than just a clean digital one.
I’m now searching for a topic: something specific enough to test but broad enough to help me find more general design principles. The advice from my talk is to go out and explore. This has shifted my focus away from theory and back to the real world. My next step could be to pick a few potential use cases and compare them to how they worked before, how they are digitalized now, and what a post-digital version could look like to see which one has the most potential. Another thing I will of course look into is some literature research about post-digitalization itself. I think it will be really valuable to familiarize myself with theories and terminology like this and find out what the state of research is. I have done a quick research out of curiosity and found a few papers and researchers that sound interesting, such as Florian Cramer who writes about the „Post-digital“ and Löwgren & Stolterman’s Material theory.
