The world we live in today is made of computers. We don’t have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don’t have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers; a 3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it’s a general-purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software.
- Cory Doctorow, The Coming War on General Computation
This is a fundamental change, and like most fundamental inflection points in the way we see the world, it will take most of us a while to catch up to it. But as interaction designers, it’s useful to be reminded of why our work matters, and why thinking of it as something that only happens in web browsers and traditional apps is so limiting. There are interactions everywhere; go make them better.