Why we need to take computers out of computing

Computers — the boxes that we consult in the form of tablets, mobile phones and desktops — are wonderful, but they take away from what it is to be human and to really connect with one another. So the challenge and opportunity that lies ahead is how to get the computers out of computing, said Mark Rolston, the chief creative officer at frog.

Speaking at the GigaOM RoadMap conference in San Francisco, Rolston took the audience through a vision of omnipresent computing. “The room is the computer,” he said, as he described putting something like Apple’s Siri voice recognition system into an earpiece, and then being able to interact with a projector in a room to create a screen wherever the user needed one. “Computing is decoupling. Most computers are composed machines, but if you can image a case where they are externalized resources in a room,” he said. “I can talk at it and wave at it, and maybe I have a keyboard or maybe there are screens or cameras around, but [the computers] compose in the moment as we need them, and they are no more ornate than we need.” So today, if you have an iPad, that’s all you have. But if computing is decoupled from computers, then it becomes more flexible, and available to become whatever the user needs for the function they need to fulfill. However, if computing is decoupled from the computers, input becomes more challenging. Now that computers have eyes (Kinect for example) and ears (Siri), designers — such as those at frog — have to figure out how to use the human body as an input device.