Space, The Final Frontier.

Star Trek was right… but about which space?

Human beings are natural explorers. Our curiosities and our desires to build and tame that which is outside of us is obvious, sometimes painfully so. It is equally clear to notice the patterns of our introspective journeys.

For as long as the idea of design has been around, we have discussed the spaces in which design takes place, by traditionally speaking about physical spaces. In my medium post on emerging UX Design spaces, I wrote about how only recently previously unknown, unexplored dimensions are being made available to us. We must now think and talk about those spaces, too.

When iterating any design we often take baby steps. This is important because radical changes either break things that aren’t broken, introduce concepts that people won’t find useful, or introduce the right concepts at the wrong time or in the wrong space. Like a wood sculptor, we shave away and shape meticulously. There are points in time, however, when a technological paradigm shift occurs. And so, much like how space and time are a continuum in the scientific discipline of astrophysics, space and time are also interdependent in the design discipline.

Space, Time, & Quantum Leaps

Think about the iPhone. Just before the first iPhone was released there was Microsoft Table, a coffee table that utilized multitouch surface technology. Why don’t we have these in our living rooms today, yet everyone has a multitouch phone in their pockets? The wrong space. The wrong time. Speaking of time….

The distance of time between the first commercial electronic telegraph and the announcement of the first iPhone was 170 years. Pause for a moment. That timespan is nothing compared to the timespan that modern-day humans have been around. It’s only .09% actually– not even a tenth of one percent of our time. And now, ten years later, we face the frontiers of functioning virtual reality and augmented reality. We see the surface technology of…

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