The slogan for this conference is Arthur C. Clarke’s encomium about technology that’s sufficiently advanced being indistinguishable from magic. And this morning’s talk is “The Coming Age of Magic” - which seems to be about the influence of games and their magical leanings on future interface design (the Wii wand, etc). - magic as the metaphor for ubiquitous computing design. On his way to his main point, however, he showed some examples of interface design from General Magic, the cutting edge ten years ago, which foresaw the convergence of handheld computers, networks, and communications. But when it was working, cutting edge though was that interface design needed a metaphor people understood, and the common choice was the desktop. GM extended this, so you could walk away from your cartoon desktop down a hallway past doors labeled library into a downtown with a huge building that was the Internet…

We have moved on now from this particular metaphor, and when you see this interface it looks unbelievably lame and clunky. Some of it was fashion (as I believe the magic games metaphor is), and some of it was necessary as training wheels for people unused to the concepts of computing. But how lame will what we design now look in ten years? And how long will we have to go on using it while the next generation rolls their eyes?