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Technology Imagined

A.I. rendered interfaces of the past and future

By Lowell Robinson

October 26^th, 2023

All Devices Tell a Story

My garage is filled with old technology. Every device has a story, and if you have a big enough space, you probably have a lot of 'stories'. What I love about looking back at older technology is seeing a collection of human decisions to connect to the previously untouchable.

All of the images below were created by generative A.I.

Touching the Untouchable

Control interfaces allow us to temporally manipulate a moment in time and space, to touch something abstract that was previously untouchable.

The spirit of what makes an interface compelling isn't just its aesthetic. Every design is filled with choices to allow us to connect to technology and extend ourselves into new spaces.

More Than Just a Switch

Even something as commonplace as a light switch in our house encapsulates so much more than turning a light 'on' or 'off'. Is the switch in right place for how we live our lives? Is the switch alone, or mixed in with other switches that don't relate? Does it have a satisfying click, or a gentle ease? How reliable or dependable is the switch?

A good interface allows itself to be an extension of its user. As we live more and more with technology, our experiences fight binary descriptions.

A Few Kilobytes of Data

The images in this essay were created with tremendous processing power and image models with billions of parameters. In comparison, my first computer was an Atari 1200 with 64K of internal memory (a giant leap from the Atari game console (2600) that used sparsely coded game cartridges--2KB). What do we expect from technology today and what magic can we still remember from those simple plastic boxes that contained entire worlds? --And lastly, what should the interface look like?