Are you somebody that talks to your office software? “No I mean, select this, and leave everything else!” Well, it seems that the YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN-factor is perhaps one of the neatest A.I. adjacent interface enrichments we’ve come across.
Take this wonderful architectural interface by Studio Tim Fu created out of thin air, just by articulating their needs and wishes. Of course the interface is quite impressive, but the astonishing part is this: all components for this interface already existed! None of the architectural principles have changed!
Apparently we just lacked the ability to articulate what we mean, or rather we missed an interface that translated our natural ambiguous language into a recipe for software that can be executed upon. Stating the obvious: this is the thing we’ve been overlooking all this time.
Why is this important? We cut out a major stack of interpretation layers between the person with their needs and the end result. Not only simple misunderstandings have been eliminated, but we also skipped the line on: a huge amount of limited thinking, professional biases and preferences of people that surely know better what you NEED, rather than make what you ASK.
The result: just the thing you asked for. Nothing more, nothing less. Ready to build upon. Is it perfect? Probably not. Is it exact? Nope. Can people now SHOW to others what they had in mind? YES. This is truly like giving creatives a Babelfish** to speak in exacting language what they want, so they can tinker, experiment and become better in articulating their needs.
This technology, or interface characteristic is THE feature need in rapid development, innovation, creative exploration, copy writing, and even self help. Somehow we just didn’t realise how much we needed it. Get ready for a huge amount of things that are actually like the things we needed, rather that swaths of ‘specialists’ guessing in our stead.
** The Babelfish is from the fictional Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, where the little creature would live in your ear and translate all spoken word in all languages (foreign and alien) to your native tongue.
And now I wonder where we should put this YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN-interface in this graph below. Here we see all kinds of design, some of them are seldom used, but highly valuable.
Only just one thing: most of these design-methods and mindsets on the map are facilitated, or done together with other people. Design, apparently, is a social act. So what if you are left to your own devices and just uttered your needs and magically it would prompt into existence?