This is a video produced by Apple in 1988. It’s amazing how visionary it is.

Given the technology landscape in 1988 this takes some incredible imagination and as a user experience practitioner, what I find most surprising is how much the users are at the center and not the technology.

Here’s snapshot of 1988:

• Hit movies were Die Hard and Rain Man
• Seoul hosted the Olympic Games
• Chart toppers were Guns N Roses “Sweet Child ‘O Mine”, George Michael “Faith”
• People were using MS-DOS v4 and Windows was in version 2.x
• Apple IIc+ and Macintosh IIx released
• 5.25 inch “floppies” were still widely used
• The internet was still ARPANET

At a time when computer ownership was not widespread and users were still struggling with MS-DOS command lines to interact with computers, the technology in the video takes a background role in support of the goal of each of the characters. These goals are:

• Author/mother: write a research and write a paper, organize her
• materials and communicate with her kids
• Students: study chemistry and conduct experiments
• Teacher: monitor and guide students
• Architect: create and present designs to client
• Girl with disabilities: make a cake for mom

The video shows the following (yet to be developed) technologies to achieve these goals. It is shocking to see how many of those technologies are now available today. And yet the interactions are still not as natural as in the video:

• Voice commands
• Natural speech recognition
• Gesture recognition
• Video conferencing
• Flat panel display
• Smart agents
• Shared desktop
• Distance/remote learning
• Real-time animation/simulation
• 3D modeling

Today, the video seem comical, but remember it was 1988. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for the authors to see a future like this one. Can we imagine what it will be like in 2020 let alone 2030?

Compare Apple’s video with a more recent video produced by Intel in 2007. Here it is obvious that the technology plays center stage and the humans are just extras.

The optimism in Apple’s video is commendable. The optimism that we will get technology right – in service of our needs and goals, not the other way round.

Something so simple is so easy to forget.

Continuing on my TED kick, in case you missed it, here’s an inspiring talk given by Katherine Fulton in 2007 on how philanthropies need to change, entitled You are the future of philanthropy.

It’s easy to criticize charities and foundations as being dinosaurs from another era, limited in funding, reach and risk. I was very surprised to learn that this was not the case at the turn of the century when philanthropies were emerging to solve the pressing social issues of that time.

Katherine talks about five categories of experiments, each of which challenges an old assumption of philanthropy and pave the path for philanthropies to adapt to today’s environment and social challenges:

• Mass collaboration: think Wikipedia
• Online philanthropy marketplaces: think DonorsChoose.org
• Aggregated giving: think Warren Buffet and how he didn’t start his own foundation.
• Innovation competitions: think X Prize
• Social investing: think xigi.net

… what’s really interesting here is that we’re not thinking our way into a new way of acting. We’re acting our way into a new way of thinking. Philanthropy is reorganizing itself before our very eyes. And even though all of the experiments and all of the big givers don’t yet fulfill this aspiration, I think this is the new zeitgeist: open, big, fast, connected. And, let us also hope, long.

She also has a report on the future of philanthropy called Looking out for the future.

Clay Shirky, TED@State, June 2009

I’ve recently been reading Clay Shirky’s 2008 book Here Comes Everybody and found he gave a talk at TED@State last month, hosted at the State Department in Washington DC .

He talks about how rules have change in the games of communication. Where before the internet, organizations would send the same message to everyone they are trying to reach. But all that has changed. Not only are they talking about but they are talking to each other about you:

We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global. social, ubiquitous and cheap. Now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world, to the distributed collection of the audience, are now used to this change. The audience can talk back. And that’s a little freaky. But you can get used to it after a while, as people do.

But that’s not the really crazy change that we’re living in the middle of. The really crazy change is here. It’s the fact that they are no longer disconnected from each other. The fact that former consumers are now producers.

There is an additional Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran (June 16, 2009):

I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.

Here’s Clay talking at TED2005 on Institutions vs. Collaboration, which interestingly is before the rise of Twitter as the communication tool of choice.