October 24, 2000: I've been thinking a lot lately about how odd it is that we (web interaction designers, IAs, etc) spend so much time and effort trying to design software user interfaces that don't suck, but we've totally abdicated responsibility for the hardware interface. We design navigation systems and layouts for accessing information within the screen, but we've resigned ourselves to the fact that people will be sitting at a desk, hunched over a blurry monitor, painfully gripping a mouse! It's completely absurd. And, on the other hand, the people working on hardware rarely seem to be grounded in consumer software development (Actually I'm not sure I really believe that last statement: there are lots of exceptions to this, such as Microsoft's touch mouse, and if you can think of other good ones, I'd love to hear them).

Anyhow, bring on the hybrid software-hardware interaction designers!