Christian Ervin examines how the relationship between camera and operator has evolved over time in a way that mirrors a lot of the current conversations we’ve been having in HCI about the evolving relationship between users and products.
“Cameras that use ML have the potential to both automate existing functions of the camera as a tool for human use and extend its creative possibilities far beyond image capture.”
I coincidentally just walked out of a design class where we talked about this shift from tool to medium to material; from being something manipulated by humans to something that predicts and manipulates human lives. Today’s “smart products” take the interaction from something user-driven to something that drives itself (and I’m not just talking about self-driving cars!). For cameras, Ervin describes this as “the full dissolution of the camera’s physical form into software.” These products tend to work towards efficiency, drastically minimizing the human effort required to operate them by aiming to remove that effort altogether.
On one hand, this is terrifying, and it’s easy to slip into some sort of sci-fi dystopic nightmare where our devices take over the world. However, the part of Ervin’s quote about creative possibilities is what gets me the most excited. We are in the early, early days of this sort of autonomy, which means the rules are not defined. I see this as a wonderful opportunity to bring philosophy and ethics into the conversation and ask ourselves what we’re really doing.