Over-Innovation: A Cautionary Tale

The power of design is that it gives us methods to approach solutions from all angles. You don’t arrive at elegant from the bottom up. You start by establishing requirements, adding in all the necessary features and qualities. Midway through, you may actually have an incredibly complex product. Then, much like a sculptor, you strip away what’s unnecessary. You combine parts and pare away superfluous functions. Innovation teams work incredibly hard to get the right kind of solutions in the right spots to arrive at an elegant solution.

Take Microsoft’s Project Natal, an amazing new gaming interface that debuted earlier this month at the gaming conference E3. Natal looks like no other game controller you’ve ever seen. There is no controller. At least not one you can hold in your hand. Natal uses a sophisticated scanning system that not only recognizes how you move and who you are, but how you feel. In this demo, the fluidity with which the virtual character Milo interacts and even converses with the human player is truly remarkable. The potential for Natal beyond gaming is astounding. Imagine a virtual companion so aware that it could recognize when a shut-in was depressed or non-responsive and call for outside help. To the user, Natal’s interface looks simple. There is no learning curve. You just interact as you would in real life. From a design perspective, Natal is incredibly complex, combining next gen facial and voice recognition, motion capture, and artificial intelligence to arrive at an incredibly powerful and transparent user interface. Elegant and genius.