Virtual Design or Pavlovian Experiment?

Dear Designers...

As I lay firmly entrenched in a thread-bare recliner, laptop glowing, earbuds blaring, Siamese sleepily blink blinking at me as the rain patters outside the old Victorians... my eyeballs hungrily read through a week-old article on the impact of viewing our lives through screens (such as the faintly undulating LCD pixels gazing steadily back at me now). In Smoke Screens, Angela Riechers questions the proliferation of screens in different designed experiences and its impact on our appreciation for the three-dimensional world around us. Children ignore a T. Rex skeleton in favor of the digital display, concert-goers pay $250 to watch the Rolling Stones on the Jumbotron, encores are called for with iZippos instead of the real thing.

What Riechers poses to us as designers is whether by incorporating a video element we are truly enhancing the experience with something that cannot be readily experienced in the real world.... or are we adding to the "pixel dependent" phenomenon? Culturally-speaking, that is.

Ironically, not 20 minutes past I complained to my Facebook-employed cousin how I'm worried that I could too easily substitute online social networks for real-world social interactions. While the technology has many benefits, least of not which is the ability to re-connect with old friends and then target your once-a-year communications to riff off of some random link or status update that you felt particularly relevant to you (instead of some random email or phone call where you awkwardly search for common ground like your first junior high school dance).... the point is that technology cannot always substitute for the real thing. I'm not one to suggest that we are all part of some mass social experiment (for you Sergei Lukyanenko fans of the Night Watch series) and this is some Pavlovian experiment to test our ADHD, but....

Anyway, as designers I believe we owe it to society to consciously incorporate arms-length (or world-length) media when it has true value... or we do so at our own peril: perhaps to evolve (devolve?) into our own futuristic parodies of the Borg?

Well... you get the general gist.... and I'm getting off my duff to get outside into the real world...

-Stan
P.S. For those of you who are going to stay indoors, I'll give you the Pavlov's Dog game!