Skills: Making eye contact

I’m always bursting with excitement when I visit India – there’s nothing like seeing your family after one year.  I imagine exchanging stories about what all of us have been up to. But instead, my 12-year-cousin takes over and I’m given three options of what I want to do: watch a movie, play an online game or be ‘physically active’ on the Wii. He’s almost more tech-savvy than I am! What happened to the teenage days when my friends and I used to interact over board games or invent our own versions of “Doctor, Doctor” or go to the parking lot to play Hopscotch and Tag?

As the use of technology has increased over the past decade, the idea of physical presence is becoming more and more obscure. It’s as if being able to make eye contact with another person in the room is a resume-worthy skill!

I’m not saying I haven’t been on the other side myself. Even when I’m catching up with my best friends back home, our catch-up sessions are incomplete without stalking someone on facebook, youtubing silly videos or flipping TV channels.

We don’t even have a family dinner without one of us checking a text message on our phones.  

It’s a scary thought- With the ability to text people, order food via Seamless.com and have group meetings via Skype, are we slowly losing the need to interact with other beings?

While it is imperative for designers today to gear their inventions to a further tech-savvy population, I also feel we need to rewind a little, and re-discover the joys of physical interaction. 

I love the delete button on my laptop to correct virtual errors. But what I would give if the ‘copy-paste’ function could allow me to re-live those heart-to-heart moments with my family, or re-bond with my friends over inside jokes and a couple of drinks!