I've just seen the funniest thing!

In Broadmead shopping for shoes (in an impossibly upmarket shop you understand) I spotted a mother with her baby, parked nearby in a pushchair. The mother was, shall we say, from South of the river...but none the less she had a shiny new iPhone. The baby was 2 years old at the very most and was kicking up a slight fuss as Mother perused the faux pearl necklaces and peacock feather earings...

So she plonks the iPhone in the kids lap with some kind of primitive Magic Roundabout cBeebies drawing app and the baby is instantly silenced! Whether he managed to articulate his squidgy digdets around the iPhone's famous interface remains a mystery as I was called to the till. But it begs the question - if children are using these sophisticated digital interfaces only a few heartbeats after slipping out of the birthing pool, what will the parents of this world be decorating their fridges with? Digitally captured, brightness-adjusted, perfect-copy self portraits? What happens to the stick men!? The bright orange hand prints!?

But machines-are-taking-over panic aside, it really does raise interesting questions about how we build applications for future generations who have been born into an environment surrounded by complex computer systems; a generation who won't bat an eyelid at multi-touch interfaces, infrared tracking and 3D projections. As Happy Packages approach another release version we will be casting a wider net when it comes to user-testing. My 9 year old sister? Why not! She may not represent our target audience but there's no doubting she'll raise interesting questions when it comes to interface design...

Posted by Ben Templeton