Even Better Than The Real Thing
Or: How I Learned to Stop Imitating and Start Innovating
There is a common pattern I have observed when developing new research ideas: investing too much effort trying to compensate for digital weaknesses to reach parity with the real world. This approach misses the point, something I learned when planning a research proposal on digital sketching early on in my faculty career. Sketching is inherently physical. Paper works because it’s cheap, familiar, has effectively infinite resolution, offers rich physical affordances, and passes easily between hands. Naturally, many have tried to replicate paper digitally through various tablets, touchpads, and pen interfaces.
These efforts go far. But the closer you approach faithful replication, the harder the problems become. You need ultra-high-resolution displays to match paper. You want thin, accurate styli. Ideally, your display should flex and fold. Many of these are engineering challenges rather than scientific ones. The returns diminish as you narrow the gap. I would argue that industry handles this kind of incremental improvement better than academic research labs.
After struggling to identify interesting scientific problems in this “narrowing the gap” activity, my collaborator made an important observation: the real advantage of digital media is not replicating the real world, but embracing its own strengths. For example, digital sketches copy and modify effortlessly while paper sketches require tedious redrawing or a trip to the photocopier. Multiple people can work simultaneously on a digital canvas, which is impossible on a physical one. You can branch versions to explore different directions without destroying the original. The possibilities stretch as far as our imagination.
This, I think, is the optimal role of digital technology. Rather than building digital replicas of every physical artifact, we should embrace freedom from real-world constraints. A digital pen needs no ink, so we obviously don’t model ink behavior. But what other actions are there that are impossible to conceive physically yet effortless digitally?
Take remote meetings. I often hear proposals for technologies that feel “almost like being there.” But nothing replaces physical presence, and digital meetings will never reach full parity. Nor should they.
In my opinion, remote meeting technology just has to be “good enough” (and I think we’ve reached this threshold already). More importantly, it should enable otherwise impossible actions. A 2024 CHI paper by my Aarhus colleagues gave meeting attendees the ability to whisper naturally to any other attendee. This capability is clearly impossible in physical meetings — walking across a room mid-session to whisper to someone not seated nearby would be disruptive. Yet it’s almost trivial in digital meetings.
“Almost trivial” needs clarification. Obviously, the engineering of this isn’t trivial. The concept isn’t trivial either. But once explained, the idea feels obvious. This kind of “obvious” marks brilliant work: in retrospect, it’s so simple you wonder why nobody thought of it sooner.
As inventors of interactive digital technology, our role is pushing boundaries beyond what’s possible, not primarily reaching parity with the physical world. The U2 song got it right: we should aim for designing interfaces that are even better than the real thing.
