| |19 OCTOBER 2026HIGHERReviewA good haptic experience should not be intrusive or attention-seeking. It should feel like a part of a larger experienceThis makes us rethink the definition of an interface. An interface can be beyond the screen. It could be vibration, sound, temperature, motion or perhaps smell. There may even be interface capabilities that we have not discovered yet. Does this mean that humans need more information? Perhaps not. I will be cautious here.Technology has made it really easy to add information. We can make the screen busier. We can add more notifications, information in our ears, haptics on our body, digital information around us using augmented reality and so on. But the capacity of the human body has not evolved at the same rate. Our attention, working memory and senses get tired. We take time to learn a new code. This is especially pertinent in the age of AI. Artificial Intelligence can generate infinite information about everything. It can summarise for us, alert us, recommend for us and predict for us. It can observe multiple streams of information simultaneously. But can a human hold all of this in their head? We sometimes confuse more information with better understanding. They are not the same.Think about driving in a busy Indian city. There may be vehicles coming from all sides, pedestrians, honking vehicles, signals, road markings, two-wheelers and all sorts of unexpected movement. Adding another icon or alert on the windshield may not always be useful. A small vibration on the steering wheel may sometimes communicate the message better. The design decision should come from the situation. Not from the fact that the technology is available.We need to design for perception and not just for the deviceThis will be one of the important challenges for experience designers in the future. We have spent years designing products and interfaces. Now we are getting into the fascinating space of perceptual design. Take Augmented Realty, for instance. It is tempting to think that the more information we can cram into AR, the more valuable it is. But think of the experience of a person wearing AR glasses in the crowded railway stations of Mumbai or Delhi. The signs, people, trains moving, announcements, ads, movement around the person are part of their visual field. Now imagine that we overlay another layer of digital information on top.The key challenge is no longer to get information on to the screen. It is to decide what information to hide. What information should stand out? What information should be pushed to the periphery? What information can be hidden until the user needs it? An effective AR experience may be quiet. It may only indicate something when it is necessary. That is why concepts like progressive disclosure, contextual highlighting and visual hierarchy become important. The designer is not only deciding what to show but also what to withhold. We need to manage the human's attention.The human body is also an interfaceAnother fascinating area is touch. There are parts of the body that are more sensitive than others. Our fingers can detect far more detail than our torso. There is scope for a lot of experimentation for designers. Vibration can indicate direction, help us learn a movement, and carry information while eyes and ears are busy with other tasks. We already see some simple examples in products today.A phone vibrating in the pocket can indicate an alert. A smartwatch vibrating in a particular manner can indicate a direction. The future will bring more subtle and sophisticated haptic languages. But then there is another challenge. If a wearable device vibrates constantly, we may stop noticing it. The wearable becomes heavy or uncomfortable. A rich haptic language may take too long to learn. So, the challenge for the designer is not to make haptics more sophisticated just for the sake of it. The designer should create meaning through the medium. A good haptic experience should not be intrusive or attention-seeking. It should feel like a part of a larger experience.Smell and taste are differentSome senses are far more difficult to digitise. Smell and taste are two such senses. We can control lighting and sound fairly easily. It is much more challenging to control chemical
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