Today’s 2012 candidate buzzword: “Kinesthetic UX.”

It’s an election year, so it can’t hurt to don the 2012 trending, branding, and positioning hat and declare 2012 the year to (among many other equally important things):

.1. Break the Screen Trance

Across tablets, smart phones, and game pads, our current perpetual face-glued-to-palm (facepalm) catatonic state deserves one huge collective flash-crowdsourced palmface. We, the utterly spoiled top 60% or so, all possess these super nifty handhelds; wearable, accessorizing, super skinny cute cyber work-n-play-mate devices that are supposedly doing all this uber neighborly, lifestyle integrating, big data inclusive, cloud synergizing, socialish stuff. And they do, sort of. Except for a few minor side-effects.

.2. Narcissistic Mono-Screen Attention Disorder

Kinesthetic UX means please give us reasons to look up and re-connect with one another, across and through our growing constellation of displays and devices! It’s a theme inspired by this presentation by Marco Tempest.

Until we can get to the full-on fruition of Steve Mann’s lifelong work, forever dreaming the impossible stream while going about our daily post-singularity grind; please, device manufacturers and designers, at least give us reasons for our devices to actually want to cooperate, collaborate, and interact, kinesthetically. At the very least, we want the experience of our mobile devices to feel more like Marco’s marvelous artistry.

.3. Prying Open My Third Eye

Maynard James Keenan loyalists may not require any further explanation at this point of departure. For the sake of legacy 44 & 2 humanity, we’ll add that features like augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, collaborative social cognition, social tv, the cloud and the crowd, won’t be discarded or lost, they’ll simply become recombinated and incremented into new species that exhibit all the earlier behaviors plus vastly simpler and more accurate geo-fencing and tagging capabilities; improved contextual salience (what matter most to me in this particular place and this unique circumstance); increasingly effective ad-hoc intentional communities for travel, learning, political action, business; more intimate bodily kinesthetic awareness (external and internal); real-time understanding of the gravitational pull of time constraints and scheduling; shockingly higher resolution direct neuro-discernment (yep, respectable degrees of thought and mood reading are not far away, now) and associated mind amplification tools and processes; all assisting us in selecting, affecting, and optimizing both material and immaterial aspects of our environment to better fit the architecture of our intentions; individual, group, regional, global; recreational, educational, aspirational, and occupational.

For devices, there’s got to be more to this particular technium evolutionary branch than endlessly fidgeting with 4” or 7” or 10” or 11” experimentation. Yeah, yeah, size matters; to a degree. So does fit and function; usually more so. The point is, especially with NFC on the scene, we’ve finally got all the pieces to go wild with the multi-device, multi-screen, multi-surface, multi-sensor, multi-player, multi-ulti-everything experiences; not just for mobile, but incorporating public kiosks, displays, entertainment, transportation and transit, work group round tables. We want Microsoft Surface like capabilities on every display surface, in every size, shape, and setting.

Each of those contexts, and many more, are teaming with potential for new mutations of open, semi-shared, specific-use, general purpose swarm cams, swarm sensors, swarm screens, human-machine synthesized compound-mind’s-eye perspectives; in addition to vastly accelerated and extended social cognition tools that are right now delivering incomprehensively complex, yet elegant and easy to interact with, limitation-shredding, human-machine-mind-melding, problem solving capacities.

Given the pace of development and disruptive implications of these and other accelerating changes, and considering that the Cyborg Anthropologist field is already well represented, I’m leaning more and more in the direction of finding the right people to help me invent a PhD in Cyborg Psychology. If there isn’t such a field, maybe it’s time we create it. How well are hominids adapting to the merger of human and machine minds? How can we do better? What does it mean to do better and to stay healthy, thriving?

Where are we failing, or missing opportunities? Are some people simply not fit for these new prosthetic, extended capabilities? What is our cyborg obligation to them? Should we be thankful that certain minds can’t grasp the significance, much less master the means of various mind amplification techniques? How do we help to foster adaptive, resilient, flourishing cyborg lives?

As we reach even further toward extending biological life and repairing disease through technological means, should people who exhibit histories of manifestly anti-social or violent, lynch-mob like behavior be permitted access such technologies? Who gets access and why? Is money or any other caste a valid rationing program for the kind of positive transhuman capabilities we’d hope to lead us into the next era of human technological evolution?