Jason Schell shows us what we can learn about a possible future by looking at the present popularity of Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars.

Back in February, just after the iPad was announced, I happened to have been sitting at the kitchen table of a country house in Western Massachusetts, a good 15 minute drive away from the nearest wifi connection. The house has no cable TV and its lone computer has only a dial-up connection to the local college. The woman of the house, Anne, is in her 60′s, a grandmother, and won’t turn the computer on for fear that she might break it.

Anne told me that she wanted the iPad. When I asked her why, she just shrugged. “It seems like it could make so many things easier than how I do them now.”

This is a woman who is technologically-averse that, until a few years ago, was afraid to pump her own gas.

It got me thinking as to what, exactly, the iPad would change about our world. More importantly, what won’t it change. And most importantly: why?

Open vs. Closed

The iPad was released this past weekend nearly two three weeks ago (it took a bit to polish this post off), and it’s safe to say that it’s been the most polarizing piece of consumer technology to be released in recent memory. I’ll leave the reviews to others who have spent more time with it, as I haven’t bought one. What’s interesting to me is why it has released the animosity between the open software vs. closed ecosystem camps. I’ve been thinking a lot about that since its release — actually, I’ve been thinking about it since I bought an iPhone 3G.

There is no Open without Closed

Before AOL there was America Online.

American Online was the first – and most successful – walled garden online community. For $15.00 a month, you could access the “Internet” – specifically, AOL’s chat rooms and auditoriums, all without the hassle of command-line interface. It even had a happy, enthusiastic gentleman greeting you whenever you logged in. “Welcome!” AOL was Your Mother’s Internet. Remember those ubiquitous AOL CDs?

But it wasn’t the Internet, and eventually, the Web caught up to AOL. You could dial-in to any number of local Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which generally came with browser software from Netscape (or, you could use the browser that came with Microsoft Windows) and browse the Web in all of its glorious entirety. AOL opened up access to USENET, and eventually, allowed you to browse the web through their own inferior web browser. When compared to the growing open Web, the AOL user experience was a fractured mess. Then they bought Time Warner and just like that… Goodbye.

The iPad Will Change Things

The world of seamless and near-ubiquitous Internet connectivity in which we live started off with AOL. I can’t help seeing the same thing happening now with the  iPad.

David Pogue accurately states that the iPad is “basically a gigantic iPod Touch.” But the hybrid of size and portability the iPad affords experiences that are orders of magnitude more varied than can be provided by its smaller sibling. It’s big enough to comfortably watch an episode of “Lost” or read an eBook in bed, but small and light enough to carry to the coffee shop. Unlike other touch-based devices on the market, it’s everyday technology. “It’s a vessel, a tool, a 1.5 sack of potential,” Pogue said back in January. ”It may become many things.”

Sure, it’s an eBook reader, but we’ve seen that already. The iPad can replace your board games. You can play Scrabble with your family at the dinner table – even when your table is in New York and their table is in Texas. It makes frog design‘s Future of Health Care seem, well, not so future-y anymore.

You need to download all of these apps from the App Store, which is policed by Apple, the Gest-App-o. The Cory Doctorows of the world think that this is “bad,” which it is, if you’re a tinkering, compunerdy, science fiction writer like Cory Doctorow. But then he goes on to talk about your mom, which is just bad form:

…with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The problem with writing off on “technophobic, timid” folks is that there a lot more of them than there are of the early adopters out ther. They don’t care about the Next Big Technology. You won’t see too many Mommy Bloggers talking about the relative openness or closed-ness of the  iPad. They just want something easy to use and beautiful enough to keep out in the open.

But they do notice. “It seems like it could make so many things easier than how I do them now.”

The point is that nobody is wrong here: It sucks that the iPad is a walled garden (or an Iron Curtain). But people don’t care about walled gardens. They want it work and they don’t want to have to configure it. This is technology adoption at work. This is Apple saying “Welcome.”

And it has every right — every obligation — to profit from the ecosystem they created.

The iPad Won’t Change Things

Because of this walled garden, the iPad will not single-handedly save any one industry. It won’t, for example, revolutionize commerce. In the iWorld, everything you do on an iPad and the iPhone passes through Apple. You buy your apps from Apple, and when you make a purchase, it’s an “In-App Purchase” through Apple. The experience is seamless – no account setup, no need to enter a credit card again – iTunes is the Universal Shopping Cart of the iWorld.

This type of experience isn’t available quite yet. There are options – Google Checkout and Paypal come to mind – that could replicate this kind of experience, but in an open ecosystem, things are messy. The players don’t always play nice in the open sandbox, and as a result experiences aren’t seamless, and more often than not the edges of the seams are rigid and uncomfortable to use.

And publishing? The iPad won’t save the news media industry. Newspaper articles are not like MP3s. Their initial prescribed value is immediate and short (You read most articles once.) Additionally, where there was always a paywall between a listener and her music, no such wall exists with news anymore. We curate and mash-up and share our news freely, and as Jeff Jarvis says:

The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again. That is why media companies and advertisers are embracing it so fervently, because they think it returns us all to their good old days when we just consumed, we didn’t create, when they controlled our media experience and business models and we came to them.

Apple never positioned the iPad to be a savior of anything.

The iPad is an Opportunity

Much like AOL, the iPad is exposing people like Anne to new ways of interacting with the digital world, and in that sense, it is opening the eyes of the masses as to what is possible when you interact with a computer. And just like what happened after AOL, we’re going to see a new world open up, one outside of Apple. That world is messy and disorganized, much like anything that isn’t controlled by a single, all-knowing entity. But sooner or later, that world will organize. Competition will emerge. The open experience will become a better option, because in the end, open always beats closed.

Once it does, Apple will have no choice but to take down its wall (it’s giving up some control over app distribution with the new 4.0 OS) and we’ll all be living in a touchable world, where natural movements can control new interfaces, governed by completely new interaction design patterns.

The iPad isn’t a savior. It’s a good start on a new world. It’s up to designers to move it forward.

Design Mind lets people inside the nitty gritty details of how they pulled off the coolest opening night party I’ve never attended. Augmented reality Porta Potties?

And then came the television, and then, later, cable television.

And then came the Internet.

None of this is mentioned in this Onion video. But it’s all right there if you look close.

Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

You’re welcome.

More on that later.

For now, here’s one of the better Rube Goldberg machines, made possible by the creative technologists at Syyn Labs.

You can read more about the event, including my illustrious co-speakers - Raj Aggarwal of Localytics, Steve Brykman of Apperian, Anna Callahan of RaizLabs, Dan Katcher of Rocket Farm Studios, and Yoni Samlan of Active Frequency - at the MITX blog. Thanks to Katie for covering the event, to Hill Holliday for hosting, and for Jaime for putting the event together.

If you’re a UX designer or developer and you’re interested in learning about the hows and whys of designing mobile applications – specifically for the iPhone – then this event is for you.

I’m honored to be a member of the panel of experts for the MITX event “Designing iPhone Apps: It’s more than just beautiful coding.” on February 19, starting at 8:00 pm. Mobile experiences present a new level of design challenges, and the panel of folks assembled is second to none:

• Steve Brykman – SVP, Lead Strategist, Apperian
• Anna Callahan – Software Developer, RaizLabs
• Dan Katcher - CEO & Co-Founder,  Rocket Farm Studios
• Bryan Maleszyk – Senior Consultant, Experience Design, Molecular (that’s me)
• Yoni Samlan – Partner, Active Frequency

This promises to kick off a great year of MITX experience design events. I hope to cover the basics, but I’ll also be talking about some of the mobile experience topics: Augmented Reality, Location-Based Services, and maybe even a bit about the iPad.

I’m Looking forward to mingling with the great folks above, – and I hope to see you there.

The session was filled with great minds, and as usual I learned at least as much as I imparted. For those of you not at the session, here are the top 5 things we learned:

• Think small. Break things up into small, manageable problems. Focus on the smallest possible challenge, innovate for solutions.
• Converse. You’re solving people problems. Get them involved. Find influencers - on Twitter, in support forums, in private communities. Go where they are and get them involved right now. Show you care.
• Listen. Social media presents the unique opportunity to listen. It’s cheap and it’s free.
• Fail. Solving small, manageable problems gives you more room to fail, which mean more to room to innovate. Lots of small, focused failures nearly always lead to a big win.
• Know your value. More importantly: Know you have value.

Bonus: Read Four Steps to the Epiphany. Apparently it’s good. I just ordered it.