The same people writing about this future are the ones who claimed the future of user interface is flat. Visual styles come and go, but deeper shifts do happen. If flat design was a sign of digital maturity, will flat design do a comeback when embodied computing is mature? If waving your hands in the air to navigate is just part of daily life, will flat interfaces still make sense? Or is depth, tactility, and spatial feedback the new minimal?

Of course, people change their minds as the medium evolves, they should. More broadly, we might be in the beginning where it’s more than touchscreens. When tech changes, opinions change. But I’d like to see more nuance, not predictions. To observe and reflect. Is this a long-term shift, or a short-term aesthetic wave we’re seeing? What happens if spatial UI fails – what do we learn?

To be blunt, we – designers – are hired guns and we follow trends. We design what’s expected, but we also shape what’s next. Interfaces evolve and new tech – like Apple’s Vision Pro – has innovations creating ripples into existing tech. Nothing happens in a vacuum. This will always be desirable for a certain few. We could see this with iOS 7 going flat and mainstream, and now we’re slowly introduced into glass, blur, and depth.

When the next design pendulum swings, will we reflect on why it moved in the first place? What problems did it solve – for real users in real interfaces? And what did we gain – at what cost?