I think touchscreens are a thing of the past and we should really look forward to a new, more intuitive technology of the future. I've been thinking a on and off about this and I think I have the solution, though it may take a company as visionary as Apple to implement.

What I've come up with is a system called finger-friends. Where the touchscreen usually goes, you'd have a grid of finger-friends and some information-displaying screens that do not react to touch (this is important). The actual finger-friends are physical objects that can be manipulated by a person's fingers and relay control intent to the software. So far I've come up with four (well three, you'll see in a second) finger-friend designs to replace our usual buttons and sliders.

First is the pushy - it's like a button, but instead of reacting on touch, you need to push it - it's basically a nub with a spring inside that closes a circuit when it's pushed to the bottom. The good thing about this is that you know when you've pushed it to the bottom and don't need to look at the system to know it's accepted your touch.

Second is a variation on the pushy - the sticky pushy. Like a toggle button, it has two states and works by having a latch mechanism - you push it to the bottom and it stays there, and when you push it again, it pops out. I call the two states of the sticky pushy pushed and popped, and propose that pushed state should be used for "on" and popped for "off".

Third, the tweaky. It's a protruding cylinder with ribs along the ridge for easy grasping. You turn it left or right to increase or decrease a value, like a normal dial. It has a leftmost state past which it can't be turned any more and a rightmost state. It also has a line painted along the edge to show which way it's oriented and you can paint the range of values around the base so the user can see which value in range is selected.

Fourth is the snappy. It's a small stick pointing outwards from the dashboard moving inside a ridged groove which lets you set it at one of several discrete inclinations. That is, when you push on it from the side with your thumb it snaps off its current ridge and snaps into the next one. This allows you to select one of several mutually-exclusive options.

There might be other finger-friends you can come up with, like something to replace the normal radio button controls - the snappy can function as that, but I'm worried its visual language will confuse users and they won't see it as an actual radio button group.

Another problem is how the information you can put around these controls is static. You can't make them magically show as actual physical objects in the middle of a normal touchscreen, so maybe the screen should be broken up in several pieces and each part adorned with finger-friends around the rim. The screen would show information on what each finger-friend does and allow you to switch your mode. So, the most used features in the car, like the headlights, the turn signal, the heating and the wipers would have their own dedicated finger-friends along the top of the dashboard with their one function written on them, while less-used ones will be bound to contextual controls explained by a screen.