Last year I was in London with some friends and we ended up having dinner at Inamo in SoHo. They’ve developed an interactive ordering system that uses your entire table as a display, using ceiling-mounted projectors The basic dilemma with these sorts of restaurants is that the novelty, whatever it may be, is what attracts  Read the rest…

After my post about the fluidity of using the Symbolics keyboard, I thought Phil Gyford’s recent post about typing speeds on different devices, Pen v keyboard v Newton v Graffiti v Treo v iPhone, was very cool. As an experiment, he entered the same paragraph of text into using six different devices to see which  Read the rest…

Lukas Mathis, for UX Magazine, recently wrote an interesting article: Realism in UI Design. It takes some of the ideas from Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” (a book I remember making a big impact in the UI world when it first came out) — and looks at those concepts apply to UI design. The examples he  Read the rest…

On the eve of the rumored announcement of an Apple Tablet, I started thinking about similar devices in Star Trek. In Trek lingo they are referred to as PADDs. For a show made in the 60s and 80s it’s interesting to see how their conception changed over time. In the original show the earliest padds  Read the rest…

Back in the 80s there was an AI (artificial intelligence) boom – a euphoric time of specialized computers and the belief that we were going to be able to invent smart computer systems. It was after Xerox PARC‘s peak but before personal computers had the computing power that eventually put specialized high-end workstations on the  Read the rest…

Here’s a great piece on Engadget by Paul Miller: Editorial: 10 outdated elements of desktop operating systems. It’s a very interesting read, not just about the problems of existing desktop operating systems, but pointing out that some of the possible solutions are right in front of us. What’s cool is the degree to which phones  Read the rest…

If you’ve never seen the work of Yugo Nakamura, known online as Yugop, go immediately to his website www.yugop.com and take a look around. And if you have seen his work, it’s probably worth looking at again. Based in Japan, Yugo’s been doing amazing interactive work since the late 90′s. His work, primarily Flash-based, has  Read the rest…

I’ve always been interested in high-level design tools as a means for designers to easily sketch ideas without getting stuck in production details. It’s too easy, and common, for a designer to create a sketch in Photoshop, or an initial wireframe, and then be reluctant to make large-scale changes to the design because of the  Read the rest…

Today, in the US, is a holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. It was in 1963 that Dr. King gave his famous, and still relevant, I Have a Dream speach. What was happening with interactive media at that time? Well, most significantly, it was the same year that Ivan Sutherland published his PhD thesis at  Read the rest…

It’s safe to bet that interface design in movies will be a recurring theme here. They give us a glimpse of the future, but from a design perspective of when the film was made. They take current ideas of where technology is heading, and project it forward to a point beyond what is currently possible.  Read the rest…

I’m very interested in how we develop the next generation of interactive design talent. Partly because I’ve been both a educator (teaching and developing curricula at Art Center) and an employer (my own studio, Triplecode, and within other firms). And also because my own personal path has covered a wide range of professions. David Malouf  Read the rest…

The recent earthquake in Haiti is devastation beyond belief. But it’s been so encouraging to see how interactive technologies are playing a part to help those in need. The American Red Cross’ mobile giving program, where anyone can txt “Haiti” to 90999 and automatically donate $10 to Haiti relief, has been a big success. [You  Read the rest…

Over the past several years I rarely read I.D. magazine. And so when it was recently announced that the magazine was going to cease publication I wasn’t terribly moved. Yes, it was sad to lose an historic design voice. But the magazine had been feeling less and less relevant. Perhaps it was just another casualty  Read the rest…

Welcome to my new blog: Inventing Interactive. My friend Terry, who runs Sknitter, mentioned that keeping a blog fed is a lot of work. We’ll see how it goes — but if I don’t start I’ll never know. I’ve been involved in interactive media design, in one form or another, for almost 20 years. I’ve  Read the rest…