Small Design Firm‘s recent Pledge Wall for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a beautiful interactive installation with a unique pen interaction. David Small, the firm’s founder, is a friend back from when we were both students at the MIT Media Lab. I’m a little jealous, as his firm has gone on to create some remarkable  Read the rest…

After seeing this fantastic fan-created re-imagined trailer for Tron (source: Gizmodo), along with being excited about the upcoming Tron Legacy, I thought it could be interesting to take a look at the interfaces in Tron (1982) — a film I have a crazy nostalgic love for. The world envisioned in Tron is distinctive and stylized —  Read the rest…

In the latest issue of Fast Company magazine there’s a fascinating article, ‘A’ Is for App, on how technology may unleash childhood creativity and transform education.  The article begins with the usual stories about how children, often just a year old, are naturals with the iPhone. Simple yet playful apps help them build vocabulary and learn  Read the rest…

Check out this recent interview with Nicholas Negroponte on The Engadget Show. A little background: Nicholas founded the Architecture Machine Group (or ArcMac) at MIT in 1967. His aim, partly inspired by Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad was to create an “architecture machine” — an active partner to help architects design buildings. The group also was responsible  Read the rest…

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session of the  Read the rest…

Golan Levin’s Prequels to Everyday Life has a great discussion of how new media artists’ influence is often broader than we would originally imagine. …some of today’s most commonplace and widely-appreciated technologies were initially conceived and prototyped, years ago, by new-media artists. In some instances, we can pick out the unmistakable signature of a single  Read the rest…

I don’t remember when, or where, I first saw the Aspen Movie Map, but I do remember thinking that it was really cool — representing a new digital media world that I wanted to get involved with. Created in the late 1970′s, the Aspen Movie Map was a groundbreaking interactive virtual tour of the real-world  Read the rest…

The New York Times has an interesting article (and video demo), Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit highlighting Emory University and their Salman Rushdie Archives. At Emory they debated what to do with the wealth of digital content Salman Rushdie had donated to them. Among the options: preserve the physical objects (computer, floppy disks,  Read the rest…

What’s striking, at first glance, about this US Air Force TV commercial is how much it feels influenced by the UI design in Avatar. Or perhaps, alternatively, it’s because Avatar was influenced by military interfaces. In either case, it’s an interesting view of the Air Force’s UI capabilities. The commercial shows “Space Command” as both  Read the rest…

After posting about the UI in Avatar, I was so happy that Neil Huxley agreed to an interview about his work on that film. Neil was art director and motion graphics supervisor for Avatar‘s UI at Prime Focus VFX LA. Q: Can you talk a little about your background and how you got started. I  Read the rest…

In What Movie UIs Say About the Future, Tony Walt reviews a variety of interface types featured in some recent movies. His discussion on Complexity was particularly interesting — especially in the context of the iPad and its move towards simplicity: I’ve noticed that UIs in feature films are continually getting more elaborate and complex.  Read the rest…

It’s kinda crazy – but kinda cool, too. The premise: as technology gets smaller and smaller it gets harder for us to interact with the devices. The solution: use our bodies as input devices! Chris Harrison’s research project, Skinput, to be published at CHI 2010, is fascinating. It’s fun to imagine what this might be  Read the rest…

Take a look at this charming new game for the Nintendo DSi — Rittai Kakushi E Atta Koreda which roughly means: “3D Hidden Images: Found it! Here it is!” The premise is simply: explore 3D scenes and find hidden letters… Tilt the device around to see the scenes from different perspectives. What’s beautiful is how  Read the rest…

I’m a fan of BERG, and so was excited to discover this video of Mag+, a digital magazine design concept they created for Bonnier. BERG’s Jack Schulze talks about what people like about printed magazines… things like the of significance the cover (and our long-term memories associated with them), the sense of completion when done  Read the rest…