At one of my first summer college internships, back in the 80′s, I briefly used a Xerox Dorado workstation. It’s a pretty fuzzy memory, but the things that made the biggest impression on me were the machine’s large bitmapped window display, and the mouse that I used to create the flowcharts I needed. Using it felt like a big deal — but the my time with it was limited, so I never learned more than…
 
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One of my favorite pieces at the Cooper Hewitt 2006 National Design Triennial was ”SnowWorld.” It was beautiful, absorbing, and other-worldly. The basic concept and execution are pretty simple… Wearing VR goggles, you fly through a snowy landscape and throw snowballs at woolly mammoths and penguins, while listening to Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” But the purpose of the piece is to help relieve pain of burn victims, by distracting them from the reality of actual treatment….
 
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Generated Crazy I started the day reading a fascinating article on generative interfaces, “Can Algorithms Help Design the Ultimate Gestural Interface?” At first I thought it was about generating, algorithmically, user interfaces — something I’d love to see. What would a UI that was designed by a computer be like?! (I searched, but closest to this was work on robots generating their own spoken language.) But that wasn’t the case. Instead the article was about…
 
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When the iPad was released last year, there were several titles that had strong echos of earlier days of interactive CD-ROMs. Relaxing on a sofa and exploring a new world was much more enjoyable than sitting at the computer where the sense of wonder and adventure quickly transformed into frustration and an eagerness to relax elsewhere. So it’s great to see a title from “back in the day” get reissued and brought, sensitively, up-to-date for…
 
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Back in 1997 Art Center‘s Williamson Gallery housed the exhibition “Memory, Reflection and Transformation, Reactive Works by Jim Campbell.” I was teaching there at the time and remember first seeing the show as I took a break from one of my classes. Walking through the gallery was a playful and social experience, as visitors together discovered the reaction the pieces gave. But it was the subtle use of technology and interaction to create remarkably beautiful…
 
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In the late 90′s, Underworld was super-popular among my graphic design and new media friends. It wasn’t just Underworld’s music, it was the way they used visual design and motion graphics as part of their brand, and as a central element in their live performances. They weren’t just music – they were media! And it made a lot of sense — Underworld had deep connections with the art/design group Tomato and there was even some…
 
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Last week Microsoft demoed Surface 2, the new version of their Surface table. It has some pretty cool features, particularly a technology they call PixelSense, which lets the table visually recognize and scan almost any object placed on it without using cameras. Interactive Things pointed out the similarity to Starfire — a fascinating project I’d never heard of before. StarFire was a future vision film, done in 1992 by Bruce Tognazzini at Sun. It shows…
 
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The earliest OS I ever used was the Apple II (my first computer as a kid), but quickly moved on to the Xerox Alto (on which Smalltalk ran and on which I did my undergraduate thesis), the Amiga OS (which was a lot uglier than people want to acknowledge), and X Windows (in grad school). They’re hugely nostalgic for me but, I’m sure now, I’d cry if I tried using them. Guy Haviv, on his…
 
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In 1993 Jef Raskin wrote the article Down With GUIs! in which he decried the state of user interfaces. He started with a bang: “Bluntly: Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are not human-compatible. As long as we hang on to interfaces as we now know them, computers will remain inherently frustrating, upsetting, and stressful.” And his conclusion was just as strong: “Some of the deepest GUI features conflict with our wiring. So they can’t be fixed….
 
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Today, the MIT Media Lab starts its big 25th anniversary bash. And I’m sad that I’m missing the event. But the next best thing to being there is reminiscing, right? Twenty years ago, when I was a student there, the Lab was celebrating its 5th anniversary. As part of the schwag for the party, the Lab printed a book. It wasn’t big, just 6×6 inches and 32 pages, but it perfectly captured the mood and…
 
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