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 the basics. A couple years later, I worked with Xerox PARC for my college thesis project on Smalltalk — and came in contact with these machines again. But again, the specifics of how the machines worked is one of my faded memories.

So, it was interesting to recently find these two video demonstrations of Xerox’s Star user interface. The Star’s UI was the inspiration for Apple’s Macintosh OS — and there’s plenty of information about how that exchange happened in the recent Steve Jobs biography.

Watching these video demos — it’s clear how strongly influenced the Mac was by the work at Xerox. But what I found most surprising, was how the Star didn’t really embrace the full potential of the mouse. Not to say that the Star wasn’t a revolutionary system, but the mouse was rarely used without a related keyboard action, and the idea of “dragging” doesn’t appear in any of the demos. The mouse and how it was used was in its infancy.

For example, to select some text you wouldn’t click and drag. Instead you’d click once (to select a point), twice (to select a word), three times (to select a line of text), of four times (to select the paragraph). Or, to move a file on the desktop you’d click it to select it, but then use a keyboard key (such as “move” or “copy”) to specify what you wanted to do, and then click the new location. The idea of directly manipulating the file icons wasn’t there yet.

An interesting reminder of the sometimes revolutionary, sometimes evolutionary nature of UI design.

Function keys

Dialog boxes

Screen, and icon details

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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.

“Because humans are so visually dominant, wherever you’re looking typically that’s where your attention is focused. (For patients) during wound care, when they’re getting their bandages changed, they’re looking at these different tools that the nurses are using to treat them, and just looking at those objects makes them anxious. They begin to associate objects in the room with high pain so you can imagine that day after day they start to develop psychological associations between the treatment room and pain, amplifying how much pain they experience.”

And the data indicates it works, with results as substantial as a “50-90% reduction in pain-related brain activity in all five pain regions of the brain.”

The project was created by Hunter Hoffman and his colleagues at the University of Washington. I haven’t read much about the research since it was shown at the exhibit, but hopefully work is being done so that it can reach an wider audience.

(For more information see this BBC story and the researchers documentation.)

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Excitebike

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 a group in Poland that…

Using statistical analysis and a motion capture glove, the authors mathematically distilled 22 common hand gestures (including “A-OK,” “thumbs up,” “crazy,” “walking,” and “cutting”) into so-called “eigengestures”: the pure essence, if you will, of these movements that are common across most instances.

The result was a set of generalized, and potentially universal, gestures that would be comfortable to everybody. These gesture could then form the basis of a new standard building-blocks from which interfaces designers could use. Unfortunately, the resulting gestures are pretty cryptic — not something people would feel very natural doing. And the response hasn’t been very enthusiastic.

Gestures Suck

Not exactly. But an interesting report (via Small Surfaces) from Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen argues that today’s gestural user interfaces are a nightmare. They really don’t like the inconsistency of current interfaces. And give examples of how, if you don’t know a feature is there, it can be pretty non-intuitive to discover. They’re probably right, but I that’s part of the fun of our era — it’s all still being invented.

A Crazy Interface

When I first saw this I wanted to do an entire post on it. It’s really awesome. But I’m including it here because it relates — it’s about non-traditional interfaces, and how users learn can to use them…

“Excitebike,” part of Matt Ruby’s ALT CTRL (link via CreativeApplications), replaces a video game’s handheld controller with a helmet-based microphone. The player controls the game with the pitch and volume of the sounds they make. From the video, it looks like it’s pretty hard to figure out an intuitive way to play the game. But the idea of someone shouting to control a game is amazing. And, although it’s not the point of the project, it could be interesting to see if the game could learn what sounds that players are make are most natural, and then adjust the interface accordingly. (Is this a form of synesthesia?)

Historical Crazy

Ok – maybe crazy isn’t the right term for this, but Microsoft recently launched a great site: Bill Buxton’s collection of computing devices (and their interfaces) from the last 35 years. The Buxton Collection not only includes interfaces that have become mainstream, but also includes less successful watches, gloves, pedals, and chord keyboards…

I never used a chord keyboard but can’t even imagine how crazy one must feel. They’ve been around since Sketchpad in 1963, but, getting people to learn something as radically new seems like a fantasy. At the time, though, some really did think it could happen.

The site features a beautifully optimistic quote from Bill:

“Look at the collection and then try and convince me that our slow rate of progress is due to a lack of technology rather than a lack of imagination.”

Let the chaos continue!

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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 the iPad.

Gadget, originally released on CD-ROM in 1993, was designed by the epic Harukiko Shono. It was fascinating, mysterious, and beautiful. Its pre-rendered scenes, while static, were great eye-candy in an era when 3D rendered worlds were still a novelty. And its video elements, often in just a tiny portion of the screen, and in black-and-white, were still so new that you couldn’t help but feel drawn in, straining to capture what they had to say. Were you missing a crucial clue?

Harukiko designed several other games, including Alice and L-Zone. There’s a great interview with him on Core Gamers and more about him on Eastern Mind. Check them out… it’s interesting to learn, for example, that his games have been quoted in films from Guillermo Del Toro, Alex Proyas, The Wachowsky Brothers and David Lynch.

It is great to see an interactive auteur’s work brought forward to be appreciated by a new audience.

Gadget (B&W movie)

Gadget (updated render)

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5th and 56th (2006)

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 and wonderful works got me immediately hooked on Campbell. I was also really impressed with gallery director Stephen Nowlin’s boldness to bring a digital artist into, what had been previously, a fairly traditional gallery.

The Los Angeles Times had a nice review of the show. And they make an interesting point: “that Campbell recognizes a fundamental danger in the way he makes art. Its technical wizardry can distract us from attending to the important things Campbell has to say.”

We live in a world of increasing hype about technology, businesses, and design that’s shouting to be seen. Campbell’s work is a reminder to focus on the experiences that matter, the messages we really want to share, and the manner in which we want to say them. To share them, and to slow down.

Be sure to take a look at Campbell’s website. It’s also got videos showing the pieces running. Plus, bravely, a section called Duds.

Digital Watch (1991)

SHADOW For Heisenberg (1993 - 1994)

Portrait of My Father (1994-1995)

Memory / Recollection (1990)

Tourists At World Trade Center (2005)

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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 sort of connection to the innovative interactive group Antirom.

Rummaging through storage boxes, I recently stumbled upon an old Underworld DVD, the 2000 “Underworld Live; EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING.” What’s funny is that that it looked like I never actually played it, as the disc was unopened. So it was interesting to look at it with modern eyes, without the memory of what it was like at the time.

The disc had a DVD-ROM bonus feature, a PC-based interactive component that was comprised of two experiences:

The first, “Wongizer,” takes keyboard input and, based on the character pressed, displays a different video clip of abstract graphics. In an era when video and rich graphics were still pretty rare, this would’ve been a fun toy. But since you can’t remember which graphics are associated with which keys, there isn’t much sense of control. It’s a keyboard without the ability to really “play” it.

The second, “Headset,” lets the user select between four different soundscapes, change the audio mix between music and ambient speech, and vary the mix via a dynamic 3×3 matrix. Mixing audio was, at the time, a common CD-ROM experience, but the dynamic interactive graphics were a nice touch in a world where so much interactive content was made from static images.

Still, given Underworld’s design and interactive pedigree, I can’t help feeling that the piece was a missed opportunity. The Urban Feedback CD-ROMs, for example, had a similar moody, graphic designed, atmospheres and abstract interactions, but they felt much richer — spaces you’d want to explore further. I just wish Underworld had pushed this a bit more.

Wongizer - interface

Headset - interface

DVD - main menu

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That is a big desk!

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 some pretty cutting-edge (at the time) technology and UI ideas — when the web was still in its infancy. (As a point of reference, the film was done six years after Apple’s Knowledge Navigator film.) Included were: a curved immersive workstation, “cyberspace searching” (a precursor to the web), texture mapping of information from a 2-D video onto a 3-D mannequin, telepresence, and wireless networking. (For details on the deep thinking behind the project, Bruce has a good write up.)

As film-making, it’s strange and dated — a workplace scenario that reads like a soap-opera. The height of weirdness is when we voyeuristically watch a marriage propose taking place in another office. (You can see how big the production was in this making of video.) Crazy but fun.

Video conferencing / Telepresence.

Scanning text placed on the desk.

Video conferencing work session at desk.

Watching co-workers.

Dual chording keyboards

Search results.

Texture mapping a 3-D mannequin.

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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 blog Meet Gooya just posted this great History of UI / OS Design. It’s a slideshare of a presentation he gave on the visual history of desktop operating system user interface design and it’s full of great examples.

It was great that Guy mentioned that many of the examples he used came from GUIdebook — “a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces.” The site is definitely worth exploring, and full of lots of other interesting archives (including apps, icon sets, splash screens, sounds, etc).

Take a look. In ways it’s amazing the rate at which these interfaces have changed. But, simultaneously, you can’t help but notice how fundamentally alike they all are. We strive to develop new metaphores and interaction models, but what’s familiar remains — perhaps with a fancier skin. When can we have the revolution?

MS-DOS Shell

SGI IRIX

Amiga OS

NeXT

Xerox Alto

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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. Like bad governments, they are evil, well entrenched, and must be overthrown.”

Jef may be best known for starting the Macintosh project, but more out-of-time interesting are his interface concepts, which he wrote about in The Humane Interface. His design rules were smart and as relevant today as ever: “the product should only help and never distract you from the task”; “To make an interface habituating, it must be modeless … [and] monotonous”; and “The suitability of an interface can only be determined by testing.”

But some of his other ideas were so out-of-step with what was happening at the time that they baffled users. He proposed a world with no applications and no files, just the user’s content. And to manipulate this world users would “leap.” It was one of the fundamental ideas in his interfaces, and it was never embraced by users. Leap let users move around in a document faster, he claimed, than using a mouse. His Canon Cat system implemented leaping with two distinctive keys below the spacebar — which ended up making the machine feel like it was from another world. He further evolved the OS with Archy — but, sadly, its development stalled after his death in 2005.

Perhaps these interaction concepts were too revolutionary for people to really understand. Either that, or they were just eccentric curiosities. In either case, his question-everything approach was pretty amazing and admirable. His attitude may have been a bit aggressive and confrontational, but it was insightful and pointed out real problems. Hey – maybe it’s time to question developing NUI conventions before it’s too late…

Archy interface

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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 energy of the time.

The opening spread was an image, by David Small and Jacqueline Casey, of several 5s. It was rendered on the Lab’s Connection Machine running a simulation of pigments and water on paper fibers. The areas where the paper was most wet was shown using a varnish layer — this pattern was also used for the texture of the book’s cover. If you’re looking for trivia, the “watercolor” code used to generate the image was also used for a blood-splatter effect in Bob Sabiston’s Grinning Evil Death.

The Lab’s Mission Statement is as appropriate now as it was then — not just for the Lab but for all of us:

“Our charter is to invent and creatively exploit new media for human well-being and individual satisfaction without regard for present-day constraints. We employ super-computers and extraordinary input-output apparatus to experiment today with notions that will be common technologies tomorrow in areas as diverse as music and learning, entertainment, film, and quality of life in the coming electronic millennium. The not-so-hidden agenda is to drive technological inventions and break engineering deadlocks with new perspectives and demanding applications.”

Happy Birthday Media Lab.

(Below are a selection of pages from the book.)

Nicholas Negroponte

Stephen Benton

Walter Bender

Muriel Cooper and Ron MacNeil

Andrew Lippman

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