In February 2009, David Merrill gave a TED demo of Siftables – a project he was working on at the MIT Media Lab along with Jeevan Kalanithi and Pattie Maes. He described Siftables as “an interactive computer the size of a cookie.” But it’s not just a cute phrase, for it also communicates the approachability and playfulness of the devices. Well, Siftables are now an actual product — for sale from Sifteo. And the sample…
 
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TED.com just posted a talk from this year’s TED2010 by John Underkoffler on his research into gesture interfaces. John is best known for his work on the interfaces in the film Minority Report but has since founded Oblong Industries. The talk demonstrates Oblong’s point-and-touch interface called g-speak. I have to admit, having never actually used the system myself, that it looks a bit baffling. How does a user know what to do? Don’t your arms get…
 
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The recent SyFy series Battlestar Galactica series was incredible. A captivating vision of our pre-history. I’ve tried watching the follow-on series Caprica, which takes place sixty years earlier, but haven’t yet been drawn in. The show, however, has an interesting technology… When a character in Caprica wants to “go online” (or whatever it’s called in their era) or exchange information, they do so through what, at first, looks like a piece of paper. The paper…
 
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With TED happening this week, it’s been interesting to follow the buzz of activity around it. Watching Jamie Oliver’s powerful talk, an “all-out assault” on the need to change how we teach children about food, got me thinking… What role can we play, as interactive media designers, to make change and support responsible behavior in the world? Activism The first time I was introduced to the idea that my work had social impact was shortly…
 
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In 1994 Muriel Cooper presented work at the TED5 conference in Monterey, CA that changed the way designers thought of the possibilities of electronic media. The work, from her group at the MIT Media Lab‘s Visible Language Workshop (or VLW), took typography, literally, into three dimensions — and gave it dynamics and interactivity that had never been seen before. Tragically it was just after this that she passed away. I was a grad student in…
 
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