Inventing Interactive
Muriel Cooper (1925-1994) was my advisor when I was a graduate student at her Visible Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab. It was an experience that profoundly influenced the way I work and approach the the world. It’s not easy to describe, so instead these these quotes of hers may start to give a sense […]
Somehow, I’ve ended up with a handful of browser-based links — a mix of retro, low-res, and stuff that made me say “I didn’t know that you could do that.” Google BBS Terminal is what Google would have looked like if it existed in the 80s. PCE.js is a Mac Plus emulator running Mac OS […]
I’m a massive Star Trek fan. So I’m super-excited that Jorge Almeida took some time to discuss his work on Star Trek Into Darkness — for which he was the lead designer of the UI elements. (If you’re paying attention you’ll remember this previous post with Jorge on his work for MI:4 and The Dark […]
Sorry for not posting lately, I’ve been surprisingly busy. I’m off to Paris for the long Thanksgiving weekend – and just remembered an old post I had started on France’s Minitel. I’ll include it here. If anyone has any suggestions of interesting interactive work I should check out while in Paris, drop me a note. […]
Sometimes it takes me a while to get through my old bookmarks. And sometimes I discover something unexpected and comforting. Case in point was Eye Magazine’s post The Past is a Foreign Domain about Digital Archaeology — an exhibition and collection of videos about some of the early breakthrough moments in web design. The show […]
Google Project Glass got a lot of buzz a couple months ago when it was first announced. The idea of real-life augmentation built into a pair of glasses showed some really interesting potential uses. But it also highlighted general fears that augmented reality could remove it’s users from really engaging in the world — instead […]
Dont’t bother reading this post. Just head over to Artport and take a look around. “Artport is the Whitney Museum’s portal to Internet art and an online gallery space for commissions of net art and new media art. Originally launched in 2002, Artport provides access to original art works commissioned specifically for artport by the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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). […]
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 […]
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 […]
Look! Look! Look! My friend Keith Knueven has created a new logo for this blog! Take a moment, visit his website TDOOKK.com, and then hire him, immediately, for all your projects — he’s great! Thank you Keith!!! When I started Inventing Interactive, at the beginning of the year, I had no posts planed and no […]
In the mid 90’s there was a mini-boom for pop-music CD-ROMs. Unlike early titles from Voyager, which tended towards intellectual examinations of classical symphonies, these were moody, artistic, experiences. Strongly influenced by Myst, they let users move through virtual worlds, try to solve puzzles, and unlock special content. Their narratives may have been frustrating and […]
When I was a kid I loved watching the 1970’s tv show Space: 1999. For some reason it was only on around 11 or 12 at night, and so I had to stay up late, which gave watching it a kind of other-worldly experience. A few months ago Sean Adams did a great post on […]