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 […]
I love maps. Their communication power to reveal and clarify our world is like little else. But they also have political power — and they can be used to influence how we interpret the world around us. (The blog Strange Maps is full of such examples.) GrassrootsMapping.org is a admirable project that seeks “to invert […]
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 […]
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 […]
Today, in the US, is a holiday celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. It was in 1963 that Dr. King gave his famous, and still relevant, I Have a Dream speach. What was happening with interactive media at that time? Well, most significantly, it was the same year that Ivan Sutherland published his PhD thesis at […]