brightly colored food

See the “mother of all demos” online.

This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface.

From bOING bOING.

Salon is featuring a short story by Richard Powers that’s worth reading. It’s called Literary Devices. If you like it, you might want to check out Gattaca 2.2 and Plowing the Dark as well. He’s a fine writer.

Happy Thanksgiving to those reading from the U.S. Pittsburgh is quiet and snowy, and there’s a slowly cooking pot of lentil soup keeping me company.

Matt Jones posted his notes from the Doors of Perception conference. They are rich. Next year. Must go. Must. Also, catch his post about “social software and shipbuilding”. Oh, to be a social shipbuilder right now - what a wonderful area of research and work.

Locally, I’m currently discovering the deep, resonating joy that comes from working with a sufficiently large group of scary-smart interaction designers. There’s a whole mess of em here. It’s been an adjustment from the world of work, where you might get one or two great people working with you, or the internet, where everyone knows what everyone else is thinking, but actual collaboration is rare. It’s that high-bandwidth variety of communication, the face-to-face kind, grounded in a context of shared inquiry and exploration of some fairly high-level themes. It’s life-affirming in the way that all good work is.

Grad school is a difficult process, one of reflection under strife. Half the time you wonder, “what the hell exactly am I doing here and what do I hope to get out of this?”, the other half is “how the hell am I supposed to get this much work done?” In the last week I feel like I’ve hit pay dirt, getting a much better sense of perspective and meaning on the whole thing. It’s a nice motivation as I move into the last four weeks of the semester.

I’ll be posting some links to some papers later this week, some stuff relating rhetoric to design that provides some of the basis for the way we approach the idea of interaction in our program. I’m curious to see what the rest of you think of it - it’s easy to dismiss as mere philosophy, not relevant to the day-to-day stuff you do, but if you start to internalize it, it provides a wonderful way of understanding the concept of design.

Kim Goodwin from Cooper has a nice short article that gives some insight on analyzing data gathered from ethnographic inquiry in order to produce more valuable personas.

Sorry things have been a bit sporadic around here. My life has become a jumbled mix of philosophy of design (lots of rhetoric, with side dishes of grammar, dialectic, and poetic for good fun), Scrabble as an information space, interactive parking meters, haptic scheduling devices, spatialized audio-only interfaces, the pleasures of learning multiple applications and java(ugh), and, finally…robots! (what a great word - it just begs for the exclamation point). The learning continues at breakneck speed, and I’m ready for the winter break.

Yesterday I got to see Cynthia Breazeal from MIT speak about her work on robots, specifically Kismet, her doctoral thesis. She closed by presenting some video of her latest robot, Leonardo, which was contructed by Stan Winston, who’s made just about every animatronic creature you’re seen in movies for the last 20 years. Although Leonardo is still slowly undergoing the transition from an animatronic puppet to a robot having its own (small) degree of autonomy, the range of motion and emotion it can express is scary cool. She presented a great taxonomy of robots, considering robots as a tools, cyborgs, avatars, and social creatures. Much of her current work focuses on designing more sociable robots. I’ll be doing stuff in a similar vein on this robot over the next couple of weeks as a final project in my Interface-Interaction Design class.

What else? eDesign magazine has an article on design and technology at Carnegie Mellon. Their cover has my friends Carl DiSalvo and Francine Gemperle posing around an egg-carton (you just have to see it). I don’t know if the article is any good - I couldn’t seem to find it online, and I’m too lazy/busy to hunt it down in print. However, the eDesign site does feature a surprisingly good visualization of design-related careers courtesy of Harvard Grad School of Design.

Oh, and I needed a new cell phone, so I got a Hiptop. Yes, it’s as nice as reports said it is. It has lots of nice touches - good redundancies, tasteful audio feedback, nice layout and navigation. What’s funny is how quickly I became accustomed to it. It’s a fairly novel form of interaction, not like any handheld I’ve used, but within about an hour of using it I felt comfortable. It just works. I’m now exploring the integration with their website, which allows you to manage contacts, etc. And I haven’t used it much as a cellphone yet either.

It is an odd experience though, having an always-on internet connection in a handheld. I kept instant message conversations going intermittently with friends from a bus stop through the ride and my cooking/eating dinner. Instant messaging is just asynchronous enough that you can communicate with a friend but do lots of other stuff once you’ve got the form factor down to a reasonable size. I guess the odd part is realizing that you don’t ever have to stop a dialogue with someone, you just slow it way down. You could say that’s just email, but it’s qualitatively different - it feels different. Kevin Fox got one at the same time, so we’re both tracking our experiences as we use it.

Congrats to all the crew for launching The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture.