Monthly Archives: November 2008

We’ve played with @Boxee and it seems cool although it has some interesting interaction design problems. We’d be happy to help solve them… # OH: “It’s like The A-Team. But feminine. And a latte.” # New PC + experimental hardware up and running (finally). Now we’re watching each other perform gestures in front of it. [...]

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Last year, I wrote up an Interaction Designer’s Thanksgiving. That was a more general list of what we should be thankful for always. This year, I want to focus on what we designers should be thankful for this past year. So, without further ado, here’s my list.

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Never underestimate the power of a good click.

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Week o’ Wireframing. # OH: “This document is like short-story writing by engineers. Be very afraid.” # Wrestling with technical constraints to figure out a certain gesture/action combo. # We’re wondering how much of this gestural g-speak interface is live and/or useful: http://oblong.com/ Cool looking though. # Interview with the designers of the Wii Balance [...]

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Despite a panning review in the New York Times and scoffs from Joel Spolsky, I really enjoyed Outliers: The Story of Success by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, who is also the author of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

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It would be difficult to name a more influential article written in the last 20 years in HCI or Interaction Design than the late Mark Weiser’s The Computer for the 21st Century. Starting with its now-infamous first sentence (“The most profound technologies are those that disappear.”), the article has had a profound impact on how we think about computers and, really, about the future itself.

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We’re coming up on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10. I’m a big supporter of this, and of Amnesty International, which works to protect these rights. Which got me to thinking: why isn’t there a list of users’ rights anywhere? What is the baseline that all users of every product everywhere should expect? So using the UDHR as a starting point, I drew one up.

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One of the reasons we formed Kicker was to help design the Internet of Things, to put humans into the web of objects. Lately, there has been a tremendous outpouring of really interesting talks, articles, and discussion around the Internet of Things that I thought would be worth sharing.

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It is much easier to buy innovative products (or buy the company that makes them) than it is to affect the underlying nature and operations of the company itself. Very few people get excited about a reorganization. Which is why I’m a firm believer in the tangible, in change via products.

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I’ve never given courage much thought until recently when I took the leap to start Kicker. But thinking about it, the more I realize that Jeff Lake is certainly right, and probably not just about designers. To be great in any field requires taking risks, and risks require courage.

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