Bill Moggridge is working on a book titled “Designing Interactions”,
to be published by MIT Press in the fall of 2005. In preparation he has been
interviewing some of the Interaction Designers who are pioneers in the field,
and help us to form the way we understand and practice Interaction Design.
He has recorded the interviews on video, and will show samples from his tapes,
with some comments.
Desktop and Mouse: Stu Card
The combination of desktop and mouse define the graphical user interface that
we use for so much of our time, and has a pervasive influence on the way we
expect to interact with our personal computers. Stu Card is modest about his
personal contribution to the invention of the "Personal Graphical Computer",
and insists on giving full credit to the long list of key people who make
the story complete, at Xerox PARC and elsewhere. However, since he joined
PARC in the seventies, he has been a key member of the community that developed
these Interaction Design concepts, from the Alto and Star onwards.
Designing: Bill Verplank
Interaction Design is still emerging as a discipline, and the design processes
that are needed for it are only partially defined. Bill Verplank has evolved
a sophisticated process for the design of graphical user interfaces over many
years of practice at Xerox, IDEO and Interval Research. Bill has an amazing
ability to draw upside down at the same time as he talks. If you meet him
and ask him a question about Interaction Design, you can sit at the nearest
table or desk, and be mesmerized by the fluency of his answer. His words are
easy to understand, and as he talks he builds a beautiful diagram that reinforces
what he is saying. You can take the drawing with you as a reminder and summary
of his ideas.
Playing: Will Wright and Brenda Laurel
A game will only succeed if it is engaging to play. This has pushed computer
and video game designers to learn how to create enjoyable and playful interactions.
Will Wright founded Maxis to create games that also become hobbies with his
Sim series, including Sim City and the Sims, now the most successful game
around. The play is part strategy, part simulation and part role playing,
with a wide appeal across age and gender. Brenda Laurel brings enactment to
play, and has developed the use of theatrical role playing as a design tool.
She was with Atari in the early days, experimented with virtual reality, and
kept Interval Research playful, and then started Purple Moon to create games
for girls.
Simply Palm: Rob Haitani
The Palm operating system offers a set of functions that are simple enough
to use to make a "palm top" computer compelling, particularly when
combined with the ability to "hot sync" to your personal computer.
Rob Haitani worked with Jeff Hawkins as the designer responsible for defining
the interactions, originally at Palm and now at Handspring. He tells the story
of how the crucial decisions about the operating system were made.
Searching: Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Google is so far ahead of the competition as a search engine that to "Google"
may become a verb in normal use, just as Hoover did. Larry Page and Sergei
Brin met at Stanford and developed a "nice search engine" together.
They went on to found Google and to develop a company that is acknowledged
as the industry leader. They talk about how they did it, and where the future
of the company lies.
