Yesterday I went to the Yahoo Design Expo, an event bringing together bright design students from the U.S., England, and Brazil.
The exhibit had a number of demos or performance art-like pieces, which ranged from a bit weird (but I'm not very avant-garde) to fun to pretty compelling. Peter Merholz is right that Aaron Koblin's work is mighty cool, but I thought that the expo overall exhibited a few interesting themes. First, as Larry Tesler pointed out, they all played with a few big themes:
- Tangible interfaces;
- Collaborative/social media things;
- Geolocation;
- Wacky performance art stuff.
Okay, the last one might have been mine. (And for anyone who was there, yes, I'm the one that nearly destroyed the project with the spitballs and the ship's wheel. And yes, I hate art that much. I truly do.)
I talked for a few minutes with Joy Mountford, who has been organizing this expo every year since 1990, and got Yahoo to sponsor it after she joined the company as a senior designer. Joy is one of those Silicon Valley interface design types who's made the pilgrimages to all the storied, hot but unstable, or interesting places-- she founded Apple's International Interface Design Project, worked at Interval Research in the 1990s, and now it at Yahoo-- and taught here and there. (This ACM Ubiquity interview is a good intro to her work.) It's the kind of career path that's like a river. To visitors it seems meandering. Those more familiar it can decipher its logic and know its more picturesque turns. And the river itself is absolutely determined to get somewhere.
We talked about how the expo has evolved over the years. In particular I wanted to know when the tangible interface stuff-- which connects with my own work on the end of cyberspace-- started showing up, and when people started trying to move interface design beyond the WIMP interface. She said that there had always been such projects, but they'd become more prominent in the last few years, and now were commonplace: everyone in design and UI circles takes for granted that this is the future.
But the most interesting thing she said was that while in the Olden Days, students had to do a lot of fudging and improvising-- using magnets instead of sensors, or doing videos that showed how something would work if the technology were available-- today, the sensors, RFID tags, and just about everything else you need to make a working prototype are within an intelligent student's reach. At least four of the projects were using Max, a high-level programming language that makes it pretty easy to build simple systems combining sensors, logic, and actuators.*
As Larry Tesler put it, an exhibit like this is worth putting on at a place like Yahoo for two reasons: first, it gets Yahoo people thinking outside the box; and second, art students are a group that's regularly thinking about things that everyone else thinks about a few years later. As William Gibson might put it, they have an unusually high concentration of the future.
My instinct is that this is true for the tools they use, as well: just as CAD has gone from an exotic expensive thing to something that you play with in Second Life, and robotics is now as accessible as Lego, If design students are able to build M.A. projects with this stuff, when my daughter is in high school she'll be building anti-sibling detectors to keep her younger brother and his various robots (which he will have also built) out of her room.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, design, digital-physical, geoweb, prototyping
