Monthly Archives: October 2011

Lord of Lisp

Posted on October 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

While digital culture around the world was mourning the untimely death of Steve Jobs this month, another  towering innovator slipped away unnoticed. John McCarthy’s, who deserved the “genius” designation at least as much as Jobs did, was a professor at MIT  in the 1950s when he invented the now obscure LISt Processing programming language (LISP), which laid the conceptual basis for the representational power of computation as we know it today. 

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Posted in II Expressive Procedural Design

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Siri as Pretty Good Companion

Posted on October 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

In Inventing the Medium  I devote a chapter to the Companion Model as one way of scripting the interactor. I talk about the recurring fantasy of the computer as a perfect mind-reading servant.  Siri, the voice-activated app on the iPhone, is the most ambitious attempt so far at creating a servant companion and its successes and failures illustrate the principles in this chapter.
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Posted in Ch 12 Companion Model

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Are Games a Medium?

Posted on October 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

The publication of Ian Bogost’s How to Do Things with Videogames has opened up the question of whether or not games are a medium in themselves or just a part of the larger medium of software systems (as one reviewer suggests) or as I would call it, the digital medium. Continue reading →

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Posted in Ch 13 Game Model, What is a Medium?

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The Onion on Steve Jobs’ Minimalism

Posted on October 23, 2011 | 1 comment

In my previous post I discussed what was admirable about Steve Jobs as a designer, and ITM includes many examples of innovative design from Apple.  But the Apple emphasis on minimalism could also get in the way of good design, so it is sometimes useful for offering good examples of bad design. Continue reading →

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Posted in Design of the Unfamiliar, V Scripting the Interactor

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Steve Jobs on what users want

Posted on October 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

In the Preface to  Inventing the Medium,  I write about the limitations of asking users what they want since  people “often cannot think past the familiar conventions of existing devices and applications.” A similar theme emerged from the many admiring reminiscences that followed Steve Jobs’  death this month. From the  New York Times obituary : When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Design of the Unfamiliar

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