cw9 curated links & thoughts

Here’s another weekly recap with some findings worth mentioning.

Aaron Marcus‘ MuC 2011 Keynote

I had the chance to see Aaron Marcus‘ last year at HCI in Las Vegas. In this video he’s giving another great talk on HCI in Science Fiction movies and how sci-fi HCI relates to real developments and vice versa.

Apple Knowledge Navigator

Aaron mentions briefly some company promotion videos envisioning future developments. I didn’t know this video by Apple from 1987, a concept sort of resembling an iPad prototype including Siri, 20 years before its actual inception. I wonder if there are social or gender studies on how companies envision technology innovation and how actual implementations affect our own work and behavior (or actually don’t change us). Like the desktop metaphor (which took even Apple years and years to abandon it in the context of tablets but MSFT is still struggling with it), the video presents a secretary metaphor. So while they present technological innovation, the idea of a visual personal virtual assistant just maps current hierarchical working structures (e.g. you still get the feeling someone is working for you like a secretary).

That’s it for this week :)

---