Studio 360 2007.02.23 – "Thinking Outside the Mouse"
Episode description
Sketch by Bill Verplank
A piece I produced for Studio 360′s Design for the Real World series airs this week: Thinking Outside the Mouse. It features Bill Verplank, a seminal interaction designer who comes out of the tradition of human factors engineering. Bill worked at Xerox in the seventies as part of the team that brought the Xerox Star, the world’s first commercial personal computer, to market. After periods at IDEO and Interval Research, he is now at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA, or “Karma”) working on new interfaces for musical expression. Verplank has a special focus on haptics, or force-feedback systems that “push back on you when you push on them.” He believes this is a promising direction for musical interfaces that will give greater expressive control to the performer of computer-mediated music.