Inspirations

As an HCI practitioner, part of my life is to read, observe, and analyze surroundings. One aspect of this work is drawing inspiration from great minds of past and present eras—individuals who have dedicated their creativity and skills to shaping new or innovative ways of human-computer interactions across various mediums.

My interest in HCI began during high school when I founded a tiny computer club where I enjoyed building robots with my peers. This interest then evolved as I pursued engineering and started building products for the public, specifcally K-12 teachers, and students.

Below are some of the notable inspirations since then: people, projects, and readings that have influenced my work and my perspectives on crafting tools, and I will update this page from time to time.

People

  • Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart: pioneers of HCI. Alan was one of the great minds behind OOP and GUI, and Douglas was the inventor of the computer mouse, and many more fascinating pioneering ideas they have worked on that push the human-computer interaction to a new level.
  • Seymour Papert: educator, computer scientist; inventor of the Logo educational programming language, author of the book "Mindstorms," which inspired the name of Lego's best-selling programmable robot product.
  • Hiroshi Ishii: founder of the "Tangible User Interfaces," and I was impressed by many of the creative technologies that he and his lab have built and presented at different HCI events, such as TEI and Ars Electronica Festival.
  • Joichi Ito: entrepreneur, former director of MIT Media Lab. His book "Whiplash" influenced my view of the world in this ever-changing era in terms of both technological and sociological factors. From one of his early blog post: "science, engineering, design, and art can together be viewed as a circle where the output of one is the input of another."
  • Bret Victor: early Apple engineer, and a designer, co-founder of DynamicLand
  • Geoffrey Litt: working on mallaeble software system design, with some applications utilizing LLM. He is part of the independent research lab Ink & Switch, which experiments with creating software for creative minds. His blog content is reflective and thought-provoking, much like the work of the lab.
  • General Magic (1990-2002): a group of talented engineers inventing a product that doesn't belong to their era but resemble to many of today's technologies.

Projects

  • Dynamicland (2014-), the goal is to make everything surrounds you interactable, "computable," and ultimately constructing a "communal" computer. Here's Andy's note, which I found informative, on the current members of the project.
  • Programmable Space (2019-): the goal is to be able to interact with more than just rectangular screens but physical objects, bringing a "communal and social experience" for users.
  • SixthSense (2009) by Pranav Mistry, a wearable device that provides a gestural interface, projecting information onto any surface.
  • Pocket Projector Research and Demonstrations (2000-2004) by Ramesh Raskar, a series of research worked on portable projector-camera system
  • inFORM (2013) by Daniel Leithinger, Sean Follmer, Alex Olwal, Akimitsu Hogge, and Hiroshi Ishii. "inFORM is a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way."
  • Project LFX (2021) by Lightform, "a research platform for steerable projected interfaces." One of the co-founders, Brett Jones, helped build Microsoft's IllumiRoom, a project that projects media information on the walls of living rooms and makes it interactive for users.
  • HERMITS (2020) by Ken Nakagaki (project lead, currently at AxLab), the project "explores a way to greatly advance the versatility of Robotic Tangible Interfaces," it is "a modular system for table-top, wheeled robots to dock to passive attachment modules, defined as 'mechanical shells'."
  • Folk Computer (2023) by Omar Rizwan & Andrés Cuervo, a research & art project that "centered around designing new physical computing interfaces."
  • Project Esky (2022) by BEER-Labs: "An Open Source Software Framework for High Fidelity Extended Reality."
  • toio (2017) by Sony, "a hands-on 'toy platform' that lets users put blocks and other items on cubes and move the cubes around with a controller."

Communities, Groups

Readings

Last update: October 2, 2024