Aidan Feldman "That's a weird combination."

Julian Bleecker

Journal entry from October 16, 2009:

The Smart Surfaces instructors encouraged us to attend a talk last night by Julian Bleecker, an LA-based designer/engineer.  His day job is at Nokia, but he works on the side in free-form design studio called Near Future Laboratory.

"Normalization" was a recurring term in his presentation: the transition of technologies or ideas from extraordinary to commonplace.  He talked about his love for science fiction, and how great sci-fi writers use stories like virtual testbeds for radical (or not so radical) advancements in technology, to demonstrate the ethical, social, economic (etc.) effects such changes might bring.  Sci-fi presents scenarios where scientific or other such changes that might seem radical to us are normalized to the population in the story, and how they have adapted to it.  He used this video as an example:

Very cool perspective: I had never thought about writing in that way, to be used as a tool, rather than just a medium.

Julian's post about his visit

Side note: Julian had worked on virtual reality systems in graduate school in the '90s, at a time when they were speculated to radically transform the way humans interact with computers, across the board.  I see VR as an example of a technology that has not (yet?) delivered on its promise of revolution.  Their cost aside, I have not seen any virtual 3D interfaces that are actually effective and practical for personal computing.  Hopefully we catch up with the sci-fi on this one (lookin' at you, Minority Report).