In a field with more than its quota of seers, salesmen and motor­ mouthed gurus. there is something reassuringly levelheaded about Gillian Crampton Smith's approach to interaction design. As professor of Computer Related Design (CRD) at the Royal College of Art in London, Crampton Smith directs one of the most progressive new tech­ nology master's-degree programs in the world. Her students and gradu­ ates are snapped up for placements and positions at Apple, Microsoft, Philips, Taligent, Voyager and IDEO. Back in the early '8os, Crampton Smith was one of the first British graphic designers to see the com­ puter's potential and s!J.e expected things to move faster than they did. Hence, perhaps, her caution today, the careful deliberation before she will make a prediction or venture a claim. Things are certainly moving now. Since early 1994, Interval, the Palo Alto-based research corporation, has funded the Computer Related Design department to the tune of £2.5 million ($3-75 million), payable over five years. (Interval has similar relationships with Stanford University and the MIT Media lab.) The week before my visit, CEO David Liddle and 30 Interval personnel were over to present work on musical interfaces, culminating in a "Soundscapes" performance by musician-boffins Thomas Dolby and Michael Brook, for an audience that included the likes of Peter Gabriel. The Royal College of Art's strength, and its appeal for Interval, lies in the way that the CRD department has grown from a genuinely multidis­ ciplinary base. (By contrast, Stanford and MIT's research is strongly rooted in technology, Carnegie Mellon's in graphic design and New York University's in media and television.) "The college is a special place, in that it brings together so many designers of talent from such a range of disciplines," says Crampton Smith. "In some ways this makes it easier for us." David Liddle concurs: "In the first five minutes with a piece of technology, artists push it :o the edge. That is how you find out what is possible. You need unreasonable people doing things for reasons they can't verbalize." For Interval, collaborating with "not so obvious" institu-

6o I.D. MAY JuN E 1995

tions outside America, such as the RCA, helps to keep the "gene pool" open and ideas fresh. Five years after CRD was founded, enough preparatory work has been done to chart the way ahead. "We do research through projects," explains Crampton Smith, sitting in her office on the third floor of the college's main block, overlooking the greenery of Hyde Park. "The projects are in a way experiments. Through designing we try to draw out what the issues are so that when people come to design real things they can per­ haps draw from some of our experience. We're trying to make things People have Instinctive knowledge about that are generalizable, rather than taking particular problems and the way the physical world works: which way finding a solution that is not then generalizable." is up, how objects fall and so on. Durrell Three essential considerations will inform all future research. First, Bishop's Phone Answering Machine explores the ways in which computing can be t1ken that information technology is driven by people, not by the technology off the desk and lntegreted Into everyday itself. Artist/designers must make things, in other words, that ~both objects. Durrell represents Incoming phone work for people and are enjoyable." Second, information technology must messages with n:arbles: drop one into an have a social and ethical dimension. And third, that the information indentation in the machine and the m1!Ssage environment has an aesthetic dimension that is fundamental and not plays; drop It Into the telephone and it dials up your caller; if It's not for you, put lt in a merely an add-on. The task of designers and artists is therefore to G.raw saucer to await your rcommate's retu:n. on the existing languages of painting, music, film and the other arts to forge a new art of interaction design that is aesthetically complex and rich in meaning- a fusion of the practical and the poetic. To achieve this synthesis, Crampton Smith takes on 10 to 12 master's students a year from architecture, industrial design, graphic design, fur­ niture design, fashion, software engineering, psychology and other disci­ plines. So far CRD has had slightly less success attracting people with audiovisual and video experience, the third cornerstone (along with graphics and industrial design) of design for electronic media. Interval funds 10 staff at the RCA in all, including researchers, research assis­ tants and technicians; an Interval software engineer and mechanical engineer are currently working in the department for two months. "Interval hasn't paid for the results," says Crampton Smith. "It's paid for the people and they get first option on any results. But generally

I.D. M4Y jUNE 1995 we're reckoning to do things that are pretty open here, not to do secret The desktop metaphor Is !Ike lhe ard Index work." Roughly one idea a year is patented by the department. One, in a library: the information is there but jointly patented with the London-based Multimedia Corporation, is a hidden. If you know what you are looldng for you c~~n find it, but the cards alllo:~k the radio that can be programmed to record automatically ifit detects mate­ same and don't glve you much feel for the rial of interest to the listener-for instance, any piece of music by books they represent. The Pinboarl!, an ongo· Mozart- digitally signposted at the top of the broadcast signal. lng project by Nick Durrant, Julie Knaggs and Another, devised by Interval researcher Durrell Bishop, is a proposal for Martin Locker, was conceived as a replace· "electronic paper" that would allow additional information to be encoded ment for the desktop, or an application that sits on top of lt. a allows users to interact within the paper itselffor access through an electronic tablet. directly with their material, rather than CRD sets out to address any device or process that responds to the with abstract icons that stand In place of It, user- from "multimedia to microwave ovens." There are four main and allows them to leverage tYIO important areas of research: computer software and hardware; electronic products; ways we use memory: through spatial and interactive infot mation and entertainment; and intelligent environ­ temporal mapping. ments. So fo.r the emphasis has fallen on the design of tools, such as soft­ ware or hand-held computers, rather than the design of what Crampton Smith describes, with some reluctance, as "content." Partly, she says, this is due to an "historical accident" that has left the RCA with a sepa­ rate Interactive Multimedia course housed within the School of Communication Design, while CRD is in the School of Design for Industry. The division implies the existence of precisely those "!>ound­ aries that Crampton Smith seeks to erase. ''I'm interested in developing different ways ofthinking about the content and the form as one, rather than content that is poured into form," she says. Some of the research within CRD attempts to rethink software tools we already take for granted. Pinboard , a "non-hierarchical interface" designed by Martin Locker, Nick Durrant and Julie Knaggs, questions the established model of the Macintosh/Windows desktop by offering a wide pictorial dataspace that allows the user to organize and archive files according to the informal groupings and personal priorities that one might bring to a notice board or an entire room. Durrell Bishop. on the other hand, is investigating the divisions between the elements of a process that unfold on screen and those that happen in the physical world. In his telephone answering machine, incoming messages are represented as marbles that accumulate in an external groove, giving software processes a three-dimensional expres­ sion that the eye quickly grasps. It is the larger issue here, rather than the specifics of the design, that counts for Crampton Smith. "That's not a proposal for an answering machine," she says, "that's a proposal for an approach. In the past, the urge has been to put everything on screen because it's so easy and simple and clean and neat. But Durrell feels, and I think his approach has very much rubbed off on us all. that there are natural things that you just know how to do." This degree of "naturalness" and transparency is precisely what is missing, even now, from so many computer products. A couple of days after we meet, Crampton Smith and three Interval researchers give a presentation to RCA students. Colin Burns talks about the technique of "informance" -using performance and storytelling as design aids - and psychologist William Gaver describes an experimer.t in which varia­ tions in sound are used to monitor a bottling plant. Afterwards, one skeptical student brings the discussion down to earth w~ th the abrupt­ As Interactive technology becomes increas­ ness of a system crash by describing the all-too-familiar problems she ingly smaller ar.d no longer needs to be has experienced helping a neighbor print out a letter with a word-pro· tethered to the desktop, one question arises: How do you carry these things? Can they cessing program. "Clearly there is a long way to go," agrees Crampton become fashion ltl'mS rather than afflce Smith diplomatically. "A lot of people in the department are quite skepti­ equipment? Lorn Ross's Phone Glove Is cal about the benefits of technology. We are not gung ho." dri'len by ideas of exploring new kinds of Crampton Smith's own conversion came in 1981, while reading a social protocols that might arise from these magazine article about the computer's uses in graphic design. She new technologies. Everyone has probably had the intrusive experience of soml!one bought an Apple II, taught herself Basic (later adding Forth and Pascal to loudly mobile-phoning their friends In a her repertoire} and began work on a program that would allow her to do restaurant; Ross's project explores more page layouts on screen. It took her two years. "I just felt that ordinary dellcate and reticent ways of having a private designerly commonsense really hadn't been applied to those kinds of call In a public place. The Phone Glove allows problems." In 1984, convinced that other graphic designers would be you to speak into your hand - an act that Is reminiscent of t8th-century ladles whispering similarly interested in the computer's potential, she set up a computer behind their fans. studio and started a postgraduate course at St. Martin's School of Art.

I.D. MAY )UNl 1995 She moved to the RCA in 1989, becoming a professor in 1992. For someone in the vanguard of interaction design research, Crampton Smith is refreshingly frank about her allegiance to the book. She studied philosophy and art history at Cambridge- "a traditional academic education"-before turning to typography and working as a designer on the Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement. Her conversation runs from the decline of poetry to Rudolph Arnheim's clas· sic treatise on film aesthetics, Film as Art. She travels with a Power Book and uses e-mail, but wastes no time surfing the Net. "My sense is that it takes too much time to get the nuggets. I would rather have a book that an editor has gone through, and that somebody has suggested might interest me." Crampton Smith's sympathy with the established media that new forms a{ interactive information delivery will have to equal and surpass Top to bottom: Thinking of an ATM as just a makes her a particularly demanding critic. "Reading is very effective and terminal to a remote database, Dennis Poon's people who are at home with words can process at a fantastic rate," she Personal Financial Adviser explores ways In which this tech11ology could interact remotely says. "With a book, you know whether you want to read it and you can with a stockbroiter - either on screen or In vir· find the bits you want to read pretty quickly. You can fillet it. Those skills tual reality; Durrant, Knaggs and Locker's are very difficult to use with current technology." In the same way, she desktop-defying Pin board project; A sampling points out, it is impossible to scan and evaluate the relative importance of Martin Loclter's term-end digital portfolio Is ofincoming e-r.1ail in the way you can a pile ofletters. The department navigated via an alphabet situated on the left­ hand side of the interface; the letter In focus plans to investigate an expanded form of e-mail- "a digital no~ice­ indicates a project to be perused, a summary board"- that would allow the sending ofaudio, video and pictures, and appears and the demo can be played. find ways of using graphic and information design techniques to man­ age "information overload." "We understand very little yet about what makes a pleasurable inter­ action," says Crampton Smith. But such knowledge will be essential to the design of everyday products that people ofall kinds can slip into using ..vithout conscious effort. By demonstrating the essential place of designers and artists in this process, her department is helping to bring about an information environment in which the tools will fit the way we feel and think. ....