The Game Changer

Vannevar Bush had a vision – he believed in human flourishing and science. He wishfully envisioned the capacity of technologies would benefit humankind in this information society. To expand our knowledge in a faster and productive way, Memex was invented to make information more accessible. Bush laid the groundwork for the future to understand the essence of accessing and restoring collective knowledge. Later in 1968, The Mother of All Demos pioneered computer science and manifested how to orchestrate information and data in its most efficient way – primarily demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing, which included hypertext, windows, command input, navigation and etc. These inventions of computing set a departure for the information age to a brand new era.

There were plenty of important verbs and keywords being used In The Mother of All Demos: “copy and paste”, “jump around”, “cross-referring”, “modifying”, “identifying”, and etc. All of these words represented the basic actions to control the interface and they were explicitly instructed in order for the computer to respond and to correspond its tasks correctly. Today, we still use these basic actions to navigate our computers. For instance, we have to jump around different tabs to copy and paste the information we need. In the demo video, Englebart and his presenters also showcased some of the hierarchical graphs to properly manage the basic file structures and structure code. Even though we are not manipulating each every one of the commands on our computer today, Englebar’s inventions leveraged the backstage of modern computing to run effortlessly and made the computer experience more accessible for everyone. Similar to these basic commands, in our interaction design practice, we use information architecture to sort data productively; we use graphs and charts to arrange our information; we use some very basic principles and techniques (metrics and mapping) to navigate ourselves in the design practice. All of these key actions were designed to help us generate information in the most efficient way.

On the other hand, IBM had progressively taken the journey of constantly innovating machines and technology into prosperity. From advancing punched card machine to helping NASA to put the first man on the moon, IBM has demonstrated the most of epic and game-changing inventions. Through the first launching of magnetic hard desk that was the size of two refrigerators to today’s “Waston Computer” that competed in the TV show Jeopardy, IBM has consistently working at the forefront of the computing development. If you might have noticed, The models have gotten smaller and smart – the computer is literally in the size of our hands! This paradigm of making information and data more obtainable and manageable has shaped our work in interaction design as well. As interaction designers, one of the important aspects of our practice is that every decision-making and action has a purpose – we keep refining our designs to make them as simple as possible for users to have a effortless and more accessible experience.