This week we finally start to hear about the origins of Interaction Design as a distinct practice. It still doesn't have the official name yet but as you watch the video of Bill Verplank, he talks about the work of doing interaction design.

Read about the concepts for the Personal Dynamic Media - Dynabook - concept put forward by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg. This concept predates the first tablets by 15 years and tablets by Microsoft or Apple by twenty years. They prototyped what they thought the future of computing might be—" personal computer for children of all ages". How right or wrong were they?

For this week's writing assignment, you will actually be making sketches with annotations instead. Read the chapters supplied from John Scalzi's Old Man's War - which is a futuristic science fiction novel. Over the years as technology has been created (starting in the Industrial Age), science fiction writers have envisioned amazing technological and futuristic things—like HG Well's time travel, Isaac Asimov's Robots and Scalzi's BrainPal. These authors take the bits of real science and technology and extrapolate what might happen in the future if things keep going. They imagine through words how tech might work. Designers imagine through sketches and prototypes.

After you read the chapters, make concept sketches based on Scalzi's descriptions of his PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) and his BrainPal. He describes how these work. How do you think they work? What might the interactions be in an embedded heads up display? How would you move around and access information? What might it look like?

Feel free to sketch in color and be creative. This is an opportunity to have fun and design the future rather than rely on existing technologies for your ideas. Make sure to annotate and use call outs to describe your ideas. Post your sketches as PNG or JPG files into the class blog.