Orange Cone

My keynote for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference last year has been posted to ITConversations. The talk is called "The Coming Age of Magic." It's an argument for the use of magic as a user experience design metaphor when creating objects that exhibit behaviors. In other words, I believe that magic can be a useful metaphor for making ubiquitous computing devices more comprehensible and usable. My presentation takes the form of three linked arguments about emergence:

• The emergence of ubiquitous computing from market forces acting on, and in concert with, CPU prices
  
• The emergence of animist reactions to devices that have behaviors that go beyond action-reaction physics
  
• The emergence of magic as a metaphor for the design of ubicomp devices
  

Also, "Observing the User Experience" was translated into Japanese and is available from Amazon Japan.