SpoolCast: The History of Interaction with Bill Verplank Ñ Transcript Audio available here: Brian Bill Verplank, interviewed by Jared Spool, recorded August 5th, Christiansen: 2008. [music] Brian: Welcome. I'm Brian Christiansen, producer of UIE Podcasts. In this week's episode, we have a special treat. Jared had the opportunity to discuss the evolution of human/computer interaction with Bill Verplank. Bill is one of the key figures who worked at Xerox PARC during its seminal days in the late '70s and early '80s that would define personal computing for years to come. Bill Verplank will be our spotlight plenary presenter at our User Interface 13 conference, which will take place this October 13th through 16th 2008 in historic Cambridge, Massachusetts. You won't want to miss it. Now, here is Jared. [music] Jared Spool: Welcome everybody. Today we have a chance to talk with Bill Verplank. He is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. He is going to be giving the User Interface 13 spotlight plenary. Bill has a long history of working in the computing industry. He goes back to the early days of Xerox and has worked at ID2, which became IDEO and Interval. He has been working with Terry Winograd at Stanford University on a studio course. He has got a lot of experience. I first met him way back in the mid-80s and have learned a lot from him. I am very excited that he is with us today. Hello Bill. Bill Verplank: Hello. [laughter] Bill: Hi Jared. We started talking about terms. I think my bio even online still says that I am a Human Factors Engineer. That is partly a result of having been educated as an engineer. Part of what I learned as an engineer is to participate in doing design. So, I am kind of a design engineer. My actual degree is in mechanical engineering, both at Stanford, where I studied design and at MIT, where we did what we called man/machine systems. That was about bringing engineering models to understanding people as part of systems. So whether it is a pilot or a driver of a car or someone operating a fancy machine, we could predict some of the limitations like reaction times and sensory thresholds and all of the psychophysics that go into understanding the limits that people bring to systems or the capabilities. Quite often, it was just the limits. People are not quite as fast as machines and people forget things. People don't see things as accurately as machines can. I still teach Human Factors. I teach a Physical Human Factors course to industrial designers at the Institute of Design in Chicago every year. It is five days of psychophysics and anthrometrics and all the classic human factors issues that became human factors in the '50s, which was after the Second World War when it was really important to make cockpits that fit all the pilots and select pilots so they fit in the cockpits. So, that is really going back to some of my roots in Human Factors. There is still a Human Factors Society. It became the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society about 10 years ago or maybe 20 years ago now. A lot of those people have moved quite comfortably into the usability business. That is what their core issues always were and still are. So, that is part of my background. I don't consider myself strictly a usability expert or even a pure designer in terms of the graphics and the layout and all of the visible parts of an interface, although I have a lot of appreciation for that. Jared: Now you worked, in the early days, at Xerox, on the Xerox Star, which a lot of people consider to be one of the really first graphical user interface applications. Macintosh gets its history from that. Microsoft Windows get its history from that. There was a lot of innovation that was done in terms of using a mouse with a screen and a pointer and editing right on the screen and what is now called direct manipulation. You worked on that project. Bill: Yeah. I joined the special group that was set up by the people at Xerox to study the details of the interaction they were designing. They had already decided to build an office product. In fact, it was called the Office Products Division. It was a spinoff of all the research they had been doing at PARC -- the Paolo Alto Research Center. I was part of what was called the Functional Test Group. There were about six or eight of us, who spent three years testing all the details of what the interface should be like. It was already agreed to do a mouse, but we had not decided, for instance, how many buttons should be on the mouse. It was already decided to use icons that you would directly manipulate on the screen but we had not decided what the icons should look like. So, we did a bunch of tests and design studies of the appearance of the icons. We had not decided, for instance, how big the screen was going to be, or what its orientation was going to be, although we had prototypes that had similar shapes and sizes. They had had almost 10 years of developing prototypes and living with them. Our job was to make sure it worked as a product. So we were there for three years, before the product came out. But I was engaged in some of the detailed testing and then along the way the justification for what we were doing -- why is the mouse better than cursor keys and things like that. Then when the product came out, we went right to work on the next generation, the ways to fix it for the customers that we had and the things that they wanted. So I moved from being just an evaluator or an alternatives tester, into being more of a designer of refinements of the interface. I went into the business of explaining to the world what graphical user interfaces are. I'm trying to remember what we called them. We did use the user interface term. That was a direct extension of what computer people understood as interfaces. If you had to interface between the computer and the printer, you needed a way of having the computer talk to the printer. That was a kind of interface between one piece of hardware and another piece of hardware, or between one layer of the protocol and another layer of the protocol. The user was simply another device in the system. The interface to the user was just like an interface to any other piece of the hardware or software. So, I made this transition from being just an evaluator into being more of a designer. I taught a series of projects or tutorials for the SIGCHI conferences, which started up right at the same time that Xerox Star came out in '81, '82. That is when I met you at some of the SIGCHI conferences, right? Jared: Right. Right. Yeah. Bill: Do you remember your first SIGCHI conference? Jared: My first CHI conference was 1983. Bill: Mmm hmm. Jared: It wasn't Gaithersburg, which was in '82. It was in '83. Bill: I think it was in San Francisco, wasn't it? Jared: No, it was in Boston. Bill: In Boston, OK. I remember '83 was when we presented our paper on all the studies we have been doing for Star. I think that really was the conference that set the direction for the CHI community and established the basic paradigm with which all of us were working with -- graphics on the screen and pointing at pictures on the screen using keyboards, but with pointing devices. I think the focus of the conference was well established at that time. It hasn't changed much. We should talk about that later if you want. We have tried changing it, and there have been some interesting spinoffs. For instance, I think there is now one called, 'The Design of User Experience' -- the DUX Conference. Jared: Right, the DUX Conference. Yeah. Yeah. There have been several. The Usability Professional Association spun off of that. Bill: Mmm hmm. Jared: Yeah, there has been a variety. I think that the problems that you were trying to solve with the Xerox Star, in some ways aren't a whole lot different than the problems that people are trying to solve today. Now, we are not thinking about, 'is a mouse better than cursor keys?' per se. But, we are still trying to get the overall experience to match how people really want to think about the problems they are trying to solve and the goals they are trying to achieve. Bill: Mmm hmm. But we were clearly aimed at Xerox, to the office, and productivity in the office. In fact, we said it's not just office workers or secretaries, but it is the knowledge worker. I think that was Doug Engelbart's idea, at SRI, when he came up with the mouse and online hypertext and all of that. Those were the predecessors of the work at Xerox. We picked that up. That was part of what we were told we were working on, the architecture of information. Knowledge workers were our goal at moving beyond clerks, who would type up memos. But, I remember there was quite a bit of resistance to thinking that some executive is going to use a keyboard. Jared: Yeah. Bill: Looking back on it [laughs], people really didn't think it was right to be sitting at a typewriter because they'd be viewed as a secretary, and they'd be viewed as some kind of clerk. Jared: Yeah. There was a whole group of people, I remember meeting with a group of women in technology, and they were telling me that many of them avoided taking any typing training, because that would have instantly branded them into the administration track and they didn't want to go into the administration track, so they never took typing. Now, there regretting it, because they're hunt and peck typist, and are not in a place where they can take advantage of the technology. I took typing in High School on a whim, it was mostly because all of the cute girls took typing in High School, and it's like one of the things that I learned in school that I actually use everyday. There are very few things that come into that list. Bill: I remember in Junior High, I took typing and my favorite parts were the exercises. The little finger, left hand, little finger, right hand, ring finger, left hand, ring finger, right hand, and you'd go "dot, dot, dot, dot". Exercise all your fingers and it was sort of like playing a piano and I just enjoyed this sort of mechanical delight in what the keyboard brought. Jared: The instructor used to have records, and they used to play LP Records, and this was before tapes and CDs, of this music that was created especially for typing. Bill: Yeah. Jared: It was these polkas and westerns. [laughter] Jared: He would dance around the front of the room, while we were doing our typing lessons. I remember that. Bill: There's sort of a nostalgia about typing, but it hasn't gone away and people have tried making better layouts for the keyboard and better ways to type with the cursor with a stylists and it's really hard to beat the perilism of ten fingers that can come down not only one after another, but simultaneously. That's one of my interest, what's the future of keyboards. It's not just the future of pointing and gesturing and all sorts of analogical inputs, but the digital inputs which are very powerful and parallel, it's what's powerful about them. Put down a bunch of fingers at once. Jared: Right. Bill: I've never made a breakthrough in keyboards and I keep wondering about all the legacies that we bring with us. Why is the layout the way it is, how many extra keys do you need, how many shift control, alt-function, and I've got some keys here that I don't recognize. There's a little that looks like a windows symbol, and there's an apple symbol, and theirs a little menu symbol, and it's just a tiny little laptop. It's crammed all these extra keys into it. I remember debating how many buttons there should be on a mouse and Larry Tessler, who went from Xerox to Apple was the biggest advocate for Moodiness, he said "If you've got one button and you need two functions, then that button is going to be in one mode or another and your going to hit a shift key before you hit that button, or your going to hold down the shift key before you hit that button, and all those modes make it difficult to operate." He said "The mouse should only have one button" and then we won't have to worry about which button to use, but now you have a thousand or a million modes, because then you can click on any pixel on the screen. Jared: Right. Bill: It's an awkward tradeoff between how many buttons do you need and we decided, for instance, by testing different selection schemes that the mouse should have two buttons, instead of three or one. Jared: Right. Bill: We didn't find there were four buttons or sixteen buttons, I'm sure there are mice now that have that many. Jared: Now, the Star was derivative of the Beta, right the Xerox? Bill: It's called Alto. Jared: Alto, that was it. That's right. Bill: That was the research machine that had been developed at Xerox and it was what all of the researchers used. It was what the programmers used; it was the machine that had all the basic facilities of the bit mat display and a mouse to point at the screen and then three buttons for the mouse. Jared: Now that was a three button mouse, right? Bill: Yeah, that's what they brought from SRI. Those Engelbarts, the first mouse had three buttons on it, and they re-arranged them a bit, but it was still a three button mouse and never tried four buttons as far as I know. I came up with a theory that says, there's a kind of optimum between two many and too little and one is too little and three is too many. Therefore, the number two must be the optimum and you could argue if it's a pessimism or a worst tradeoff, worst being too many and too little and in a way it is, its long stories to tell about the mouse and how to arrange it. When I left Xerox, I went to work for an industrial design firm, which is strange as a PHD Mechanical Engineer. I think that we changed industrial design forever by moving industrial design closer to usability and software and having as much concern for the physical appearance of products as for the software appearance of products and software behavior of products. Jared: It was ID2 that you went? Bill: ID2, yeah I went from Xerox to work with Bill Margrage at his second industrial design firm, which was called ID2. It was his second office; his first was Margrage Associates in London. Jared: Right and that became IDEO, right? Bill: Yes, he merged with David Kelly Design and Matrix Product Designs, where three firms came together. Jared: Right. Bill: I was the seventh year that I was at ID2 and it became IDEO, and that was the year that Interval Research was formed and so I transitioned for a year between ID2, and IDEO, and Interval Research. I think that for me that was a real turning point in my career, moving from being a straight forward industrial product developer working for one large company. That was eight years at Xerox to being a consultant and I've really been a consultant every since then and worked for probably 20 different firms in the six years I was at ID2. I think we were able to come up with better terminology for what we were doing. Call it easier interface design at Xerox and we realized it ID2 we were not just designing information products, we were designing medical products, and navigation devices, and instruments and they weren't just information products. They had information in them, they had these complex interfaces, because the computer was there to relieve the user, or to make it more complex, or to make it more powerful and you had to deal as much with the software interfaces as you did with the physical interface and it's not just the buttons, and knobs, and dials with all the displays in computer that made those displays complex. That's when we decided we weren't going to call it Easy Interface Designs, which was so strongly associated with computers; we were going to call it interaction design. Moggridge and I both sort of take credit for that term, which I think is a good one. A lot of people came up with the term independently and they don't claim they all took it from us in fact there's a book called "Interaction Deigns" that Bill Moggridge did not write, when he wrote his book he called it "Designing Interactions", which I think isn't what he should have called it, but it was to late. It was already a textbook called "Interaction Design". Jared: Right. Bill: I think it's a good term and it's a little bit vague, which is appropriate and you make of it what you want, and you can claim it as a usability expert, or a psychologist studying people and their usages, and anthropologist and ethnographer concerned with situations that people have and what they do. Jared: Do you think that designs have changed from the 70s, to the 80s, to the 90s, to now? Bill: Certainly, look at the Rhode Island School of Design. That is sort of a preeminent design school in the United States. Who did they hire as their next President, who's just arrivedÑJohn Maeda. He was a computer programmer and a graphic designer, and he spent most of his career at MIT as an undergraduate then as a professor. I think they expect him to change the world of school design at least to get them on the right track. Certainly, the industrial designers now realize that, there not just designing clever materials, or mechanisms, or structures, but all the ways that people not only approach and use and sit on products, but how they use them. Increasing the experiences that uses isn't just a graphical one or a physical one, it's a complex problem of understanding of what its doing, and how it's doing it and how you're going to operate it. Making sure the word operate is the best ones, but that's part of the paragon that I come from, that the idea of designing for operators, designing for people who have tasks to accomplish. I think that's part of what designs changes that the technology is changing in amazing ways. We have computing technologies that are pretty ubiquitous and inexpensive and it continues to get more and more ubiquitous and more and more integrated into everything we do. Jared: Yeah. My thinking is that, as technology gets cheaper and more ubiquitous, that we get the chance to focus more and more on the overall experience and how that experience really, really works. It was very telling when the iPod was being sold; almost every ad really just featured someone just wildly dancing to the music of their choice. [laughter] Jared: Those ads with the white earphones and the colorful backgrounds always looked to me like someone was getting electrocuted. [laughter] Bill: A lightening bolt. Jared: Exactly. But, it was very much about experience, and not about this is a device that holds this many songs and it has this user interface. It plugs into the computer in this way, and you move music from one storage unit to another through this easy technique. But, that's not what they sold. What they sold was standing in the street, dancing to your own tunes. Everything else is in support of that. So, then the question becomes if we work for an insurance company, or we work for a hospital or we work for a university, what are the equivalents to standing in the street and dancing to your own tunes, which is basically the experience that we're designing? Bill: I disagree. Jared: Yeah? Bill: I think that if you're designing for a hospital and you have some kind of a patient check-in or a patient record system, you may not be designing for the clerks, the attendants or whoever is actually using the database. Maybe it's the patient who gets to use it to make appointments or check their records. There are circumstances where it's very important that they get very clear information quickly, and they have no doubts about what it is. I think focusing on experience is a little bit broad, and it maybe a distraction. Maybe what's important is that they get the information. Jared: But, is that part of the experience, you think? Bill: That's defining experience too broadly, I think. Jared: OK. Bill: I think your example of the iPod is a perfect one. It pins us in the world of music and personal entertainment, and personal 'grooving' on the music, and that's a kind of experience. There are a lot of other systems that are being built to create records, to create appointments with specific times. My wife just had a procedure this morning, and she spent a whole week preparing for it, and getting all the data about exactly what to do. It wasn't a painful experience, partly because the information was all very carefully presented to her, and she had it when she needed it. Everything went really smoothly. So, in a way, it was a smooth experience, but it was also a well-engineered experience that had less to do with the aesthetics or the feelings she had. There were feelings, but they were feelings of reassurance and completeness that she knew she was doing the right things. Everything went off without a hitch, and it was a good experience. On the other hand, a lot of what made it a good experience was a careful attention to detail, careful attention to engineering and having the right information there when she needed it, and ways for her to check up on it, and be reassured that she was doing the right thing. A lot of that was done online, some of it was done with good paper documentation, and some of it was done by having the right people accessible to her. So, it was a well-engineered system, if I could use the term 'engineering'. I think design has a broader sense than engineering. Engineering usually focuses on some task, system, or some goal that you have to accomplish. There's trade-offs between cost and effectiveness. That's a very different discipline than the one that brought us the iPod. I'm sure it was involved in the iPod. But, I think a lot of what was involved in the iPod was an understanding of what you're going to appeal to in selling it - and that's the experience that people are going to have with it. And, it's a consumer product. Jared: Well, Yeah. Bill: The appeal has to be in the advertisement and the way you present it. It was carefully designed to provide all those experiences. I think iPod isn't the best example for someone designing a medical services system in a hospital. Jared: Yeah, but I'm wondering if that's strictly true. These days many hospitals are privately-funded and are business unto themselves. And so, to some extent, they want people to choose them over the others. There are choices that we can make. They know that if they provide a patient with a reassuring, informative process that allows them to feel like they're in control and moving forward. On the one hand, it's very different than dancing in the street with music. But, on the other hand, it's also very different than thinking about the underlying information systems and their structures, and saying, 'we have 20 terabytes of storage that we use and high bandwidth lines running through the hospital'. None of that is important. What's really important is that the patients feel the way that you described. They feel like their getting reassured with good information. They're not surprised when they get into the hospital by unexpected things popping up because they weren't prepped well. Bill: I think one of the things that's changing is that technologies that have a lot of careful engineering in them are being applied to areas where what's most important is the aesthetics of their application - application is even the wrong word - or the ways that they affect us, or that we affect them. I guess what concerns me is that we are able to separate these big design problems into issues that are some technological and some aesthetic issues that an engineer with special kinds of training can solve, and other issues that an artist can be brought in to solve. I think there are some big differences between engineering training and artistic training. There are art schools and engineering schools. I think they produce very different kinds of people. They attract very different kinds of people. And, when we get into any real product design or system design, we need to make sure that we have the right balance or mixture of those sorts of talents. I've always discovered that I can't be the artist in my team. I have to work with someone who has a different set of attitudes and a different set of skills that have come from a lifetime of concern for colors, for instance, rhythm or harmony. These are all of the things that I consider the core of an art education. Certainly, you can approach some of those things in a good engineering education or scientific education. But, it's very hard to apply science to understanding things like harmony or rhythm, or even the issues of balance and sensibility in a graphic display. I think it takes years to be good at that kind of work. The most important thing to me is this awareness that there are specialties that can be brought to bear in different sorts of circumstances. Jared: Yeah. Randy Pausch at CMU, unfortunately, recently passed away. One of the insights he had for the programs they were doing there, was to actually pair up an engineer with an artist. They would sit at the same workstation and work together. And, he found that the designs that came out of that pairing were always unique, and had an overall better aesthetic and feel to them than the ones that were done separately, where the artist and the engineer were separated. They had these distinct hand-offs of handing the design back and forth vs. collaborating together. Is that your experience? Bill: Indeed. I think part of the challenge is to find the right place where you can do that. CMU is clearly a technology school, so they call it Entertainment Technology, and that was the name of the program he ran. I think it had a very strong technological base, but there are also some good designers there at that school. I think it was a big stretch though, for a technology school to take on that kind of entertainment as a focus. Certainly, there are technologists who want to design video games, movies, and special effects, and they consider that a path to that profession. It will be interesting to see what kind of program will come if an art school tried doing technology, and whether they would mess it up the way that some people mess it up. [laughter] Jared: I wonder if that is what's going to happen to RISD, if in fact, we're going to see more integration of technology into their classical arts program. Bill: They also have a good university there in Providence called Brown. Jared: Yeah, I've heard of it. Bill: It's one of the world's leading computer science departments, and I know some of the people who have come from there. They all went over to RISD and took courses in animation or typography. And so, there is that kind of 'cross-town' interaction. Jared: In the early days, Brown was one of the leaders in computer graphics. Andy van Dam wrote one of the seminal books on the topic. He was a professor there for a hundred million years. Bill: He's still there, actually. [laughs] He's not so old. Jared: Is he? [laughs] I had lost track of him. I didn't know where he had ended up. I met him--oh, my gosh--back in the early '80s. I remember just being in awe that he was standing in the same room as me. So, you are coming to the User Interface 13 Conference in October. Bill: Yes. Jared: You are going to give our Spotlight Plenarys presentation, and talk about interaction design. Do you want to quickly talk about what you are thinking of? Give us a little preview of what you are thinking of talking about? Bill: Yeah. I've decided to talk about sketching metaphors, so there are two issues. One is sketching. I think the focus will be on metaphors, though. I think the term "metaphor" has been stretched beyond recognition, and I'm happy to do that. I'm happy to continue stretching it. I think it applies, quite broadly, to what we do as interaction designers. Jared: So you are stretching it, metaphorically. Bill: That's right. [laughter] Bill: I hope to not snap it, but I could let it snap back together. It has some resilience. The first thing I want to talk about is the common sense of the desktop metaphor, 'What is the thing that organizes the interface for you?', and 'How the metaphor is different than the user's conceptual model.' I think that's where everyone is able to enter the discussion. But, before you ever get to generalize it, to the metaphor that's going to organize your interface, and the user's conceptual model, you need to do some observation and invention. That's just upfront stuff of understanding what problems you're trying to solve, who you're solving them for, and how those people think. One of the ways you can do that is to listen to them, watch them, and see what they say and do. Quite often, embedded in their language, are the metaphors that help them organize their thinking. It's important to understand what the people who you're designing for bring to the problem you're solving, or the new system they're going to design. They're not going to give that up, entirely. A lot of their existing thinking is going to be part of that system that you build. At the other end of the design process, are if the user's conceptual model and the metaphors used to come up with it, or to describe it, or to convince people about it, are the core of the interaction design process, the result of that, quite often, is a new set of paradigms, we call them, the ways we consider computers. What is a computer? Is it a tool? That's what IBM claimed. It wasn't a brain. That was the first idea; that it has a brain, and it's going to think. And, it'll take over all our thinking chores. It's a thinking machine. I think that usability is, very clearly, associated with the idea that some use that you have, some task that you have, and your job is to accomplish that task, and you are provided tools. Hopefully, tools that empower you to do good jobs. The CHI Conference, or the CHI community, has very much bought that as the thing that they do. They do concern themselves with users who have tasks, and they can define the jobs that you're trying to accomplish. There's a whole set of questions you ask, as part of an organizing paradigm. A community has a set of questions that they agree are the kind of issues they will deal with at that conference. Quite often, you spend 10, 20, even 30 years now, debating whether that's the right issue, and have you rejected the papers that really should lead you in a new direction. Jared: Right. Bill: Quite often, an organization needs to hold to its guns. [laughs] We're not an entertainment group. We're not about education or entertainment. If you want to do entertainment, you go to this other conference, or go start your own conference on new paradigms for user computer interaction, which is intentionally thought of as, this is where you'll see breakthroughs. Jared: Right. Bill: I think the most important competing paradigm is that the computer is a kind of medium. Negroponte understood that, with the Media Lab. There are a lot of programs that are dealing with multimedia, and all the issues of how you use computers as media, as ways to communicate; ways to persuade; ways to entertain; or engage; ways to convey one message or another; and ways to... Not "trapped", but "engaged". Jared: Yeah. Engaged. Bill: Those are, very much, words from the media world. You go to different kinds of schools. Sometimes there's a communications department that studies communications. The people coming out of those programs are always asking a very slightly different set of questions than the people who come out of engineering programs, or computer science programs, or even psychology programs where users are studied. If you come out of the "computer as brain", though, you think, "Well, how intelligent can this computer be?" Or, "How do I talk to it? Why can't I just talk to my computer, and let it talk to me?" You are drawn into a whole set of issues about: what is human-like intelligence. You learn more about what humans can, and can't, do, and what computers can't do, like understand natural, spoken language. Computers aren't very good at understanding handwriting. But, it pulls you down a whole set of directions that are based on that underlying paradigm. Those three, I think, are the competing paradigms, and have been, for the last 50 years. The "computer as brain", or "computer as intelligence", "computer as person", "computer as agent", all those issues that a computer, as an intelligent, communicating being that sometimes distracts people into thinking, "Oh, we'll name our new operating system Bob." Jared: Right. Bill: Bob will be this character that pops up on the screen, and is friendly, and smiles at you, and interrupts you, and suggests things to you. I think that it's a bit of a distraction where you're not trying to entertain people, but to let them get things done. Jared: Right. Bill: Certainly, those sorts of characters on the screenÑsome people call them avatars, if they represent other peopleÑagents, or representations of the computer, lead you and entertain you, engage you, and distract you from what's really going on. It's a kind of magic show, and I think a lot of systems should not have magic in them. They should have real clarity about exactly what they're doing. That's where use, usability, and engineering concerns are. At the other extreme, they are entertainment systems. They're like this bolt of lightning that connects to your ears with two white lines, and lets you dance down the street, and forget your woes and concerns, and engages you in a sort of mindlessness, if you will. You can see where my favorite paradigm is. There are others, though, that are competing with all these. I think the "computer as life" paradigm is an extension of the "computer as person". We think of it, now, as just an evolving system that's going to learn. We're back to all the AI dreams of artificial intelligence, and such. Jared: Right. Bill: There are these competing paradigms that I think we need to be aware of. We have to be aware of our own biases, as well. I'm, quite clearly, stuck in tool engineering view, and there are other ways that that's extended. We asked people at Apple what was the future of their interface. Actually, we asked them, first, "If the Macintosh was a car, what kind of car would it be?" They said, "Oh, it's like a Beetle, a Volkswagen Bug, or it's a BMW. That's what it really wants to be." We said, "What will it be in the future?" They all agreed that it was going to be some kind of rollerblades. It was going to be something you wore on your head with you in the street. That was 25 years ago that we asked that question at Apple, and it's real clear that that's where they're headed. Jared: Yeah. Bill: One of the things that they've really accomplished is that their computer should be in their rollerblades, or other things that allow them to roll around. Jared: Right, and it's not just the iPod, but what we've seen with the MacBook Air, which is this very lightweight laptop. Yeah, that's definitely the way they're going. Bill: And the iPhone. Jared: This sounds very good. I'm looking forward to it. We've been talking here with Bill Verplank. Bill Verplank is a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He's an expert interaction designer, going back to the days of the Xerox Star, and having had a lot of influences on many folks, including myself, over the years. He is going to be speaking on Thursday, October 16th, at the User Interface 13 Spotlight Plenary, on sketching metaphors. Thanks very much for talking with us today, Bill. Bill: You're welcome. I look forward to it. [music] Brian: Don't forget, if you'd like to see Bill Verplank's unique, live sketching presentation of design paradigms for yourself, be sure to sign up for our user interface conference this October, 2008, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Learn more at uiconf.com. That's all for this week. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. [music]