Computers as Theatre, Second Edition

6. New Terrain in Interaction Design

In the first edition of this book, I wrote about some of the up-and-coming things I could see on the horizon in human-computer interaction: new environments for writing, smart houses, multimedia, and virtual reality. These things and many more have since entered our world. Smart houses are still not so smart, but I think we have trouble handing over too much agency to the architecture. Instead, houses have become “smarter” by incorporating technologies that reduce their footprint in the world, from new materials to solar panels and graywater gardens. Multimedia in its most general sense is so pervasive as to be unremarkable except as a historically situated bridge that people thought of as a media type (usually ...