A Look at 35 Years of Interface Design

Back to the Past: Bill Buxton Shows Off 35 Years of Tech Devices,Microsoft Research’s Bill Buxton has unboxed, unearthed, and organized his personal collection of interactive tech devices gathered over the last 35 years. The collection will be on display at an international interaction design conference this week and could end up as a display in a museum.

Buxton has accumulated hundreds of items that struck him as interesting, unusual or important to the evolution of interactive devices – watches, keyboards, mice, an electronic drum set, a 60-year-old transistor radio whose design inspired the iPod, a Nintendo Power Glove, several Etch-A-Sketches, and even the first so-called “smart” phone – controlled by a touch-screen - first shown in 1993, 14 years before smart phones exploded onto the scene.

A look at 35 years of collection:

Input Devices
Buxton's selection of input devices includes (clockwise from upper left) an original telegraph keyset; the Green Eye Mouse – the first mouse Microsoft sold; the Swiss mouse, with a roller mechanism designed by yes, a watch maker; and Data Hand, which aimed to reduce arm fatigue by enabling each finger to choose a character by selecting from a radial menu. View the entire collection online.

 

Touch Devices
Touch devices in the collection include (clockwise from upper left) the Arc Touch, which morphs from flat to arch; a touch controller Buxton used in two-handed input studies back in 1985; the UnMouse stand-alone touchpad; and the iGesture Pad, created by a small company that started making multi-touch touchpads and was later bought by Apple. View the entire collection online.

 

Frog Pad
The FrogPad is a one-hand keyboard available for the left or right hand. The left and right keyboard versions are mirror images of each other. View the entire collection online.

 

 

 

 

Swiss Champ XAVT
This Swiss Army Knife is the equivalent of a bloated application, Buxton says. "It has so many great additions that it is useless — except to collectors like me who find extreme cases of bad design charming or useful." Visit the collection today.

 

 

 

 

Explore the Collection Online
Bill Buxton's vast array of tech devices from the past 35 years is available to experience online via an extensive visual database built using Microsoft PowerPivot. Visit the collection today.

 

 

 

 

“I’m just bad at throwing stuff out,” joked Buxton last week, as the movers came by to transport his entire collection to Vancouver, British Columbia, for display at the 2011 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) this week.

“A lot of people, even people working in the field, have no idea these objects exist,” said Buxton, a principal researcher for Microsoft Research. “Those of us in the Internet Age with the most access to search engines have the least knowledge about our past. We’re so obsessed with the future that we only look forwards. I’ve been collecting specifically to counter that – to show how deep the roots go.”

A leading expert in human-computer interactions, Buxton frequently teaches, speaks and writes on the subject of natural user interface, or NUI, in which technology incorporates more human-friendly means of “input” such as touch, face- and voice-recognition, and movement sensors.

“One of the great things about Bill is the way he shares his enthusiasm for design and technology with other people,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. “It’s infectious. It also reflects his enthusiasm for teaching. Bill has been one of the most influential people in the field of design and human-computer interaction for many years, and the collection is really representative of his love and dedication to the field which he’s impacted so much.”

origin:Microsoft News Center