Has Mountain Dew changed the recipe?

Finished Interface Culture by Steven Johnson today (it’s 93 outside and humid, which means it’s reading weather). I’ll leave it up to the reviewers on Amazon’s site to give you more information about the book…

I like books.. fiction, non fiction, but books that make you think… think about things to create, think about things as you’ve never thought about them before. Interface Culture was one of those books. His central premise (I think!) is that interface design is an art form, just like a Dickens novel or a Renaissance painting and because it is an art form, it has social and cultural impacts, some of which we can see with the naked eye, some of which we can discover and some that can only be seen in hindsight.

A second theme I found was the idea that emergent technologies, things like personal agents and Apple’s V-Twin search technology, while brilliant, most often end up being applied in areas never imagined by their creators. For instance, Thomas Edison created the phonograph in 1877. But get this: he thought the phonograph would be used mainly for recording phone conversations. These applications were explained as exaptations, which is my official word of the day. 🙂

Finally, though not an official theme, I found numerous mentions of the idea that some, if not all, radical and sometimes breakthrough inventions are initially rejected by popular and mainstream culture. The Mac, with it’s icons and graphical user interface, was seen as simple and labeled as cartoonish… it was not seen as a “serious business application”. Soon, the icons, trash bin and menu system took over the entire business world and every computer we use today uses the same metaphors that the original Mac did in the early 1980’s. Just goes to show that maybe the heated debate about technologies like Flash as an interface device or wireless devices might be the tip of an amazing iceberg… who knows?