Part of the pleasure of working with industrial designers is watching the way they interact with stuff — people who make physical products think about those products very differently than most, in the same way I obsess over details of interfaces. I’ve learned so much about how the world around me is made, in the most basic ways, from working with them, listening to them, asking them questions. So it was a delight for me to have my MacBook get delivered to the office and watch the industrial design team examine it like doctors doing a physical.
I did refuse to let the mechanical engineer open it up, even though I count the day that her boss took apart an iPod nano among the more mind-bending experiences I’ve had at this job. But I wanted to take my new computer home in one piece, and I did. I’ve spent the weekend catching up on errands and sleep, and playing with the cool toys on the new computer. Unexpectedly, I have some UI complaints — the new iPhoto I find harder to use than the older version, and switching states in PhotoBooth is totally unintuitive — but overall it’s a pleasure to use.
Best of all, I think the built-in iSight could change the way people interact with their computers: it’s almost impossible not to have fun with it, to want to play with it, and once you get enough of an installed userbase, the opportunities for networked interactions get a whole lot richer. For now, though, I think it makes the relationship with the computer both more intimate and more performative — you want to watch it watching you. And of course it opens up whole new vistas of procrastination…
