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The Interactive Classroom

How student workshops hosted by Interval Research Corporation and Apple Computer may help facilitate the convergence of design disciplines in the university.

Article by Andrea Codrington, Published by International Design Magazine (November 1995)

[ Drawing on the proximity of NYU's theater programs, students from the Interactive Telecommunications Program designed a tool to help actors prepare unfamiliar dialects. Using the 'Dialect Mirror ' (left) to record and organize samples, users pinpoint on an onscreen map the exact geographical location of the desired accent (center). With a so-called "Mondrian" graph, the user then charts more specific data, such as age, gender and socioeconomic background (right). Students included Kavita Bali, Michael Bettison, Shannon McGarity, Alexia Vyshkin, Kevin Walker and Jed Weissberg.]

Interval Research Corporation's University Workshop

" If it can't fail, it ain't research," says Interval Research Corporation's CEO David Liddle, of the often hit-and-miss nature of experimentation. The topic of discussion is Interval's first annual University Workshop, held this summer at the organization's Palo Alto, California, headquarters. The brainchild of S. Joy Mountford, who conceived and organized a similar program to connect students with industry during her seven-and-a-half-year tenure at nearby Apple Computer (see p. 72), the workshop advances Interval's already avid interest in exploding traditional design boundaries to form interdisciplinary work groups.

Proactive, highly secretive and remarkably well endowed, Interval was set up three years ago by ex-Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and David Liddle as a research center to study how longterm technologies will effect the world. Liddle, who made his name at Xerox PARC, where he oversaw the Xerox Star interface later made commercial by Steve Jobs and Apple, and went on to found the business software company Metaphor, was brought in to run the R&D organization. It is expected to be financially viable within the decade by licensing fees generated by future inventions.

Taking as its starting point one of Interval's pet peeves - the general dearth of sophisticated aural components in current multimedia - the University Workshop's student brief was to develop prototype solutions for finding and browsing audio information, including sound, music and speech. Mountford and her team invited eight universities from around the world to participate in the workshop - each submitted two exemplary student projects for Interval's consideration and then paring it down to the best one. A monetary donation was given to the universities - except for London's Royal College of Art and Stanford University, which are already endowed by the organization - and Interval played host this summer to approximately 50 students whho came to participate in the four-day event. Included were Italy's Domus Academy, Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, New York University's ITP, the Kyoto Institute of Technology, the Univerrsity of Toronto and the Utrecht School of the Arts.

The inherent challenge of visualizing something as abstract and visceral as sound - and in as little as six months - was well understood by the students, who during the final day-long presentation at Interval themselves managed to transcend a host of sound-related problems, i.e., a virtual Babel of language difference and sporadic bouts of microphone feedback. projects ranged from an on-line music shop that takes the form of a journey through a series of aurally architectural rooms (Domus' "Eardrum") and a database designed to organize large amounts of samples in both logical and associative ways (Utrecht's "Xample") to the more earth-bound application of combining a recording device with an electronic note pad (Royal Institute of Technology's "NotaBene"). For the most part, however, solid form took an evident back seat to concept, since many of the projects presented interfaces alone - a result that was somehow in keeping with Interval's enviable position of not having to produce anything in the next few years but applicable future research.

Liddle's future-forward thoughts on professional research have everything to do with educational experimentaion - the boundary-pushing moments of unfetered creativity that design education, at its best, can offer. This makes the alliance between Interval and the world's most progressive design schools a logical - and fruitful -one. " The stimulative effect of students is tremendous for an organization," concludes Liddle, "but only if the organization is set up to accept it."

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Article by Andrea Codrington, Published by International Design Magazine (November 1995)

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Associated images coming soon.