My keynote for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference last year has been posted to ITConversations. The talk is called "The Coming Age of Magic." It's an argument for the use of magic as a user experience design metaphor when creating objects that exhibit behaviors. In other words, I believe that magic can be a useful metaphor for making ubiquitous computing devices more comprehensible and usable. My presentation takes the form of three linked arguments about emergence:
- The emergence of ubiquitous computing from market forces acting on, and in concert with, CPU prices
- The emergence of animist reactions to devices that have behaviors that go beyond action-reaction physics
- The emergence of magic as a metaphor for the design of ubicomp devices
You can download the full text and slides of the presentation (710K PDF) and follow along with the MP3 from the link above, which also has the fun 15 minute post-keynote Q&A session on it.
Also, "Observing the User Experience" was translated into Japanese and is available from Amazon Japan.
Thanks for the reminder, Robin. I'm aware of that article, and it's definitely an early, prescient piece. I put in my bibliography of magic in hci (which I realize I need to update: if you know of new work in the field, please let me know).
It's a slightly different argument (it predates most work in UbiComp), but you should definitely read http://www.asktog.com/papers/magic.html