I made it through the first and second day of the conference. I am happy that it is a relatively small class of about 60 people. My fellow students are from an assortment of occupations. The mix includes developers, graphic designers, managers, and QA people. Everyone seems very nice and happy to be here. We work as a team for some of the class exercises. My team includes Julio, a very cool guy from Brazil, Charles, a very dorky guy from Kansas, and Ash, a smart California to NYC transplant who works in Manhattan.
The class is a “3 day intensive” on the topic of Interaction Design. The instructor is Bruce Tognazzini, a man who looks like a beardless Santa. He is an expert in HCI (human-computer interaction). At this point, I’m not sure what I think of him. He is definitely an expert and he knows his stuff. His claim to fame (one of many) is being the 66th Apple employee. His ego is as big as his gut. He tends to talk a lot about his accomplishments. He also likes to bash Microsoft for their lack of quality (you’d think by now that Apple people would find something else to talk about). For the most part, his insights are very good in the context of a design discussion. However, he says some things that are a bit bizarre. I’ll write about the good stuff in the next day or two. For now, I have a question for you (I’m hoping this question will add a bit of interactivity to the blog. He said that he thinks video phones will be big in the very near future–bigger than the internet. What do you think of this statement?
Gotta go. I have to eat the sandwich I bought from Rupert (the likeable owner of Hello Deli of David Letterman fame). His deli is a very small hole-in-the-wall next to the Ed Sullivan Theater. Check out this picture.
