Introduction

Interactive stories are often thought to be a series of choices made by the active viewer or participant. Go left, pick up a key, fall in love, steal a car, etc. Besides some challenges in terms of plot, character development, and consistent theme, this approach has fundamental problems related to a mathematical problem.

The Combinatoric Explosion

If the story is seen as a series of binary choices–do this or do that–the range of possible outcomes becomes very large in just a few choices (and the problem is made much worse if the number of choices is greater than two at each decision point). For example, after only six choices, the number of different story lines is sixty four, as can be seen in the drawing to the left. If each choice leads to a unique story line (in other words, the different choices do not result in common outcomes), the space requirements and production costs for such an interactive expression become prohibitive before the participant spends ten minutes with the product. Imagine trying to write, videotape, and assemble 64 separate story lines.

Abandoning The Traditional Narrative

The combinatoric explosion described above is a consequence of thinking in terms of the traditional narrative. But if the interactive expression is seen in different terms, the problem becomes more manageable. Imagine that instead of following the straight line of the narrative, the participant travels through a story space. The story space is composed of all the different locations, events, times, and even moods carefully created by the author. The process of moving from one place in the story space to another is determined by their “distance” from one another, and the intervening story places.

The traditional narrative can be achieved in this story space by following a straight line. But a different story line can be achieved by traversing a different path through the story space. In addition, different beginnings and endings can be achieved by entering and exiting the story space in different places.

In this form, the concept of the story space can be useful in constraining the combinatoric explosion. The author creates only those story places within the space that help support the idea being expressed, and size of the production can be contained and made producable. But one can think of the above two dimensional story space as essentially static. To move to a more dynamic model, a third dimension can be added. If the participant makes a significant change to the environment, rather than just traveling through it, they might jump to a different “plane”. For example, by choosing to help the homeless person find a place to sleep, rather than ignoring them, the participant may jump to a different or altered plane in the story space as a consequence of their choice.

While this dimensional approach could lead to the same combinatoric explosion (by creating too many planes), the author controls the explosion by creating only the places and paths-between-places she wants the participant to explore. This is the power of Story Space model. Rather than thinking in terms of a straight line with a beginning and end, the author thinks of a story space through which the participant moves.

Ways of “Moving” in the Story Space

The participant can be allowed to move through the story space in several different ways:

• Changing locations or times. For example moving from the living room to the bedroom, or from Tuesday to Wednesday.
• Changing perspectives. The participant can look through the eyes of different characters, or the same character but with different attitudes. One could also be a passive observer rather than one of the characters.
• Changing scope. Elements of the story can be seen in great detail, or in broad strokes.
• Changing modes. One could read text, see pictures, or hear sounds.
• Reordering the sequence. Parts of the story can be viewed in different orders.
• Altering the space via practical or moral choices. The participant can send the love letter, or deem the protagonist to be an artist.
• Passive interactivity. The story can change itself, either randomly, or based on the intentions of the author.

I think passive interactivity, while facetiously named, is critical to the success of Interactive Expression. First, participants will soon grow weary of mundane choices and may prefer to sit back and let the story evolve on its own. One night, you might watch the new western and see the goings on down in the valley. The next night, you watch the same western, but see the murder in the mine shaft. Second, if the participant is to be lead to a particular idea by the author, the story may well need to draw the participant along, closing off certain choices, opening up others, and imposing yet others. Even if several different ideas are being presented, and they depend on the path taken by the participant, the story may need to draw the participant to one of those ideas. At a minimum, a certain amount of motivation, fun, change, randomness, and action is likely to be needed, and this can be provided by passive interactivity.

Afterthoughts: Dimensional Story Space

1998
In 1992, I co-founded a salon and newsletter called Interactive Expression, where we explored many of the central issues of multimedia as an art form. For the newsletter, I wrote a piece called that explored some of the problems with interactive story telling. Someone recently sent me an email about it, and it prompted me to look back and think some more about multimedia with the perspective that six years has given me. It is difficult to express something meaningful if the authorial voice is destroyed by the form of the text. And to be honest, I haven’t seen a fully successful interactive text (in any medium). But I think it may be possible, though the result is likely to be very different from what we think of as a novel.

The metaphor I like is sculpture. For example, a Calder mobile is a very dynamic thing, and the viewer may participate by pushing one part and observing the resulting forms. Even the act of walking around a sculpture like The Kiss is an essential part of experiencing the work. The viewer has to participate (i.e. interact) to appreciate the artistic expression. So even though sculptures have this participatory aspect, they maintain their artistic integrity. When you look at a Calder or Rodin, there is no question who made the sculpture. And I don’t think Calder felt his expression was compromised by the fact that a viewer (or the wind) could change the sculpture. This is what I was trying to get at in my essay:

The author can control the [combinatoric] explosion by creating only the places and paths-between-places she wants the participant to explore. This is the power of Story Space model. Rather than thinking in terms of a straight line with a beginning and end, the author thinks of a story space through which the participant moves.

In other words, the author should sculpt the story so the reader can walk around it, and move parts around in order to “see” new aspects and gain a deeper sense of the whole. So far, interactive media has been a disappointment to me from an artistic point of view, though I’ve seen some interactive work that impresses me. In part, this is simply because it’s taking longer than I thought for the new medium to develop. But another problem is the computer and computer screen. It’s kind of like watching Citizen Kane through the slots of a zoetrope. All the power and magic is taken out of the experience. Likewise, there’s something wrong with experiencing an artistic expression in the “mouse and crouch” position. I suspect that interactive expression won’t really work until there’s a medium that feeds the experience rather than detracts from it.

This free collection of software makes it easy integrate all kinds of media with microcontrollers like the Arduino. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can create interactive projects that combine sensors, video, text, graphics, sound, lighting, motors and more. These projects can be created quickly, without programming, using the smart widgets included with the Toolkit.

I initiated the project in 2004, and have continued developing it since. It is used all over the world by schools, individuals, and agencies.

The projects were quite evocative, and came at animism from many different directions. Some seemed primarily reactive to interactions, others seemed to be doing their own thing, and yet others were curious in a shy kind of way. A common theme among the projects was the use of fictional back-stories, some quite elaborate, which gave the projects a more full character, suspension of disbelief, and space for imagination.

Reflections on the project, as well as links to details and videos of the interactions below. As a followup to this project, this summer I’ll be leading further research on Animism in a project funded by the Santa Monica based Nokia Research group headed by Sean White.

Through discussion and critique, the class found patterns in these speculative projects that seemed to make the animism work well, summarized in this table.

Student Project Documentation - Click on links for details and videos

Bora Shin’s Curious Mailbox – Watches and emotes about your email	Dee Kim & Chiao Wei Ho’s Future Particle Lab – Scientific research into live nano particles
Link Huang’s Velit – Wishing machine and its minions	Mike Manalo’s Animism: Material Research – Textures and Architecture
Jayne Vidheecharoen’s Botanical Autonoma – Human Spirit Interaction (HSI vs. HCI)	Rubina Ramchandani’s Stonaloid – Traumatized rocks in recovery
Sal Orara’s Tonalis Luminous – A field of tonal, light-sensitive flowers	Joshua McVeigh-Schultz’s Mobile interface devices in their natural state
Aarti Vashisht’a Doodler – A companion that reacts to your writing, and gets bored

By the time I got some students to sign up, and an approach approved, we had just one week to make the entire project.

The project consists of six plywood panels mounted to the wall, with separate slideshows running on each panel. Because the panels are different distances from the wall, there’s a dimensional effect created. The idea was to break the normal flat rectangle of projection and create an installation that felt more like a physical part of the space. In addition to the randomly playing slideshows on each panel, we created a simple interactive feature so if someone walked up to the wall, a flourish of motion graphics would appear unifying all the panels, then fading into a photo of the front of the museum spread across several panels.

The project was a collaborative design and build between myself and three students: Brooklyn Brown, Manny Darden, and Rubina Ramchandani. The design approach was partially inspired by some of Manny’s thesis work. For software, we used my NETLab Toolkit with a new SlideShow widget I developed that runs each of the slideshows - the entire project has no ActionScript, using only the toolkit widgets. Images were placed in folders, and each SlideShow widget played a set of images from these folders in a random order. Two projectors were used to get a wider display (2500 pixels), and these were fed by a video splitter out of a MacBook Pro (this way the Flash movie played across both projectors). An Infrared proximity sensor was used to detect someone in front of the wall, and this started the playback of five different video streams across the different panels.

Video of the interaction

Video of the overall project

A capture of the slideshow

This project explores the design opportunities in objects that seem to have inner lives through their expressive behavior.

As Piaget and others have noted, people tend to imagine that inanimate objects are alive – why not leverage this to create more interesting, playful, expressive, desirable, and useful systems?

Creating apparent intentionality for objects offers the potential for fitting more easily into the narrative of daily life, as well as making it easier for people to understand the sometimes complex function and role of digital systems in our lives.

The research would be conducted in summer 2011, in Philip van Allen’s New Ecology of Things Lab (NETLab) at Art Center’s Media Design Program. Professor van Allen will work with Nokia Research staff, as well as engaging select graduate Media Design Program and upper term undergraduate Product Design students to explore the potentials of Object Animism. The project team will create a series of experiments and design speculations that investigate the roles that animism might play, both in how the objects perform their “behind the scenes” tasks, as well as how they express themselves through sound, kinetic motion, and visual displays.

A range of contexts will be selected for the work, such as sensing and reporting, simple affordances for complex tasks, and subtle communication. The project will use and further develop the NETLab Toolkit rapid prototyping system.

An updated, illustrated, and edited version of this post was published in the JohnnyHolland.org magazine about Interaction Design.

http://johnnyholland.org/2011/05/19/the-new-ecology-of-things-slabs-sofducts-and-bespoke-objects/

With the Apple iPad launched and scores of other tablets and e-readers hitting the market, I think it’s important to step back and look at the larger trends. We’re in the middle of a major shift towards ubiquitous computing, cloud based personal storage, and tangible interaction. It’s a shift away from the generic computation typified by the “personal computer,” which never really achieved the individuality or specificity implied by the term “personal.” In short, we’re experiencing the emergence of The New Ecology of Things, where a network of heterogeneous, smart objects and spaces create opportunities for a more personal and meaningful landscape. This is what I’d like to explore:

• Where we’ve been and how the personal computer has made us soulless
• Where we’re about to be #1 with the emergence of digital slabs
• Where we’re about to be #2 with a new form of design that’s a hybrid of software and product
• Where we may be going and the future of the designer in an era of bespoke objects

The Past – The Personal Computer Has Made Us Soulless

There are many signs that all is not well with our day-to-day work life. John Hockenberry’s review of Michael Wolf’s The Transparent City contemplates the crushing homogeneity and conformity of modern work revealed through Wolf’s photographs of life seen through Chicago’s skyscrapers. Describing one photo, Hockenberry sees “12 random floors of eggshell white, computer screens on brown desks, and wall-hung bookshelves.” Sound familiar?

The article goes on to discuss how the environment for “knowledge work” is unlike factories where the space is specifically suited to the activity of making things. The knowledge working context has devolved to the point where “offices have become stacks of boxes for people who get paid to think out of them.” But I believe this is not only a problem of architecture and environmental design. Our daily activity has been squeezed into the narrow channel of interaction with the personal computer and its attendant posture, furniture, and detachment from the needs of the person. The digital tools we use have played a large role in creating this disembodied, deadening uniformity.

Similarly, Matthew B. Crawford has been driven out of the office and into his motorcycle repair shop as described in “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.” In the book, Crawford discusses how knowledge work has become vague and disconnected from the concrete, meaningful outcomes of manual labor. But again, perhaps it’s not only the type of work, but the manner in which the work is accomplished. The disconnection from the physical isn’t limited to paper-pushing knowledge workers, but architects, graphic designers, recording engineers and others whom we think of as having “satisfying” jobs where things are made. As creative workers, we’ve seen our day-to-day work compressed from a productive, bodily engaged studio environment down to the almost motionless “mouse-crouch” that plugs us into the virtual. Seduced by the power of the personal computer, we have morphed from active, engaged, social, interactive people to sedentary, soulless slugs perched in front of our glowing screens.

The personal computer has created a homogenous, static and context free environment for work and play that removes activity from the meaningful and productive character of acting and thinking in the embodied, physical environment. This needs to change.

The Emergent – Slabs: A Step Towards Re-Engagement

The iPhone, Android platform, Monome (its clones), Siftables, and now the iPad represent a new form of computing device that I call the slab. Slabs are hand-held, generic platforms with a range of sizes and capabilities (e.g, touch screen, GPS, accelerometer, gyro, WiFi, speaker, mic, etc.) that, in effect, turn into something new with each different application they run.

Slabs are different from personal computers. First, because they have a smaller, simpler form factor and a direct, touch based interaction. Second, because slabs do one thing at a time, in that the device effectively becomes the app once it’s launched, and the separation between software, hardware and interaction dissolves. When you switch apps on a slab, you get a whole new device that engages you as a unified, tangible object. This works because the app is the device (and all the discussions about slabs “multitasking” have new meaning in this context). Third, slabs will eventually be cheap enough that one can use multiple devices at a time, at a location and context appropriate to the physical space and task at hand.

Finally we can begin to disconnect from soulless trap of the (im)personal computer. By using slabs, we customize and re-engage with our environment and feel the consequences of our activity. Instead of being tied to a “workstation,” we can move around the work/play space, utilizing slabs and their spatial relations to one another. We use specialized tools and work practices as slabs morph to the needs of each activity (rather than the other way around). We touch things again. Instead of immersing ourselves in the virtual, we re-engage with people and things in the world. We work more easily with others, sharing and collaborating in physical space, where “here, look” and “take this and work on it” are literal statements that once again become the norm. We customize our tools and ultimately I hope, make or acquire our own specialized tools (see the bespoke objects discussion below).

In addition to their embodied and embedded character, slabs excel at leveraging the affordances of computation and networks. With configuration and data always backed up in the cloud, slabs can be easily reincarnated if scrambled, broken, or lost – and with this, interaction, meaning, and ideas become more important than the object. The cloud also enables different slabs to work across space and time while still being in the here and now. Our digital work is no longer tied to a single workstation, but can manifest in different forms, on different devices, with activity-specific functionality.

In short, there’s the potential to get the best of both worlds – the material and social character of the physical, along with the flexibility, power, and ubiquity of the computational. We gain a heterogeneous collection of devices, specifically suited to the activities at hand. For example, a graphic designer might have a large, work table slab for standing and working on layouts. Or a lap sized slab to sit with and edit an image in a concentrated mood. A narrow slab might sit on a table to keep track of a to-do list. And of course, the designer would use a few 8 1/2″ x 11″ slabs at a client meeting to pass around the table for discussion.

The Emergent – Sofducts: A Challenge for Designers

For the designer of these systems, the slab presents an interesting set of challenges. In particular, there’s a hybrid character to apps. Apps are software, yet as described above, the app becomes something more like a physical product once launched on a slab. This merging of app + slab leads to something I call the software/product or sofduct.

On one hand, the sofduct is distributed like software with almost no cost of goods. On the other hand, the user perceives the sofduct like a product because the interaction feels similar to that of  a manufactured object. You hold it, press buttons, shake it, etc. For example, GPS navigation systems used to be sold as a traditional product, in a box, physically shipped, with a warranty card and customer service phone number. Now, the sofduct version gives you the exact same functionality but is downloaded and runs on a slab as a piece of software. To the user, the end result looks and feels just like the traditional physical product. The sofduct is very disruptive in this way.

For one, whole business models are being destroyed by the sofduct. You can now buy the MotionX-GPS Drive app for $2.99, and get turn-by-turn navigation for $2.99 a month or $25/year (not to mention Google’s free turn-by-turn GPS on Android). In some cases, in-app purchasing of add-ons and features creates a modular “product” model, where the sofduct is actually a range of product possibilities that can be selected and customized by the user. Can traditional GPS units and other physical products survive this kind of competition?

But I’m especially interested in how sofducts disrupt the role of designers. Unlike software for a computer, a sofduct has to meet the expectations for a traditional product. The high-finish aesthetics, ergonomics, and conceptual integrity of physical product design will be assumed by users. Likewise, simplicity and clarity of interaction are critical. The perception of “product-ness” will also influence user expectations for reliability and customer service – we want products to simply work. Because of this, visual and interaction screen designers need to adopt the above considerations and aesthetics of product designers as they develop sofducts. Or better yet, collaborate with a product designer as a member of the design team.

On the other side, product designers entering the sofduct realm need to understand the traditions and expectations for software. Users want constant and rapid, usually free upgrades. Product design tries to get it perfect before launch, since there’s no turning back after you send the device to manufacturing. But with a sofduct, it may be better to put out a really good, but simpler version on the market quickly, and use a software model for product planning where upgrades are rolled out on a strategic schedule. Plus, customization and the integration of media are different from the fixed character of physical products, requiring a deep understanding of interaction, typography, and visual design that requires the experience of software and screen designers.

Sofducts are are new category for design, merging the focus, situated character, and physicality of an object with the malleability, customization, and media richness of software. This requires an integration of disciplines, including software development practices with product design, screen design with haptics, interactive/interaction design with materials sensibility, media production with physical interactions. Further, new business and design opportunities emerge, and require a complete rethinking of design and implementation for this new category.

The Future – Bespoke Objects

As slabs and sofducts create an emerging design landscape today, designers need to prepare for further disruptions and repositioning of their skills. Soon, trends in hardware and software will open up the possibility for low-cost, custom-built systems for individuals and specific applications. In the same way that one can have a bespoke suit tailored to a perfect fit and style, it may soon become possible to have a bespoke object with the hardware, software and design features tailored to the perfect fit and style for you and your intended use.

By this, I don’t mean the custom manufacturing typified by NIKEiD and others in recent years (though that will likely happen as well). What I do mean something literally like the local tailor, working out of a shop around the corner. The production of bespoke objects on the local level is becoming possible because of rapid advances in desktop 3D printing, system-on-a-board components, open-source software and hardware, and the DIY culture growing around these trends.

With cheap, off-the-shelf computational components and the ability to print 3D parts, the digital tailor will soon be able to hang their sign out and make individual or short-run custom objects full of ubicomp goodness. People will want these because a generic, mass-produced slab won’t always be suited to their particular circumstance or activity. Moreover, having a custom designed ensemble of complementary, networked objects, specifically crafted to your way of working will be the hallmark of the enthusiast and expert alike. We’ll want to assemble our own unique ecologies of things, from tiny watch sized objects, through tablets, to big activated interactive walls.

Assuming the bespoke object becomes a reality, what does this mean for the designer and design firms? Will it put designers out of business? I think that in the same way sofducts are disrupting design practices and business models, bespoke objects will create major disruptions for designers. If even a portion of product design and manufacturing moves to a decentralized, local model, many individual designers and design companies will have to adjust.

I see a few possibilities. First, those digital tailors are designers. Or at least the most successful ones will be. Just because some of the parts, software and 3D models will be off-the-shelf, bespoke objects will also have custom aspects and are systems that must be integrated for a specific person or task. That’s the job of a designer. Would it be so bad if designers are small business owners around the corner, selling locally in person and internationally online? Second, the off-the-shelf interactions, interfaces, systems-on-a-board, 3D models, etc. – i.e. the ecosystem around the bespoke object – all need design, and I’d expect a market to develop for small and large organizations to design and produce the necessary (virtual and physical) components that enable the digital tailor to operate.

The New Ecology of Things

Nearly 20 years ago, Mark Weiser published his seminal paper on ubiquitous computing in Scientific American, “The Computer for the 21st Century” (scan, reprint in PDF – you really should read it!). This remarkably prescient work predicts much of what’s becoming a reality today (and perhaps Apple’s iPad name is a tip-of-the-hat to Weiser’s taxonomy of tabs, pads, and boards). More recently, Microsoft showed their vision of 2019 video. It’s a great visualization of the potential fluidity of interaction, but the homogeneity and sense of virtuality (a window into something) does not capture the more tangible, gritty, idiosyncratic, embodied, embedded character I hope for in The New Ecology of Things.

Both visions emphasize the screen as the dominant system. Certainly the screen’s power to change dynamically; show combinations of text, image, animation, and video; and to support interaction through touch is remarkable. Yet I think one of the most interesting challenges for designers is to look beyond the screen slab, and imagine how other computationally enhanced objects with texture, kinetic motion, haptic feedback, sound, and light can be integrated into this new ecology of things. Let’s make sure we leverage the joy and power of all the human senses and abilities in our designs.

The NETLab Toolkit is a free system for tangible interaction sketching and production. It enables novices and experts to quickly integrate hardware, media and interactive behaviors for products, installations, and research. It integrates with micro-controllers including the Arduino, and through its Flash widgets provides a drag-and-drop environment for hardware and media sketching with no programming required.

There’s also a new version of the Widgets on the download page with these new features:

• Arduino support now requires Firmata 2.1 which comes with the Arduino 18 software
• Insert widget now has data logging features
• Added IfThenElse widget

If you have been using the Arduino with a previous version of the widgets, you’ll need to update your Arduino with the newer Firmata released with Arduino 18.

Please send us your feedback on the new website on our contact page.

The challenge with this project was to make access to thousands of database entries easy to use for school administrators, researchers, parents, and the press. By creating a clean and clear visual and interactive system, users can explore the data in a very direct and productive way.

Working with Liz Burrill and Jamie Cavanaugh, I developed the interaction design and functional capabilities, and then built out the database and software. The system allows users to do incremental searches based on county and/or school name, showing immediate results as the user types. When a school is selected, it animates into the Schools of Interest List, building the user’s personal list of schools to analyze. The list can then be customized by narrowing the set of indicators to focus on, and then printed or downloaded as an Excel file. Alternatively, the user can select any single school, and analyze it over several years to see how performance has changed.

This workshop is a quick introduction to working with digital audio. It uses the free, open-source Audacity software. Digital audio software like Audacity shows sound as a waveform, which is a visual representation of the audio over time. Sound can be edited in much the same way that words are edited in a word processing program – i.e. by copying, cutting, and pasting, as well as modifying the sound (e.g. EQ or changing volume) which is similar to styling text.

Getting Started:

• Download Audacity 1.3.11
• Install the MP3 library so you can export in MP3 format
• Optionally, install a set of LADSPA plug-ins for making sound effects (under optional downloads)
• Launch Audacity
• Download sounds for intro to sound

For this workshop, set the recording settings: AUDACITY>PREFERENCES>DEVICES>RECORDING>

• DEVICE: Built-in Microphone
• CHANNELS: 1 (Mono)

Make use of the Audacity help system

• HELP>QUICK HELP
• HELP>MANUAL

Topics

Recording & Playback

Record a short sequence of you saying “One, Two, Three… One, Two, Three…”

To play back audio, use the green play button, or hit the spacebar. Hold the shift key down when pressing the green button to play back in a continuous loop.

• Basic recording info
• Full recording tutorial
• Playing back audio

Waveform Editing

A waveform is a visual representation of sound, where time moves from left to right, and loudness (amplitude) is represented as height.

You can cut, copy, and paste the waveform just as you would in a word-processing application.

• What is sound
• Basic editing
• Edit menu
• Selecting parts of a waveform

Do the following kinds of edits

• Cut to trim the start and end of an audio clip, then use the Trim tool to do the same
• Copy and paste
• Add silence
• Normalize audio level
• Fade-in / Fade-out from the effect menu EFFECT>Fade In EFFECT>Fade Out

Controlling level with the Envelope Tool

You can change the loudness of the sound as time progress by using the envelope tool. Use it to change the volume of the entire track, or set different points in time, and use the tool to change the volume up or down over time.

• Envelope Tool

Working with Multiple Tracks

To create a mix of several different sounds, you can create multiple tracks in Audacity. Each track will contain a different sound, and you can control where in time each sound plays, and what the volume relationships are between the multiple tracks.

• Use TRACKS>ADD NEW>AUDIO TRACK to create a new, empty track OR Record a new track
• The TRACK MENU
• Use the Time Shift Tool to move audio left and right in time to match up with another track
• Mixing
• Use mute and solo
• Use track volume and pan
• Auto Duck

Effects

• EQ – Change the tone of the sound – e.g. bass, mid, treble
• Pitch change – Change the pitch of a selection without changing the length of the sound
• Tempo change – Change the length of a selection without changing the pitch of the sound
• Reverb – Add the on the characteristics of a room to your sound
• Etc.

Outputing final audio

• Sample Rate & Sample Format (Bit Depth)
• Stereo/Mono and file size
• Using left and right channel panning creatively
• Audio formats: .wav, .aiff, .mp3

And the doubters are right, for those of us who want a cool, small, OS X laptop thing, the iPad does not hit the mark (of course, as the iPad matures it will get many of these things – the inevitable 4.0 release of the iPhone OS will likely address the multitasking and app organization issues. And maybe Adobe and Apple will finally make nice for the Flash plug-in. And the 2011 version will have a camera etc.).

But people who want a better laptop aren’t the target audience for the iPad. Just like people who wanted a better Blackberry weren’t the target audience for the original iPhone. And people who wanted a green-washed sports-car were not the target audience for the Prius. Guess what? These products were a success anyway, because they met a new need and found a new audience.

So what is the iPad? Well, that remains to be seen. It will evolve in the next year as developers turn the iPad into a range of completely new things that, once they exist, will be essential for many people. To start all this off, Apple gives us the basic foundation and a decent value proposition:

• Read rich media books/magazines/newspapers
• Comfortably browse the web
• Use interactive textbooks and other learning material
• Work with personal media (photos, music, video)
• Play games
• Shift low-intensity computer stuff off the computer (email, todo lists, calendars, presentations, note taking, etc.)
• And as an add-on value, provide an admittedly compromised level of computer substitution for word processing, spreadsheets, etc. so we don’t always have to drag around a laptop.

That alone is a pretty good deal for $500. But what will come, and will likely make the iPad a major success, is a range of new apps that turn the iPad into an incredible device for doing more specific kinds of activities. For example, recording a song – it can be a complete recording system and tangible interface with faders, knobs, transport controls, etc. Or as remote control for your house and entertainment system. Or as a painting canvas. Or as a device that sits next to, and is an adjunct to your computer - wacom tablet, todo list, email, application switcher, etc. Or to organize your genealogy. Or to do scrapbooking (really, this could sell a millions units alone). Or plan a trip. Or evaluate X-Rays at your patient’s bedside… You get the idea.

I call these devices Slabs. The iPad, iPhone, Andriod, etc. are generic platforms that, via an app, turn into a product. And a 10″ Slab with multi-touch surface can be a lot of different products.

More to come in the following days on my thoughts about SLABS, SOFTDUCTS, and BESPOKE OBJECTS.