ABSTRACT
This chapter tells six stories about interaction design. First, one of my own. I glimpsed the implications, for designers, of Negroponte’s prediction
when, as an industrial designer in 1980, 1 had the opportunity to design the first laptop, the GRiD Compass Computer. Back then there were a few luggable computers but they were more the size of a sewing machine than a laptop, and the IBM personal computer and Apple Macintosh were still un born. In the mid-1970s, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) re searcher Alan Kay had imagined the Dynabook, a portable notebook computer to be used for education, but Xerox had been unwilling to fund its
development as a real product because it believed its market strength was in office equipment, not educational tools. Still, John Ellenby, who had also worked at PARC, seeing how computer components were steadily shrink ing, had the vision to realize the huge potential market of people who need to move around for their work, and would like to carry the information with them in their computers. So he founded GRiD Systems to build a truly notebook-size mobile machine.
