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The Poetry of Strange Connections: An Interview with Bill Verplank

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New Directions in Music and Human-Computer Interaction

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Cultural Computing ((SSCC))

Abstract

Bill Verplank is an interaction designer educated at Stanford and MIT in Mechanical Engineering (Design and Man-Machine Systems). He did user testing at Xerox (“Star”), interaction design at IDTWO (now IDEO), research at Interval. He has taught design at MIT, Stanford (ME, Music, CS), ACM-SIGCHI, NIME, IDII (Ivrea), CIID (Copenhagen).

This interview was conducted on 26 February 2018 by Skype between London and California. During our conversation, Bill sketched several of his signature diagrams. I’ve reproduced variations of some of them here, including some from his Interaction Design Sketchbook (Verplank 2009). This transcript contains excerpts of our conversation which have been further edited for length and clarity, including removing some of my prompts and responses.

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References

  • Bewley W, Roberts T, Schroit D, Verplank B (1983) Human factors testing in the design of Xerox’s 8010 “Star” office workstation. In: Proceedings of the ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI)

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  • Interaction Design Lab, Ivrea, Italy. Strangely Familiar. Unusual Objects for Everyday Life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ5GBtcOYh4

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  • Verplank B (2009) Interaction design sketchbook. http://www.billverplank.com/IxDSketchBook.pdf

  • Verplank B, Gurevich M, Mathews M (2002) The Plank: designing a simple haptic controller. In: Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression (NIME)

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Correspondence to Andrew McPherson or Bill Verplank .

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McPherson, A., Verplank, B. (2019). The Poetry of Strange Connections: An Interview with Bill Verplank. In: Holland, S., Mudd, T., Wilkie-McKenna, K., McPherson, A., Wanderley, M. (eds) New Directions in Music and Human-Computer Interaction. Springer Series on Cultural Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92069-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92069-6_4

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-92068-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-92069-6

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