This is a link to a commentary on Molly Wright Steenson’s talk on designing with boredom in mind.

Steenson gave a talk at Interaction Design Association’s first annual conference (Interaction 2008) called Strategic Boredom. The link for her part in the conference is here and a followup/transcript of her talk on boredom is here.

The part that stuck out most for our class was the Musicolour, a device invented by Gordon Pask, in which a machine holds a dialogue with a performer of music. The performer plays in accordance with the machine’s visual cues which creates a sort of “feedback performance-” the machine will adapt to repetitions in the musician’s work and challenge them to create new music, thereby creating new visual cues in the machine itself.

-matt clark