Interaction Theory Blog Post #2: Pattie Maes

Blog Topic: Select a key figure in interaction design to research further. What made them tick? What was important about their contributions to the field? Where would we be now without their contributions?

Perhaps this is not exactly following the Blog Topic at hand, but my interaction design figure of choice is Pattie Maes, head of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab. According to her TED Biography,

"Pattie Maes was the key architect behind what was once called 'collaborative filtering' and has become a key to Web 2.0: the immense engine of recommendations -- or 'things like this' -- fueled by other users. In the 1990s, Maes' Software Agents program at MIT created Firefly, a technology (and then a startup) that let users choose songs they liked, and find similar songs they'd never heard of, by taking cues from others with similar taste. This brought a sea change in the way we interact with software, with culture and with one another."

She's also kind of a rock star. She was named one of the "100 Americans to watch for" in 2000 by Newsweek magazine; the World Economic Forum honored her with the title "Global Leader for Tomorrow" and randomly, Maes was listed in People Magazine's annual 50 Most Beautiful People feature in 1997. In the movie The Social Network, I felt that in a strange way, programmers were being portrayed like rock stars. Whether that's good or bad or true or not, I think that people like Pattie Maes and Mark Zuckerberg are bringing a lot of awareness to the computing world, and ultimately interaction design. Perhaps that is something that will be discussed during our class entitled "When everyone thinks they're an interaction designer."

In "From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design," Terry Winograd writes 
"Today's popular press plays up efforts like those of Pattie Maes and her research group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where thy have produced agents to help people brows the web, choose music, and filter email. In fact, a notable indicator of the current trajectory is the ascendancy of MIT's Media Lab, with its explicit focus on media and communication, over the AI Laboratory, which in earlier days was MIT's headline computing organization, one of the world centers of the original AI research."

Maybe Maes' most significant contribution is making certain areas of computing seem sexy but I have to admit, I think this TED video that highlights some of the research that is happening at the Fluid Interfaces Group is pretty awesome.