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Internet-of-Things answering machine from 1992, with marbles

Cory Doctorow at 4:38 pm Thu, Mar 21, 2013

Durrell Bishop's 1992 grad project for his design program at the Royal College of Art was a brilliantly conceived riff on the answering machine, making use of physical, legible interfaces that made a point of exposing the conceptual workings of the device to its users.

Durrell Bishop is a partner in Luckybite with Tom Hulbert, working on physical interfaces, product design and interactive media. Prior to this he was a senior interaction designer at IDEO Europe. He co-founded Itch, which won a D&AD Gold award for large-scale work on the Science Museum Welcome Wing, and he was a partner in Dancing Dog, working on camera-based interfaces to computer games.

Durrell Bishop’s Marble Answering Machine (via Timo Arnall)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

TAGS: design Gadgets happy mutants internet of things ui uk ux videos

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http://twitter.com/AwesomeRobot AwesomeRobot

This is amazing by 1992 standards.
http://jere7my.livejournal.com jere7my

There’s a design by a man who has no cats.
galaxies

& you didn’t make this why??!?!! solid gold idea, totally feasible in 1992!! you could be chillin on a beach in hawaii right now mr Durrell Bishop!!

edit: just saw jere7my’s post, excellent point
- IndexMe
  
  I tried to make a whiteboard an integral part of my workflow once upon a time.
  It only takes one utter jerk (or a normally nice person in a fit of insanity) to destroy a lot of stuff, no more santa. Come to think of it some earthquake tremor mitigation would be useful too. But, it will work underwater!
http://twitter.com/sampowers Sam Powers

Excellently demonstrated. Anyone want to take a crack at implementing this using those little sifteo cube thingies?