From mainframes to picture frames: charting the rapid evolution of visual interfaces

The past four decades are witness to tremendous change in the technical capabilities, industry techniques, and popular expectations underlying visual interaction between people and computers. Nevertheless we are on the cusp of a more encompassing revolution driven by new expectations of increasingly personal computing experiences. In this talk I will illustrate this nascent relationship between people and computation driven by the emergence of people as equally, and interchangeably, consumers and producers of the computing experience. Although buoyed by achievements in ubiquitous and pervasive computing technologies, this revolution is fundamentally about how a blossoming literacy in computing technologies empowers new forms of communication, reflection and decision making.