“Education is always enriching. It increases your capabilities and improves the quality of your work. As UX professionals, it is essential that we continue to improve our educations and develop new skills. For people who do user research as a part of their jobs, we highly recommend getting formal research education. Even if it is just a single class in experimental methods, research education improves your ability to do your job effectively and gives you the flexibility to deviate from the standard kinds of studies we all tend to do on a day-to-day basis. We work in an innovative industry, so it is important for us to be able to innovate new user research methods. Having an understanding of the fundamentals of research would enable more user researchers to innovate effectively and advance the whole field of user research.” (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain ~ UXmatters)

“Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak — the real-life version of the film’s eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface. Is this how tomorrow’s computers will be controlled?” (Huffington Post)

“Musical instruments provide really intriguing examples of user interface design. While it can take years of training and no small amount of aptitude, an instrument in the right hands can provide highly nuanced control over the many aspects of sound that come together to form one of the highest forms of human expression. And even for those of us who will never achieve such heights of virtuosity, merely using such a ‘user interface’ can result a great sense of enjoyment, immersion and fulfillment (what is often referred to as a state of flow).” (David Cronin – Cooper Journal)

“This talk considers how capacities for action are currently figured at the human–machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Drawing on examples from recent scholarship in anthropology, science and technology studies, and media arts and design, Suchman argues for research aimed at tracing differences that matter within specific sociomaterial arrangements, without resorting to essentialist human-machine divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while taking responsibility for the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are made.” (MIT Media Lab)