Sweet Spots and Baroque Phases of Interactive Technology Lifecycles
A few months ago, my sweetheart said one of those things that’d make every geek start drooling: "I hate getting lost each time I drive into Cologne. Can't we get a TomTom?" I love getting a free ticket to spend obscene amounts of cash on a gadget, without all the weak, post-hoc rationalizing why it's so useful, usually met with something between fury and pity, depending on its price tag, size, number of cables, and overall potential for destroying your living room's visual appearance. But I digress.
Read on... (final draft)
The definitive version of this article was published as:
Jan Borchers: An Ode to TomTom: Sweet Spots and Baroque Phases of Interactive Technology Lifecycles. interactions 15 (2), March+April 2008, pp. 62-66. ACM Press, New York. (Permanent DOI link)
I also presented this topic during the Ignite session at the O'Reilly ETech conference (San Diego, Mar 3-6, 2008).
An updated version of this concept was presented as a keynote at Adaptive Hypermedia 2008 (Hannover, Jul 29-Aug 1, 2008). (Keynote slides as PDF)