Upcoming Events Recent Work On-line Talks Biography Professional Resources Lincoln Lab History NRC History Personal Pages Related Links
 

Birch Bark Canoe Project:
I have a plan to follow one of the old fur trade routes in Northern Saskatchewan with my son and a few friends.  The idea is to do the trip in traditional birch bark canoes.  Of course, you need a canoe to do so.  The image above is of a now friend, Tom Byers, building my canoe.  To learn more about the trip, Tom, and the construction of the canoe, click on the picture above.

 

For information on my book, Sketching User Experiences, click on the dog-eared cover above. The book can be ordered from the normal on-line vendors such as amazon.com and chapters.ca.

Video examples for the book can be found at www.mkp/sketching.

See also the review on BusinessWeek.com and strategy-business.com. The latter states that the book "has earned its spot as the best innovation book of this year."



Bill Buxton
Principal Researcher
Microsoft Research

c/o Gallery 888
888 Queen Street East
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M4M 1J3

Tel: +1 (425) 722-4626 (Redmond)
+1 (416) 465-3836 (Toronto)

A Personal Mantra: Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the "things" that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.

Motivating Design - Lessons from the Master: "Telling the truth about a product demands a product worth telling the truth about."  ... "A great campaign will only make a bad product fail faster."  Bill Bernbach.

Talks & Events:

  • TBA - It is summer :-).

Recent Work / Activities

On-line Talks

Professional Resources

Personal Pages

Related Links:

Biography:

Bill Buxton is a designer, researcher and teacher.  His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, film and music. Buxton's research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers, technology mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing.

Buxton is a relentless advocate for innovation, design, and - especially - the appropriate consideration of human values, capacity, and culture in the conception of new products and technologies.  This is reflected in his numerous talks, and his writing, such as his column on design and innovation for BusinessWeek.com and his 2007 book, Sketching User Experiences.

In December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design.

Buxton began his career as a composer and performer, having done a Bachelor of Music degree at Queen's University. He then studied and taught for two years at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht, Holland.

In 1975 Bill started designing his own digital instruments.  This is what led him to the University of Toronto, where he competed an MSc in Computer Science, and subsequently jointed the faculty.  It is also the path that brought him into the field of human-computer interaction.

From 1987-89, Buxton was in Cambridge England, helping establish a new satellite of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (EuroPARC).  From 1989-94 he split his time between Toronto, where he was Scientific Director of the Ontario Telepresence Project, and Palo Alto, California, where he was a consulting rsearcher at Xerox PARC.

From 1994 until December 2002, he was Chief Scientist of Alias|Wavefront, (now part of Autodesk) and from 1995, its parent company SGI Inc.  In the fall of 2004, he became a part-time instructor in the Department of Industrial Design at the Ontario College of Art and Design.  In 2004/05 he was also Visiting Professor at the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) at the University of Toronto.  He currently splits his time between Redmond and Toronto.

In 1995, Buxton became the third recipient of the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society Award for contributions to research in computer graphics and human-computer interaction.  In 2000 he was given the New Media Visionary of the Year Award at the Canadian New Media Awards.  In 2001, The Hollywood Reporter named him one of the 10 most influential innovators in Hollywood.  In 2002, Time Magazine named him one of the top 5 designers in Canada.  Also in 2002, he was elected to the CHI Academy.  In October, 2005, he and Gord Kurtenbach received the "Lasting Impact Award", from ACM UIST 2005, which was awarded for their 1991 paper, Issues in Combining Marking and Direct Manipulation Techniques.  In June, 2007, he was named Doctor of Design, Honoris Causa by the Ontario College of Art and Design, and in 2008 he became the 10th recipient of the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award, "for fundamental contributions to the field of Computer Human Interaction."

From 1998-2004, Buxton was on the board of the Canadian Film Centre, and in 1998-99 chaired a panel to advise the premier of Ontario on developing long term policy to foster innovation, through the Ontario Jobs and Investment Board. He is on a number of academic advisory boards, the Department of Industrial Design of the Technical University in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.  Buxton is a member of the Association of Computing Machinery and the Industrial Designers Society of America.

Outside of work, Buxton loves the outdoors. He is especially passionate about mountains, including skiing, climbing, and touring, both in summer and winter. This interest extends to the written word. He has contributed to the literature on mountain history and exploration, is an avid bibliophile, and was one of the three jury members of the 2005 Banff Mountain Book Festival.  In addition, he is an avid cyclist, and active in kayaking, SCUBA diving and windsurfing. He is an accomplished equestrian, and in 1996 was awarded the Veteran Rider of the Year award from the Ontario Horse Trials Association, and in 2000 was named to the Talent Squad of the National Eventing Team. Finally, he has a life-long fascination with both art and his wife, Elizabeth - who owns and operates a contemporary art gallery, Gallery 888, in Toronto, Canada.

MIT Lincoln Lab History Project

I am interested in the contribution made to interactive computing and computer graphics by the researchers at MIT's Lincoln Lab in the 1950's and 60's. Consequently, I organized a panel including some of the key protagonists at the 2005 SIGCHI Conference in Portland Oregon, and I have started a web page which is intended to be a clearing house for some of the material on and by the researchers of the group, which was mainly centred around the TX-2 computer. The page now includes a video of the panel session, including the examples. See the following work in progress:

Resource Page on Early HCI Research of the Lincoln Lab TX-2 Group

NRC of Canada History Project in Computer Music & Animation

The work in computer music and animation in the early 1970's at the National Research Council of Canada was extremely important in the field of human-computer interaction - not just music and animation.  This is where I first saw and used a computer, and that experience had a huge impact on shaping my career.  The music work, in particular, is not well known.  Hence, I recently published a book chapter that gave a summary of it, and described its impact..  Through the cooperation of the NRC and especially my friend and mentor Marceli Wein, I am currently preparing some historic 16mm film footage of these systems to put up on the web.  Watch this site for details.
Last updated August 13th, 2008