Tognazzini to Present "The Next 50 Years" in Closing Plenary

Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini will present the 50th Annual Meeting closing plenary address, "The Next 50 Years," on Friday, October 20, from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. Below is Tog's summary of his address.

Fifty years ago, computers were the size of buildings, and the latest technology was the solid-state radio, featuring as many as seven transistors. Today, simple cell phones have a million times as many transistors, and many bathroom scales easily outcalculate those building-sized computers.

Predicting where our field will be in another 50 years is hard to do with great accuracy, but we can do a lot better on shorter timelines-say, 5 to 15 years. Such an analysis can bring big payoffs by enabling us to design products that will fill the wants and needs of our future users before they even come to understand their needs themselves.

At the dawn of the 1990s, my team at Sun successfully predicted the state of technology today, including the explosion of the World Wide Web. Applying the same futurism methodology, I will examine where technology will likely move in the next ten years. Then I will discuss specific predictive methodologies in detail, such as trend analysis, enclave analysis, etc., so you can incorporate future analysis in your own design work.

A principal with the Nielsen Norman Group, Tog works in the fields of usability and human-computer interaction. He was also a lead designer for WebMD and was an engineer for strategic technology at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years at Apple Computer, he founded the Apple Human Interface Group and acted as Apple's human-interface evangelist. Tog has published two books, Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design, and has consulted for a number of companies, including General Electric and Microsoft.