Aza Raskin
The Ajax Experience
Boston · October 23 - 25, 2006
President and Co-founder of Humanized
Aza has over six years of professional interface design and consulting experience. He is the son of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh project, and so has 22 years of informal interface design training. Aza gave his first talk on interface design at his local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI at the age of 13, got hooked, and has been speaking ever since. By the age of 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; by age 19, he was coauthoring a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; and at age 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Aza has also done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated in math and physics. For recreation, he does Judo, speaks Japanese, and invents in his lab. He also enjoys playing the French Horn, which has taken him all over the world. Be warned: Aza is an incorrigible punster, so please do not incorrige.
Presentations
The Death of the Desktop
We are all familiar with the ubiquitous metaphor of the desktop on the computer. We take it for granted - that's the way computers work. But how much work do we get done on the desktop? None. Time spent in the desktop is entirely wasted in navigating to the application in which we can finally do our work.