Author, theater artist, and interface designer, Brenda Laurel has written extensively on human-computer interactivity. Her books Computers as Theater, and The Art of Interface Design have become classics in this developing field.

In her lecture, Laurel traced her ideas and obsessions on interactive media culled from eighteen years of experience.

Topics included:

• What is a nice girl like you doing in a calculus class?
• What can compel a theatre type to develop relationships with computers?
• Why did we think of computers as brains in boxes, and what do we think of them now?
• What is next on the frontier of interactive stories?
• Can we use computers to heal our relationship with the natural world?