Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects is the catalogue for MoMA's 2011 exhibition about the dialogue between people and designed things. The exhibition treated objects as carriers of information and feeling, whether through visible interfaces and information systems or through quieter signals of behavior, tone, timing, and affordance. Phones, computers, websites, games, visualization systems, communication devices, furniture, physical products, and immersive environments appear here as things that interpret, answer, guide, persuade, and sometimes misbehave.

Since the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s, many objects have been designed to have capabilities well beyond their immediate use or appearance. Whether openly and actively or in subtle, subliminal ways, these objects talk to us, and we have come to expect interaction with them. Contemporary designers, besides giving objects form and function, write their initial scripts--the foundation for useful and satisfying conversations. Talk to Me focuses on projects that involve such direct interaction--including interfaces, websites, video games, devices and tools, and information systems--as well as installations that establish practical, emotional, or even sensual connections to cities, companies, governmental institutions, or other individuals. The featured objects range in date from the late 1980s to today, with particular attention given to the last five years and projects currently in development. Organized thematically, Talk to Me introduces design practices that are increasingly crucial to our world and demonstrates how rich and deep the influence of design will be on our future.

The book is especially meaningful here in the Near Future Laboratory studio archive because PDPal, created by Julian Bleecker, Marina Zurkow, and Scott Paterson, was included in this exhibition. MoMA described PDPal as an anti-geographic and anti-Cartesian project for Palm Pilot PDA. It was my first PalmOS project — in fact my first device-based project. I had to struggle through Metrowerks CodeWarrior, which was sthe IDE one had to use to develop for PalmPilot and this was all well-before any facilities existed to help support development of things like this beyond getting a possibly dated book from Barnes & Noble, or scraping through usenet forums or what I vaguely remember as Metrowerks' lousy support forums.

The project asked participants to map not only places but also the words, experiences, activities, and emotionas nuances they associated with urban space. That framing makes the catalogue more than a record of interaction design in 2011. It is also a trace of a strand of studio work that treated locative media, mobile software, and subjective mapping as art+technology research before smartphones made such behaviors ordinary.

Read more about PDPal in the project archive and in PDPal - Mapping Without Terrain. For more studio context around PDPal's public art commissions, see Creative Time: The Book.