January 18, 2005

Computer Screens: More is More

A Ubiquity interview with Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research:

UBIQUITY: What is your own environment like?

CZERWINSKI I have two monitors strung together and a laptop — well, it's really a tablet — and a smart phone. So I have four lined up across my desk that I move back and forth between. And in our lab, which is right across the door from me, we have various kinds of displays, including a big-screen SmartboardTM that's touch-enabled. We also have various projectors all around the room that project large displays onto the walls, and some of them are dual projectors for doublewide display. Soon we will have 4x3 grid of displays on one wall; at the moment it's a 3x3 grid of displays. That's been very useful.

At an NN/g workshop in Chicago last year, Stuart Card and one of his colleagues talked about having (I think) five or six LCD panels in an array on their desks. And Robert Rodriguez, in one of the featurettes on the Once Upon a Time in Mexico DVD, provides a tour of his sprawling home movie production studio; many of the workstations he shows have three or more large LCD panels. If your work involves moving information around and discerning patterns in information, more is almost always better.

I (and my employer) can't afford one of those swanky wall-mounted LCD installations, but I have some pictures of my computer setup at Flickr; I take this approach to analog spaces as well, as evidenced by my office wall at home (an image that, by coincidence, someone just emailed me this morning to ask about).

[via Beyond the Beyond]

Posted by johndan at January 18, 2005 07:22 PM | TrackBack