Dan Saffer has PDF, transcriptions, and a nice review from The Guardian of his SXSW talk, "Learning Interaction Design From Las Vegas". Name-checking substantially (and obviously, as you might guess from the title) Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour's majorly influential architectural manifesto [amazon link], Saffer mediates the perceived chaos of interfaces such as World of Warcraft and other crowded interface designs. Cool.

As Experts with Ideals, who pay lip service to the social sciences, they build for the Man rather than for the people—this means, to suit themselves, that is to suit their own particular upper-middle class values, which they assign to everyone.

We need more examples of things like this in interface and interaction design, which still tend towards the "form follows function"/"genius tells you how to live" version of architecture. Those earlier models are useful, in the same way that, say, knowing "appropriate" color combinations are useful. But there's much to be learned from late-modernist and postmodernist theories of architecture; Saffer is dragging us, kicking and screaming, into the future that's already here, already successful and working, in places like eBay and MySpace, and FaceBook, places that Vegas leaped into a couple of decades ago.

(Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown revisit their work recently in this TENbyTen interview. Design Observer has another retrospective review.)