Alex Wright

Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design, Graduate Student

School of Visual Arts, New York, MFA, Interaction Design, Faculty Member

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Alex Wright is a writer, designer, and researcher who has held leadership roles at Google, Instagram, and The New York Times, among others. He has written two books on the history of the Information Age, as well as more than 100 published articles. He holds a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Alex's books include Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford, 2014), and Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (Joseph Henry, 2007). His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Salon.com, The Wilson Quarterly, The Christian Science Monitor, The Believer, Harvard Magazine, Utne Reader, Yankee, Think, Interactions, Boxes and Arrows, New Architect, WebTechniques, Boston Business, Design Times and Library Journal, among others.

Alex has also led research and design projects for Google, Instagram, Etsy, The New York Times, IBM, Microsoft, The Long Now Foundation, Harvard University, the Internet Archive, and Yahoo!, among others. His work has won numerous industry awards, including a Webby, Cool Site of the Year, the PRSA Silver Anvil and an American Graphic Design Award. He is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts MFA program in Interaction Design.

Alex holds a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University, an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College, and a PhD in Design from Carnegie Mellon University. He has also completed graduate coursework in journalism at Harvard, and in usability engineering at UC-Berkeley.
Supervisors: Jonathan Chapman, Stuart Candy, and Molly Wright Steenson

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Papers by Alex Wright

Status and statutes

Smartphone science

Communications of the ACM, 2017

A new generation of portable scientific instruments is taking shape, thanks to mobile processors ... more

(P)REVIEWFrom interface to experience

interactions, 2009

were designing interfaces said, " Our scope is bigger than the interface. This stuff is dyna... more were designing interfaces said, " Our scope is bigger than the interface. This stuff is dynamic. It's conversational. We are Interaction Designers! " A few years went by, and the industry started to internalize this perspective. Older terms like " interface design " and " usability " gave way to terms like " user experience " and " experience design. " Around the same time, some people started calling for integrated design, an approach recognizing the interdependency of business , technology, interface, interaction, content, and so on—all legitimate targets of a design approach, all necessary for making good things. As our field has evolved—through an ongoing cross-pollination of disciplines and practices—so too has our literature. But sometimes design rhetoric has soared a little too far above the day-today lives of many designers. Hyperbolic theories of design often leave designers ill-equipped to translate those theories into tactical decisions. Perhaps sensing this gap, several authors have issued new books in recent months that try to bridge the gap between modern design theory and practice. Shneiderman and Plaisant's Designing the User Interface, now in its fifth edition, aspires to be an authoritative textbook on the practice of interface design. That term may sound outmoded, but as the conversation about how to do good work has progressed over the years, the practical challenges of hands-on interface design have not gone away. In fact, interface design has only gotten more difficult. And today's self-described experience designers would probably do well to reacquaint themselves with the foundational work of decades past. Fortunately, the authors of this seminal text have seen fit to update the book over the years, working to give us an evolving picture of these core practices. Over the course of 500 pages, Designing the User Interface provides readers with a comprehensive survey of the subject, divided into four sections: Section one provides a sound introduction to usability, with a fundamental set of guidelines and principles. This short, 50-page section documents guidelines such as " minimize memory load on the user, " " use up to four standard colors, " and " the format of data-entry information should be linked closely to the format of displayed information. " Section two covers development processes, with two chapters on managing design processes and evaluating interface designs. Section three addresses interaction styles, with separate chapters for direct The book succeeds as a thorough survey of the field …

The social life of robots

Communications of the ACM, 2012

Researchers are trying to build robots capable of working together with minimal human supervision... more

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The touchy subject of haptics

Communications of the ACM, 2011

After more than 20 years of research and development, are haptic interfaces finally getting ready... more After more than 20 years of research and development, are haptic interfaces finally getting ready to enter the computing mainstream? E Ve R S I N Ce the first silentmode cell phones started buzzing in our pockets a few years ago, many of us have unwittingly developed a fumbling familiarity with haptics: technology that invokes our sense of touch. Video games now routinely employ force-feedback joysticks to jolt their players with a sense of impending onscreen doom, while more sophisticated haptic devices have helped doctors conduct surgeries from afar, allowed deskbound soldiers to operate robots in hazardous environments, and equipped musicians with virtual violins. Despite recent technological advances, haptic interfaces have made only modest inroads into the mass consumer market. Buzzing cell phones and shaking joysticks aside, developers have yet to create a breakthrough product-a device that would do for haptics what the iPhone has done for touch screens. The slow pace of market acceptance stems partly from typical new-technology growing pains: high production costs, the lack of standard application programming interfaces (APIs), and the absence of established user interface conventions. Those issues aside, however, a bigger question looms over this fledgling industry: What are haptics good for, exactly? Computer scientists have been exploring haptics for more than two decades. Early research focused largely on the problem of sensory substitution, converting imagery or speech information into electric or vibratory stimulation patterns on the skin. As the technology matured, haptics found new applications in teleoperator systems and virtual environments, useful for robotics and flight simulator applications. Today, some researchers think the big promise of haptics may involve

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From Interface to Experience

Primal Interactions

Interactions-New York, 2008

As emerging Web technologies fuel the rise of so-called social media (think YouTube, Facebook, an... more As emerging Web technologies fuel the rise of so-called social media (think YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter), the practice of interaction design is evolving from its roots in human-computer interfaces to address a broader range of human-to-human activities. Designers who once trafficked in task analysis and usability heuristics now frequently grapple with subtler,“squishier” modes of interaction: negotiating social relationships, building communities, working with issues of trust and identity. From the proliferation of blogs to ...

Type theory comes of age

Communications of the ACM, 2010

Type systems are moving beyond the realm of data structure and into more complex domains like sec... more

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Stepping out of the shallows

interactions, Jul 1, 2010

Ever since the Internet first heaved into the public consciousness in the mid-1990s, it has promp... more Ever since the Internet first heaved into the public consciousness in the mid-1990s, it has prompted occasional broadsides from writers who have argued the network poses a mortal threat to traditional literary values. Early Internet Cassandras like Sven Birkerts and Clifford Stoll paved the way for more recent skeptics like Lee Siegel and Andrew Keen, all of whom have collectively demonstrated the paradox that for all its putative threats to the culture of the book, the Internet turns out to be a nearly perfect rhetorical foil for selling books… over the ...

(P)REVIEWOf memories and memorials

interactions, 2010

The Secret History of Hypertext

The social life of robots

Page 1.

Data streaming 2.0

From Interface to Experience

The touchy subject of haptics

Type theory comes of age

First, a quick primer. In programming languages, a type constitutes a definition of a set of valu... more First, a quick primer. In programming languages, a type constitutes a definition of a set of values (for example, "all integers"), and the allowable operations on those values (for example, addition and multiplication). A type system ensures the correct behavior of any program routine by enforcing a set of predetermined behaviors. For example, in a multiplication routine, a type system might guarantee that a program will only accept arguments in the form of numerical values. When other values appear—like a date or a text string—the system will return an error.

Web science meets network science

Ever since World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee announced the Web Science Research Initiat... more Ever since World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee announced the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006, researchers have been trying to map the boundaries of Web science, which spans a dizzying range of disciplines including computer science, economics, government, law, and psychology. ... Complicating matters further has been the parallel evolution of a markedly similar-sounding field: Network science, whose devotees explore the characteristics of all types of networks, from neural networks to social networks to, yes, the Web.

Primal Interactions

Exploring a ‘deep Web’that Google can’t grasp

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Q&A With Nicholas Carr

Alex Wright: In your book, you argue that the Internet has lured many of us into a state of const... more Alex Wright: In your book, you argue that the Internet has lured many of us into a state of constant distraction that is degrading our capacity for deep thinking and reflection. Do you see “switching off” as the only practical antidote, or can you envision a role for technology in trying to ameliorate these effects?