Advanced Interaction on Ben Bashford - Advanced Interaction

An experiment in fully parametric UI.

There’s a small screen on my desk now.

Old experiments nobody asked for sit on the site, forgotten.

I spent an evening this week back in Max/MSP, patching boxes together on a canvas, watching numbers and audio move from one to the next in something close to real time.

Every new Claude session I started for a project had no memory of the last one.

John Lewis says the share of shoppers arriving via an AI tool, ChatGPT, Gemini and the rest, has gone from 0.3% of traffic a year ago to 2.5% now.

Every metric you optimise for is a proxy.

I take products from zero to one.

How something works matters to me as much as how it looks.

I’ve led teams as Head of Experience, Group Director and Senior Group Product Manager, and titles in between, at Just Eat, Critical Mass, Whereismytransport and Possible.

Sometimes the useful thing is a second opinion, from someone who has actually shipped the thing you’re stuck on.

“Daisy Bell” is the first song a computer ever sang, and the one HAL 9000 sings as it’s shut down in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m building a small LED matrix display running its own firmware, and flashing the board just to check whether an animation looked right was slow enough that I stopped doing it as often as I should.

A browser replica of SAM, the 1982 Commodore 64 text-to-speech program.

Every function a device can perform is something your brain has to hold open as a possibility.

More money was supposed to buy better decisions.

I wanted to know if the sea’s actually worth the drive before I get there.

An AI agent doesn’t care about your brand guidelines.

I wanted to stop looking up “what’s A2 in Hz again” every time a synth only takes a frequency, not a note name.

I wrote about giving machines personality fifteen years before any of them could actually talk back.

I called it a system persona in 2011.

I kept doing the same maths by hand.

Technology has no inevitable trajectory.

Optimise everything toward the same metrics and you get the same product.

Creativity is powered by friction.

I go for walks without my phone now.

We didn’t lose our attention.

I wanted a quick way to sketch percussion patterns without hand-programming every ghost note in Bitwig.

I was called a daydreamer at school.

My music WIP folder is a graveyard of jams and sketches with names like “asdfgh” and “New 33”.

Two different strangers asked me the same question.

Collecting all the Boomkat end of year charts in one convenient place.

Testing how Claude Cowork can help me create a music player element in Hugo, so I can share my music experiments on this blog.

It’s been a while.

When every interaction happens through plain text, it’s hard to get brand attributes across.

My dear friend Ben Lowdon sent me an Instagram reel and I’ve gone down a rabbithole.

AKA Week One.

New me, new website.

My brain started fizzing again.

The best accessibility features don’t look like accessibility features.

I used to break gear on purpose.

Give a smart object a personality and people stop being afraid of it.