Recently I wrote an article on Flow and musical instrument design, arguing that too many electronic musical instruments disrupt creative flow because their interfaces are poor and they emphasize features instead of user experience. It came out of work done by a brainstorming group at Project Bar-B-Q in the fall of 2004.
I used “flow” in the sense defined by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in his studies of the thought processes of creative people. Although my article featured some fairly bitter complaints (don’t get me started again), I do think there are some hopeful signs out there that the future may be brighter.
One is Apple’s Garageband – not to be confused with garageband.com, which I wrote about recently and which I think is also cool. The rest is at O’Reilly.