The output of this effort was threefold:

1. Starfire, the Movie, showing a day in the life of a knowledge worker in the far-off distant year, 2004.

2. Starfire, the Book, entitled Tog on Software Design, which not only covers the film in intimate detail, but lays out several more equally thought-provoking scenarios developed during the initial phase of the project.

3. Starfire, the Paper, originally published in CHI Proceedings, outlining the rules we followed in attempting to build a scientifically accurate video prototype.

Starfire, the Movie

The Original Film in Mpeg 4

See the entire film for the first time in full digital quality. (247MB. Significant download time.)

	"Julie was looking forward to a good day until Michael O'Connor tried to deep-six her sports car project. Now, only her team, scattered around the world, can save her..." The film, developed in 1992, predicted the explosive growth of the world wide web at a time before graphical web browsers even existed. Starfire: The Directors' Cut explores in candid detail a technological future based on industry cooperation, human-centered design, and the continued presence of bad guys.
Requires Quicktime. For a free download:
Scenes from Starfire Quick takes for those on slow connections. Texture mapping of information from a 2-D video onto a 3-D mannequin Boardroom scene with telepresence and wireless cyberspace searching "The Making of Starfire" in Mpeg 4 To explore more about how to make a video prototype, watch "The Making of Starfire." (112MB.) The Annotated Starfire Script To see "inside" the Starfire film, click for "The Starfire Script."

Starfire, The Book

Tog on Software Design

"Tog takes us on an extraordinary journey as software design crawls out of the operating system of computers and on to the landscape of networks and new media content. He is a gifted hands-on designer who weaves a very compelling story." --John Sculley, former CEO, Apple Computer, Inc. I wanted to call the book, Starfire, but my publisher insisted on incorporating my name. When people want to title books with my name, I grow weak in my argument. The book covers a great deal of research that preceded creating the movie. You can look over the shoulders of Sun's engineers, designers, and futurists as they develop a common understanding of societal trends, then begin to envision future technology in areas as diverse as city planning, business, and education.

Check out this excerpt from the book: The Coming Decade to see how well I did at predicting, or, for further description, reviews, or to special order a copy, check out the Tog on Software Design page at amazon.com.

Starfire, the Paper

"The 'Starfire' Video Prototype Project: A Case History"

Our team set out to explore both the good and bad sides of what we predicted would be an explosive growth in networked computing. Our methodology was simple: Write a story that would force us to develop new, more efficient ways for users to get their work done. Having developed the best solutions we could, "tighten" the story so that users had to get things done even faster and under worse conditions. Continue looping until ideas (and designers) were exhausted.

Have a look at "The 'Starfire' Video Prototype Project" paper to get a more detailed view of how you can develop video prototypes that are both predictive and challenging to your development team.