Some snippets from an interview of Mike Kuniavsky (by Tamara Ardlin) on UX Pioneers:

"TA: Were there products that came out during that time that you thought were especially cool or especially bad?

MK: There were a ton of bad products. There were refrigerators with built in tablet PCs, which are totally useless. At this point all of the internet appliances that had come out — which were essentially dedicated web browsers in a box — and the uselessness of all of those things — was an important lesson. There were all of these different things people were trying. Then there were things that were interesting. Ambient devices like the ambient orb came out around the time I started looking at all of this stuff. That was a very interesting device.

TA: I’ve taken a lot of your time, but I have one more question for you. What really fascinates you the most now? What do you think is going to drive your next five years?

MK: The fact that information processing is dying to be treated by product designers and industrial designers as a kind of "material," and that these people are including it into their devices as a kind of material. What used to be robotics is now showing up as a line item in a design object, like rubber. That is a profound shift in peoples’ relationship to what computers are and what they can do and where they can do it. "

Why do I blog this? interesting content there about ideas that I share (... it's always refreshing to see some resonances elsewhere!).