This is my multi-touch table from 2009. Big thanks to my dear friend David Choi for letting me use his wood shop and helping me with the fabrication of my table.

    I have always been interested in computers and technology and I have always enjoyed overcoming technical challenges, especially those challenges that were due to the fact that I approach things from the perspective of an artist and not a programmer. I would say that a large part of my professional carrier has focused around being the artist that actually wanted to collaborate with programmers and technical hardware specialists to come up with solutions. And so part of my reasoning for building the table was my curiosity about the technology and where I think computing and computer design is headed, and partly it was to see whether or not I could actually do it.

    The most important element of my multi-touch table is the fact that it inspired me well beyond simply making it. I have since begun teaching myself how to program in Processing, OpenFrameworks, and Arduino so I can create my own multi-touch applications. My end goal is to experiment with creating multi-touch based user interfaces that will allow multiple people to work collaboratively to create content that is as yet impossible in the current single mouse and keyboard paradigm. Furthermore, I want to design ways of visualizing information that can only be achieved in a multi-touch context. I think it is obvious that multi-touch is to our current user interfaces what the mouse and GUI were to text-based computing. And so because of the multi-modal and multi-user nature of multi-touch I think the entire computer interface needs to be completely redesigned from the ground up with collaboration at its core.