Selected projects: UI consulting
Simon & Schuster R & D

From 1995 to 1996, we were part of a Simon & Schuster research and development team, that included educational consultants and staff specialists based in Boston.

Once longer term goals were established, teams in Toronto and Boston worked in parallel, meeting regularly. A team of Mackerel senior staff, lead by Dave Groff and Kevin Steele, would travel to Boston, once or twice a month, for one or two days of workshopping, and to plan the next steps. Broader brainstoming would allow us to identify specific areas for design exploration. We would then develop discrete R&D projects with short timelines to be explored and presented for discussion in a future session.

Over an 18 month period we worked on a series of speculative educational projects. One of these projects was The Writing Processor, ‘a proof-of-concept, interactive writing demonstration for students in grades K-8 that supports the six-stage developmental writing process’. Part of the challenge was to invent writing tools for children K-8 that seamlessly integrated an instructional framework.

ILLUSTRATIONS: Samples of artwork produced by the Mackerel team (Karl Borst, Jeramy Cooke, Paul Marhue) as part of our work with Simon & Schuster.

Selected projects:	Echo Lake Public Access Kiosks Southam True North Canadian Encyclopedia Simon & Schuster R&D Freaky Stories Mighty Mites on AOL
Selected links:	Recent work Burying the Fish, by Cory Doctorow Mackerel.com circa 1996
Contact smackerel:	phone 416 588-6466 email dave or kevin@smackerel.net comments