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For the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of ACM’s “interactions”, Hugh Dubberly created a model of innovation. While the model covers the many ways innovations can occur (bug-listing, testing, needfinding, etc) and the in-the-world resistances that might help shape it, it doesn’t include the many ways existing business and political interests can shape innovations and their diffusion.

Brian Winston’s “Media, Technology, and Society: A History tells how interests such as militarism and nationalism shaped the ways we experienced the telephone in our homes. Don Norman’s “Invisible Computer” gives accounts of companies that suppressed good products from within for fear of cannibalizing their own business. Nonetheless, Dubberly’s model is a dense and rich achievement in information design — I just might scribble some of my own notes on my copy. And as a hidden treat, interactions has included

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