Jennifer Brook is a resident of tree houses, a maker of limoncello, a cobbler of shoes, and one heckuva interaction designer. Jennifer is a lead user experience designer for Method. Prior to joining Method, Jennifer was interaction designer at The New York Times, where she designed the newspaper’s iPad and iPhone apps as well as several of the company’s web products. She’s teaching a Webstock workshop on rapid prototyping for the iPhone and iPad.

“Tapworthy” author Josh Clark sat down with Jennifer to talk about her path to touchscreen design, what it’s like to square off with Steve Jobs, the techniques newfangled designers can learn from old-fashioned books, and what she has in store for Webstock.

Josh: Like a lot of folks who come to digital design, your path wasn’t exactly a straight line. Where did you start in your career?

Jennifer: For the seven years after college, I focused on making books: letterpress printing, hand-binding, the whole nine yards. I got into making limited-edition letterpress artist books that have been collected by rare book libraries, museums, private collectors. And it was through bookmaking, which I see as a kind of interaction design practice, that I stumbled into what I’m doing now.

Books as interaction design, I like it! Here’s this ancient, centuries-old process of printing words and ideas, and now you’re someone who’s at the cutting edge of digital design. A lot of people would look at those worlds as being completely at odds.

I don’t see them as being at odds. There are a lot of similarities between bookmaking and digital interaction design. As a bookmaker, the way I approach my work is through this lens of an interplay between form and content. I typically start out with content, work through sketchbooks, and then start prototyping book forms. Before production, I have anywhere from 10-20 prototypes before a book would go into production.

The fundamental process of making a book: write, sketch, prototype, is almost identical to the process that I follow now.

Could you speak a bit more about how books are interactive?

Sure, well, a book is merely an inanimate object until someone opens it. Access to the content can’t happen until that first interaction happens. It’s all about hands and touch. Touch interfaces, ease of use, readability, portability, people have been working on these problems for hundreds of years through the form of the book.

It’s a highly evolved piece of technology that took centuries to get to a point where you don’t have to consciously think about the fact that it’s a complex piece of interaction design.

So as a bookmaker, I was interested in exploring these ideas, deconstructing the interaction, and exploring book forms where more interaction was necessary to unlock certain content. In all of the artist books that I’ve made, there is text that can’t be read unless someone does something in addition to just opening the book.

When I would make books, I would find myself watching people use my book prototypes to try to figure out ways to make them easier to use, or consider affordances to cue people that there was something more going on. I loved thinking about the intimacy of the form as a kind of play that would invite a deeper relationship between the content and the person.

Why did you make the jump to digital?

Learning about the history and the technology of the book was the gateway drug into wanting to be a part of something that was technologically relevant. Through making and researching books, I became interested in the idea of being at the edge of something, like when all of these different technologies—paper making, book binding, and printing—were at the edge and converging. This is what pushed me into switching the atmosphere of my practice from art and craft into design.

It was when I was living in a tree house, without an Internet connection, and for a period of time without electricity, when I started reading Fast Company and getting excited about what was happening online.

Okay, back up, we can’t let this pass. You lived in a tree house?

The tree house is a structure on a friend’s property in North Carolina. When I left my very first job, I retreated to said tree house for several months. Then I went and worked for some friends of mine who are weavers in Italy for several months for the winter. When I came back in the Spring, the friend and I decided we wanted to make the tree house bigger. So I drafted plans for an additional part and we hired a carpenter. For about four months, I worked on building the second part of this tree house, which I then lived in for several years after.

You’re drawn to the making of physical things.

I’m a builder.

Of books, of tree houses, and also of shoes, right?

Oh gosh, shoes, yes! As I started getting more and more involved in bookmaking and my work began to be collected, I would see my books go into special collection libraries, put behind glass boxes in exhibitions, and stowed away deep inside buildings, never to be handled again. I also observed that, because the books were perceived to be so precious, people were afraid to touch them. This was antithetical to why I wanted to make books. The possibility for a piece of artwork to be handled was, coming from an art school background where everything hangs on walls, the part I fell in love with.

Making shoes is a way to take the tools, materials, and processes I know and understand as a bookmaker, and using them in service of making a utilitarian object.

So you start off making art books in a tree house in North Carolina, and shortly after you find yourself working at New York Times Digital. How’d that happen?

In coming out as an interaction designer, I recognized that living in a tree house in the middle of North Carolina was like falling in love with marine biology while living in Kansas. My whole life became about getting to water as quickly as possible. New York, in this way, is my ocean.

And so I moved out of the tree house, found a mentor and just kind of put my head down on pursuing this one thing. When I finally moved to New York for the job at the Times, I was mentally prepared for it. And absolutely excited.

One of the things you’ll talk about at Webstock is how publishers are adapting to the post-PC (and post-print) era. They’re moving from the intimacy of the print era to the intimacy of the touchscreen. Are publishers in a way better suited than other industries to make this transition?

There’s definitely a fantasy that publishers have about what the iPad could be, and while many of their fantasies are about revenue, they have other possibilities in mind as well. I think some of their fantasies are around that connection that people have with the brand and how that could potentially extend to devices like the iPad or iPhone.

A real strength of analog technologies like magazines and newspapers is the opportunity to turn off and focus, and go more deeply into something. I believe there’s a need and a desire for human beings to have “off time.” There’s an opportunity there for digital designers to explore and solve these kinds of problems.

I’m interested in an idea that Mark Weiser coined and started writing about in the ’90s: the idea of “calm technology.” The central idea behind calm technology is that it should move into the periphery and away from being the center of our attention. Our smart phones and connected devices are still very much at the center of our attention, but I hope that over the next few years, this will start to change.

I’m personally interested in finding ways to allow technology to move to the periphery. It’s something I thought about when I went out to Cupertino to work on the first New York Times iPad prototype at Apple. I wasn’t thinking, “can this replicate the newspaper?” but rather, “can this app provide a kind of mental space for someone wanting to delve into long-form content?”

Do you think of the iPad differently from the iPhone in that respect?

Definitely. I don’t open my iPad up in line to check my email and see what’s new on Twitter. The iPad is usually not far from my bed or somewhere under the couch, and something I pick up here and there, not too frequently, but every couple of days. I personally think of it more as a domestic device, but that’s not to say that there aren’t these huge opportunities for the iPad in education, health care, and enterprise.

But if you look at the way Apple marketed the first iPad, it was through these giant advertisements of people laying on their couch with the iPad on their lap. And that was the marketing campaign for an entire year. That says a lot about how they were thinking about how the iPad would be used. That it’s exploding in all these other areas and that it is making it’s way into the workplace is a bit of a surprise. I definitely didn’t observe that when interviewing people the summer after the iPad came out.

When you went to Cupertino, it was two or three weeks before the iPad announcement. Your team was invited by Apple to hustle to build the New York Times iPad app to present onstage with Steve Jobs at the keynote announcement. You had the chance to interact a few times with Steve as he was vetting the app and giving you feedback. What did you learn from those experiences?

My colleagues and I had a rare and, in hindsight, amazing opportunity to meet and interact with Steve Jobs. We had one meeting in particular with him in the very beginning where we were invited to ask him questions about the iPad. One of the stories he told us was this: when the Industrial Revolution was first beginning, businesses and homes had one motor to run everything. As the technology matured and became cheaper, motors became ubiquitous. So now everything has a motor. There are hundreds of motors in our homes. He then made the connection between what happened with the ubiquity of motors, and what he predicted was going to happen with computers, where screens and sensors will pervade every corner of our lives, that every room in the house would have an iPad.

The most impressive part about meeting him was seeing how involved he was with everything to do with the launch. Our first full demo and critique was in front of him.

Yikes, I bet that was terrifying.

Yeah, we were a little bruised after that experience.

What is his manner in critique?

It’s unforgiving. I mean it’s everything you read about him. He didn’t mince words. He was brutally honest but invited that same kind of honesty in return. If we didn’t like something about the iPad we were told we could tell him. So it was a two-way street.

You got to critique Steve while he critiqued you. Speaking of critique and app-building, you’re doing a full-day workshop at Webstock. What will people get from the day?

It’s about quickly building app prototypes. One of the things people will get is a kind of religious zeal about looking at their designs on a device and as quickly as possible.

For the last fifteen years, web designers have been designing in the same context and with the same tools that their work will be seen and used. So, when you have a mouse in your hand, you’re thinking very clearly about mouse-click interactions. You’re designing using the same tools that the people using your designs will ultimately use. But when you’re designing on the desktop for a touch device, you’re not in the same frame of mind when your making decisions.

When designing for touch, we have to get our work on the device as soon as possible, and at every stage of the process. This kind of rigor will evolve our thinking about what’s possible and also poke holes early in some of the flawed thinking we might have because we’ve been designing on a desktop for a desktop.

Does that mean we have to use different tools, too, when we conceive and design apps?

The tools that we have available to us are not perfect. So there’s still a bit of fiction and storytelling we have to weave into our prototypes. And I don’t have definitive answers, but I do have some ideas.

I started teaching a class called “Designing for Touch” at Parsons New School for Design this past Fall. I was particularly impressed by one student who filmed all of the gestures available in his team’s game, and juxtaposed them with a keynote prototype of the game actions. He did this using very simple tools we all have access to.

So it wasn’t so much a pure on-device prototype but it was this proposal he put together that helped us all visualize and think about whether or not the gestures made sense and were intuitive.

It’s going to be the same deal in the workshop, right? You’re not just going to talk about this stuff. You’re going to put people to work.

I’m a taskmaster when it comes to workshops.

Concept videos are becoming more important in the prototyping process to help demonstrate gesture interactions. The smart folks at BERG are great examples of this. Do I have it right that you’ll be doing some video work in the workshop?

Yes, we will be making some tiny films as part of the workshop, what I like to call interaction sketches. One really incredible thing about using technologies like Keynote is you can very quickly make little videos that you can put on a device to get a sense of possible interactions.

There are a lot of parallels between film as a form and interaction design as a form. You have to think about time, movement. And there’s an emotion you can capture in a film that you can’t necessarily capture in an on-device prototype. So in the class I’ve been teaching, we did our touch prototypes first and then the students made a video about their product. It was fascinating to observe how much more clear and coherent their ideas came through in the video than in the on-device prototype.

Making and showing a video can convince people. It’s a believable medium. You can make an idea look very evolved in a video even if it’s held together by chewing gum and paperclips.

Webstock: Thanks so much Jennifer and Josh!

Find out about Jennifer’s workshop

Register to take part

One of the pleasures of being involved with Webstock is the opportunity to meet people like Rob Malda and Matt Haughey. And the chance to get the founder of MetaFilter to interview the founder of Slashdot just seemed too good to pass up!

We’re privileged to present this interview for you. Rob talks about standing on the shoulders of a previous generation near the end of the interview — those of us working in the web today stand on the shoulders of Rob and Matt. Enjoy the read…

Matt: I was a daily reader of Slashdot from about 1997 onwards (I usually ignored the Linux stuff but liked everything else), and it was a key inspiration for me starting MetaFilter. I thought I could combine the new (for late 1998) short link style of blogs like kottke.org, peterme.com, and jjg.net with a community setup like Slashdot, but I specifically wanted a simple comment UI, so I basically looked at slashdot and made sure there was no threading, no ratings, no sorting, no extraneous form elements so it could just be a big textarea and a post button for comments.

What’s your reaction to hearing that? Did you ever wish the UI/design of early Slashdot could be different? What did you think of the big first wave of blogs around the year 2000 starting to take off?

Rob: That’s a lot of questions 😉

Regarding the simpler UI, initially Slashdot had a fairly simple UI as well. For the first 10 months there weren’t even user accounts: all posts were anonymous. But as we grew in size, the other cruft had to be added to allow defensive measures. By mid-1999 we had the roots of our moderation system in place, which existed for 2 reasons: To stop spam/trolling/garbage, and to promote quality content. But the latter was the byproduct of the former. The thing I tend to forget is that from 1997 to 2000, I was basically the entire engineering for the site. Also, I was the primary writer. And I was starting a business. So when the dust settles, the UI was pretty good for the era, but filled with compromises that I wouldn’t have to make today.

Regarding the first wave of blogs, I guess if I’m honest about it, I often feel like Slashdot never got the fair credit it deserved. As “Blogging” became a mainstream buzzword that you’d hear about on CNN, Slashdot simply got lost in the history. From my perspective, we figured out many of the details of Social Media Aggregation years before, and then a second generation came along and got all the credit… and it wasn’t because of their UI or technology or skill, it was because Slashdot was ALWAYS a niche operation. I stuck to my guns for my entire ride that Slashdot was one specific subject. A specific tone. A certain culture. In the earliest years, that niche represented a sizable percentage of the internet community. Blogging was completely mainstreamed by the time the Bush/Kerry campaigns and the networks made it conventional wisdom. At that point, bloggers were no longer “Nerds”, they were just people willing to type.

Matt: Looking back, I seem to recall Slashdot sort of aligned itself with more of a “we are a forum!” mantra back then. I remember in all the weblog early history stuff people would mention Slashdot or The Drudge Report as having some quasi-blog like elements but not really calling themselves that or embracing it. Does that mesh with your memories of the time? I seem to recall that for some reason in the late 90s, a lot of people felt it was important to say they weren’t blogging or blogs, but were instead journals or forums or everything/nothing (remember e/n?).

I recall weblog and blog being associated with a new fad around 1999 and there being some backlash — do you think that might be why Slashdot isn’t really considered an early blog but more of a paleo or proto kind of blog-like thing?

Rob: Slashdot was a lot of things, which is probably why it never gets pigeon-holed into any single bucket. We were a blog, a forum, a community, a social news system, and in fact we were a social network (you can still friend/foe people!) years before the term was popularized by that Book website and others. Since we were all of those things, we’re generally thought of as something else.

I still shun the term Blogging just as I shun the term Tweeting. It’s all just writing. It’s like trying to subdivide Novelist, Columnist, Blogger, Tweeter. Words are words. It’s not really interesting to keep slicing and dicing and sub-categorizing to me. I just write some stuff or share some stuff. Distinguishing between “Journalist” and “Blogger” is a waste of time. I’m all of those things and none of them.

Matt: I know the late 90s were kind of crazy for everyone, definitely including Slashdot, but if you could sum up your time at Slashdot through the following decade (2000-2010), how would you describe it? What were your day to days like during that stretch of the 2000s?

Rob: For me personally, I feel like Slashdot was very strong in the first half of that time. If you wanted to mark a few milestones, the bursting of the dot com bubble and then 9/11 represent sort of the end of Early Slashdot. At that point we knew what we were and what we were doing. We continued down that path for many years. Our traffic continued to grow, and since we were cheap to run, the rest of the business mostly ignored us. I don’t think people really understand how small scale of an operation it all was: we had 2-3 engineers for much of this time, and 3-4 writers. This basically was our entire operation and production teams. We were lean and mean, but it meant that we were unable to perform significant engineering changes. For the first 2-3 years, when I was doing all of the engineering I could simply sit down and build a new feature. But at some point, the mere act of maintaining a stable platform for our users, with our incredibly limited human and hardware resources became problematic. For a former hardware company, we had a remarkably limited amount of hardware. So instead of engineering new functionality for our users, we engineered more optimized systems. We became very scalable. And eventually this caught up with us. By the mid 2000s, the next generation of social media came onto the scene: the Diggs and Reddits of the world, and we didn’t have the resources to compete.

By the end of the 2000s and up until I left last summer, my focus shifted to be more on the editorial side. I wanted the product side to succeed: to add new features for the users, to fix bugs and stuff. But it was really hard to accomplish anything significant. For awhile, Slashdot’s engineering was a single guy. He was responsible for anything anyone wanted. Just one guy. Now he was an awesome engineer: but a solitary person can’t handle all the engineering and operational responsibilities for a site like Slashdot. The system has parts that are a decade+ old. So while the editorial group was able to do some good work, the site itself remained almost unchanged for the last few years save for a few superficial changes.

Matt: Did you have any big side projects during your time at Slashdot? Anything you’re most proud of that isn’t Slashdot?

Rob: These days I spend a lot more time with my 2 boys. I also did some early work on Everything2, I wrote a column for a magazine for several years. But I was pretty intensely focused on Slashdot for 14 years. The job was good to me too. I was well paid, and got to see some amazing things (like a Shuttle Launch and the inside of Pixar!). And it continues to sort of payoff for me: I’m looking forward to going to Webstock. I’ll meet some interesting people, and with any luck get to see something awesome connected to The Lord of the Rings. I’m told New Zealand is lovely in Feb.

Matt: What’s it like these days, I imagine it’s weird to view the site as a user and not have god-like admin controls. Do you still check in on the site?

Rob: I read Slashdot now exclusively via RSS. I’m still pleased with the majority of the editorial work being done. I’ve submitted a few stories anonymously too. But the day that all my admin controls disappeared I basically logged out and it truthfully hurts to go back. I miss it tremendously, and really wish that they had granted my request to be allowed to continue to post as an occasional special contributor or something. I suspect I’ll always feel like a piece of my heart is missing.

Matt: What’s next for you, do you have any general areas of the technology world that interest you these days?

Rob: I promised my wife that I would take a few months off from work before I began looking for a job. That time is now at an end, so it’s basically time for me to start shoving my resume out there and seeing what my next chapter looks like. I’m very interested in the way internet news is created and replicated. I’d love to find a way to work in that field again, but not directly as a news editor. I’d like to perhaps work on the tools that people use to consume. Alternatively, I love photography and writing, so I’d really like to have the chance to do more in depth writing on the subjects that interest me. Slashdot was always pretty limiting: 100-200 words was the typical max. It rarely afforded the opportunity to witness an event first person, or directly ask a question to someone who might add insight. I think it did some bad things to my short term memory- spending 14 years focused on such short snippets of information has done a real number on the attention span. But I’m still following very closely the tech world, especially gadgets, tablets, phones, open source, sci-fi, movies… Slashdot was after all based on the stuff I was personally interested in. That will never change.

Matt: Huh, I think of you as more of a creator and a maker than a guy that has a regular job. Have you considered building your own new thing or collaborating with various news organizations that could use your technical expertise? (I’m thinking of all the database-journalism stuff going on with people like Adrian Holovarty that helped launch Everyblock and what places like MSNBC are pushing and what the Boston Globe and The Atlantic are doing, or heck even what the Poynter Institute is trying to do with pushing reporters to learn some coding to better present data)

Rob: I tend to engross myself pretty hard core into things, so I just had to go cold turkey for a few months. You describe me in a very flattering light. I guess I’ll find out in the next few months if it’s deserved. I think I have some really unique skills and experiences that I hope will be useful somewhere in a way that provides me with interesting and meaningful work. For so many years Slashdot meant so much to me: I felt like the work i was doing mattered so much more than just a paycheck. Anyone who has been lucky enough to be in that sort of position would understand I guess. I imagine your work on MetaFilter might be similar- and since you’ve had the good sense to retain ownership, you are able to continue to shape your creation according to what you think is best. That matters a lot.

Matt: What’s your favorite bit of technology that you’ve encountered in the last year?

Rob: I saw the final shuttle launch. I cried. It’s really such an old technology, but it brought together my childhood and adult dreams in a single moment.

Matt: What’s your biggest disappointment in the tech world these days?

Rob: The internet is simply not as free as it was when Slashdot began. Government is increasingly legislating away our rights and criminalizing actions that are impossible to regulate. I know it’s inevitable, but it’s still disappointing to witness. The joy of logging in to an IRC chat room in the early 90s, to talk to people who were innovating powerful technologies simply for the sake of it was absolutely intoxicating. To be able to talk to the guy who was responsible for some component of your system. We were all pseudo-anonymous strangers brought together by the technology that we loved, and the belief that an open future was spread out before us. The future will be exciting for my children, but I’m afraid that their technology will come in boxes welded shut at the factory. Their software locked down. Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there.

Matt: Yeah, I definitely see that trend as well, there seems to be a real push-pull on the consumer side with simplicity and control. The iPad is a technical wonder, but it does have real limitations on what software you can run and what kinds of files you can view on it. People have speculated that perhaps by 2015 you might buy a Macbook that doesn’t have write access to the hard drive, and part of me understands why that would revolutionize computing for a lot of people but be absolutely horrible for power users like you and me.

Rob: And not just to power users, but to the next generation. We all stand on the shoulders of the generation before. This is true in EVERY medium. Writers, Artists, Programmers, Engineers. The trend in the last few decades to lock everything down… be it with rivets and welds, or with patents and copyrights that never expire… we’re crippling the next generation. The joy I felt being able to gut a PC, from the hard drive to the kernel during my formative years… you’re right: an iPad is amazing. I own one and love it. But what I got out of my first PCs in the 80s was more than what my kid will get out of an iPad today. I’m not trying to wax nostalgic, but there’s a potentially dark future out there. We’re crippling the next generation in the name of quarterly profits. Creativity and innovation requires more balance.

Matt: Thanks Rob for taking the time to talk!

In the second of our interviews with a Webstock ’12 speaker, we’re both honored and delighted to present Adam Lisagor in conversation with Merlin Mann. They cover such topics as Webstock, the New Zealand accent, what it is Adam does, how he works and much, much more.

Thanks to both Adam and Merlin and enjoy the listen.

Lisagor by Webstock

In the first of our interviews with Webstock ’12 speakers, we asked Bruce Sterling to interview Lauren Beukes. Lauren was excited enough about this to tweet with the hashtag #AlsoholyshitBruceSterlingisinterviewingme.

Here’s the interview. Thanks to both Lauren and Bruce.

Bruce: Since you’re a South African writer from Cape Town, you must get all those South African Writer cliche’ questions from your many foreign interviewers. Why don’t you tell us about a few of those? You don’t have to actually answer them.

Lauren: Ha, actually no-one’s really made a big deal about that. Or not unreasonably so. They usually ask me about other South African writers, which means I get to list my favourites (some of whom are friends). Best stuff I’ve read lately: Siphiwo Mahala’s wonderful African Delights, Deon Meyer’s edge-of-your-seat thriller, 13 Hours, Diane Awerbuck’s Cabin Fever, full of perfectly beautiful and fractured short stories and SL Grey’s incredibly disturbing consumer horror, The Mall.

Bruce: If somebody in distant New Zealand has pretty much never heard of “Lauren Beukes,” what do you think they should wise-up-to first?

Lauren: The best place to get a sense of me is on Twitter. Also, if my Wikipedia profile is still stating that I’m a kraken-wrestling zeppelin pirate queen, that’s not *entirely* true. [Ed: sadly, it’s not]

Bruce: You seem to be into a lot of creative work that isn’t award-winning futuristic South African cyberpunk thriller novels. Stuff like kid cartoons, techno-art, political satire, TV scripts, music and comic books. What gives with all that? Is that like your “transmedia strategy”?

Lauren: I love the idea that it might have been part of a grand tactical plan rather than lucking into some very cool things along the way. I’m a brilliant “managed procrastinator”. I’ll do anything to avoid writing a new book, including documentaries, comic books and kids animated TV shows. And it’s a nice balance. In 2009, I was writing a cute pre-school show for Disney about a little princess and her dragon friends by day and going home to write dark messed-up fiction about a magical criminal Joburg underworld by night. It suits me to vary my projects. It means I don’t get bored. I had a day job as a freelance journalist for a very long time and then got into TV script-writing, documentary making and, for the moment, I’m now focusing entirely on comics and novels.

Bruce: I hear you “directed” a TV documentary recently. With what, gaffers, best boys, lighting and all that? That sounds like a lot of hard work.

Lauren: Ha! More like a skeleton crew running around trying to catch up to our subjects, three hopefuls in the run-up to the Miss Gay Western Cape beauty pageant. I was really lucky to work with a brilliant experienced crew, including DOP, Nick van der Westhuizen, editor Izette Mostert and my husband, Matthew Brown who produced and did some of the editing, all on a ridiculous schedule. The trailer is here, if anyone wants to check it out.

Bruce: One of your novels has its own techno soundtrack compilation. Would madame care to expound on that?

Lauren: Again, I wish I could say this was part of some strategic brilliance on my part, but it just seemed like a cool thing to do. When I finished writing Moxyland, I approached African Dope Records, which has always been the future sound of Cape Town to me, and asked them if they’d consider doing a soundtrack to the book. They were a bit taken aback, but the idea intrigued them and they signed on to do a CD and digital release. HoneyB and I handpicked tracks from their catalogue to match the mood of the book and Fletcher of Krushed & Sorted did the final mix. And then we did it again for Zoo City, with HoneyB pulling in extra tracks for that authentic Joburg sound, with kwaito and disco soul and electronica from GhettoRuff and KaleidoSound as well as a selection of artists from Dope’s list.

Bruce: Webstock has got lots of web-geekery going on. Why don’t you entice the readers with some thrilling descriptions of the personal hardware set-up that you use every day? For instance: Ever find a word processor you actually liked? Me neither.

Lauren: I use Word. I know that’s sacrilege. But Pages doesn’t do the stuff I need it to do and I just can’t get into Scrivener. It feels like the time I spend learning how to use it and adjusting my brainspace is time I could be spending writing. The most important software I use is Freedom to lock me out of the Internet for set durations so I don’t mess around. Otherwise, Kindle for travel reading, iPhone for Twitter and email and entertaining my three year old and an iPad 1 for reading Wired and wasting time I should be spending writing (or learning to use Scrivener) by playing Plants vs Zombies.

Bruce: So, what does that three-year-old eat? She looks pretty lively. I can remember dietary preference being a major power-issue at that age. 3.

Lauren: Oaties! It’s a less sugary generic of Cheerios. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, plain yoghurt, spinach, crumbed chicken, fish fingers, bacon and carrots dipped in tomato sauce (but never more than three). It is a big power struggle. And she’s very, very stubborn. And smart. And often outwits us.

Bruce: You sure are super-active on Twitter. And you commonly tweet stuff like: “Was the US military drone virus caused by pilots playing Mafia Wars?” You wanna explain Twitter to people who still think it’s all about tweeting one’s lunch?

Lauren: Partly, it’s about finding cool curators of interesting links that wouldn’t normally cross your input field (although I suspect most Webstockers would have already picked up that particular one, which was from BoingBoing). You turn up some great stuff that I never would have found on my own, so does William Gibson, Charl Blignaut, @gammacounter, @theremina and @joeyhifi, among others I follow.

It’s an open conversation, a way of engaging with intriguing minds, of having cool random strangers engage with you, in a way that’s not weird or invasive (apart from that guy who was all “Yo, ‘sup, read my shit! I’m an awesome fukin writer.” by way of introduction.)

Bruce: Besides trips to other nations of the southern hemisphere, what comes next for Lauren Beukes?

Lauren: I’m hard at work on my new novel, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer, which is due out in early 2013, and a twisted take on Rapunzel for Vertigo’s Fairest mini series, a spin-off of Bill Willingham’s brilliant and epic Fables, which should be out around August 2012.