Learning, play, graphics, and software met on the personal computer.

An educational program has to do more than contain information. It has to give a person a reason and a way to interact with it.

Howard Pearlmutter's early commercial work brought software, graphics, learning, and play into practical products. Through Softweaver and related development work, he helped take extensible-language approaches into personal-computer applications.

IBM PC MasterType became a number-one bestseller in educational software. Howard's team also shipped MasterType among the early Macintosh titles during the computer's first year.

The work included educational videogames commissioned by Walt Disney EPCOT Center and CBS Television. An energy-efficiency game for EPCOT connected environmental learning with interactive experience.

These were different uses of the same broad possibility: computation and media could give a person something active to do with an idea.

The application had to work as software. It also had to work for the person at the keyboard. Graphics, feedback, timing, and interaction participated in the result.

Howard's wider personal-computing work included input devices, graphics, audio, media, and commercial applications. He merged a Macintosh with pen/tablet technology in an early pen-based graphical interface, and worked on products involving scanning, images, maps, and publishing.

The common thread is human access to digital capability.

That perspective remains useful in a very different tool environment. An interactive explanation can let someone explore. A prototype can make a new idea tangible. A model can reveal a relationship that a static description leaves difficult to imagine.

The form should serve the person's purpose. A game-like interaction is useful in one setting; an executive inspection tool in another. Howard's factory-design signoff system and NASA human-interface work demonstrate different audience relationships.

Read factory signoff, the NASA story, and ecological animation for the wider range.

If your subject needs to become more accessible through interaction, explore interactive explanation and media prototyping.

Start with the ability you want the person to gain. The creative and technical work is finding an experience through which that ability can become usable.