Jef Raskin — Home
Jef Raskin was many things: computer scientist, cognitive researcher, pilot, musician, mathematician, and relentless critic of bad interface design. He is best known as the person who created the Macintosh project at Apple Computer — who named it, wrote its design specifications, hired its first team, and articulated the vision that a personal computer could be used by people who had never used a computer before.
He died on February 26, 2005, of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 61.
This archive collects his published essays, unpublished writings, photographs, and other work from the years the original raskincenter.org site was active. It is preserved here because the ideas in it remain worth engaging — some as historical documents of a formative period in personal computing, others as arguments that are as applicable now as when he wrote them.
Who Was Jef Raskin?
Raskin was born in New York City in 1943. He studied mathematics and physics at SUNY Stony Brook before completing a graduate degree in computer science and a PhD from UC San Diego, where he also studied music composition. His academic training was unusually broad, and his published work reflects it — he wrote on aerodynamics, mathematics, music education, interface design, and epistemology with equal facility.
He joined Apple Computer in January 1978 as employee number 31, hired to manage Apple’s publications and documentation. Within a year, he was writing memos proposing a new kind of computer. The memos became the Macintosh project. He named it after his favorite apple variety, McIntosh — misspelling it intentionally to avoid a trademark conflict.
The Mac that shipped in 1984 was substantially different from Raskin’s original design. Jobs took over the project in 1981, after which Raskin gradually departed. The design evolved significantly. Raskin’s original specifications called for a machine under $1000 with no external storage, built-in software, and an interface that required no prior computer experience. Some of these made it into the final product; others did not. Raskin was not uncritical of the Macintosh that shipped, even as he accepted credit for originating it.
After Apple, Raskin founded the Information Appliance project, which became the SwyftCard and the Canon Cat — a commercial implementation of many of the ideas he had been developing since the Macintosh. The Cat used a LEAP-based navigation system, a continuous document space, and no application boundaries. It was sold in 1987 and discontinued after a few months, a casualty of corporate politics within Canon rather than product failure. It is now a cult object among fans of alternative computing history.
In his later years, Raskin established the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces, where he and a small team built Archy — an open-source implementation of his interface principles. He published The Humane Interface in 2000, which collected and systematized the principles he had been developing for twenty years.
His Core Ideas
Raskin’s most persistent concern was the relationship between computer interfaces and human cognition. He believed — and spent decades accumulating evidence for the belief — that most interface failures are predictable from what we know about how human minds work.
The key principle: interfaces should adapt to humans, not require humans to adapt to them. This sounds obvious. Raskin’s contribution was to take it seriously as an engineering constraint rather than a design aspiration.
Modes — states in which the same user action produces different results — were, for Raskin, the defining failure of most interface design. They cause errors. They cause the specific kind of error where the user did what they intended and got something different, because they had lost track of which mode they were in. Raskin argued that these errors are not user failures; they are design failures. The user made a reasonable assumption about the system’s state. The system violated it.
Habituation — the process by which practiced actions become automatic — was both a gift and a trap. Good interface design leverages it by maintaining consistency, so that learned behaviors remain reliable. Bad interface design breaks it, typically by changing behaviors across contexts or versions, forcing users back into conscious attention for tasks that should have become automatic.
Quantification — Raskin was skeptical of design decisions made on the basis of intuition, preference, or aesthetic judgment alone. He wanted to measure interfaces. How long does it take users to complete tasks? How often do they make errors? How much does performance vary under stress? These questions have answers, and the answers sometimes contradict what designers thought was obvious.
Published Works
Raskin’s published essays cover a wider range than you might expect from a computer scientist. He wrote on aerodynamics (Coanda Effect), the history of the Macintosh (Holes in the Histories), set theory, music, and cognitive science. A selection:
Science and Mathematics
- Coanda Effect: Understanding Why Wings Work — cited in Wikipedia and physics literature worldwide
- Airfoil — further aerodynamics discussion
- Anthropic Principle
- I Before E
Computing and Interface Design
- Holes in the Histories — correcting the historical record on the Macintosh
- Ubiquity Interview — wide-ranging interview on computing and cognition
- No Information Design
Culture and Society
- Torture
- Mr. Rogers
- Music Education
- Millions
- Pacifica Moods
- Transmitter
- Nursing Theory
- The Cat Manual
- The Cat Reference
Unpublished Works
These essays were not formally published during Raskin’s life but were available through the archive:
- Widgets of the Week
- Effectiveness Mathematics
- Next Time Can Be Worse
- Hard Sails
- Merry Musician
- Old Slipstick
- Piper Cub Offense
- Twisted Words
Pictures
Raskin was a pilot, a builder of pipe organs, and an enthusiast of natural phenomena. His picture galleries include:
- Green Flash — the atmospheric optical phenomenon
- Airplane Pictures — from his years of flying
- Pipe Organ — Raskin built his own pipe organ
- Mechanical Jef — behind the machinery
- Estey Harmonium
- Solar System
The Humane Interface
Raskin’s book, The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2000. It remains in print and is assigned in HCI courses worldwide. A detailed summary of the book’s argument is here.
The Raskin Center
After leaving Apple, and after the Canon Cat’s commercial discontinuation, Raskin established the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces (RCHI) to continue his research. The RCHI built Archy — a working implementation of his interface principles — and published research on modeless computing, ZUIs (zoomable user interfaces), and interface measurement. The RCHI archive is here.
Curriculum Vitae
Raskin’s full curriculum vitae records his academic positions, publications, patents, performances, and other work.
Jef Raskin, 1943–2005. This archive is maintained at raskincenter.org.