The exceptional Masayuki Akamatsu, best known around these parts as the maker of the wonderful aka.objects for Max for hooking into Wii remotes, Space Navigators, MacBook motion sensors, and more, gets an in-depth interview over at the Make:blog. They even manage to bridge the language barrier and translate to English.
“Made in Japan” Interview: Masayuki Akamatsu
The digital maestro talks about Max, the future of technology in the micro- and macrocosm, and his live-soldering electronic Breadboard Band.
He also has this to say about the darker side of technology in Japan:
This depends on the generation, but I think that in particular young people in Japan for most part think of electronic devices as being disposable. The pace of consumption and greed is pretty astonishing, and they probably aren’t even aware of it consciously.
I think there’s a growing awareness of this issue here, as well.
One bone to pick: he claims Max, compared to the open source Pure Data, is “overwhelmingly better in terms of function, extendability, etc.” I think that easily applies that to the areas of interface and documentation, but Pd has some functionality and extensibility tricks of its own — more “different” than “better” (and arguably, Pd is better in some areas). But he has done some fantastic things with Max, so I certainly see no reason to argue with his choice of tools.
Thanks, Make, for the great interview. Anyone you’d like to see on CDM’s interview list? Any volunteer translators for people of the rest of the world?