Interviewer: Here's the idea. We start with you acting like you've never met Joe Lambert and you're tying to explain to him – and the radio audience – what is it that Abbe Don does.

Abbe Don: OK. Shall we start that now, Joe?

Interviewer: Yeah, go ahead and start that now.

Abbe Don: It’s funny because some asked me this recently, someone I met for the first time. Says to me, "Like, what do you do?" She's a chiropractor. So she said “When I meet people and they say, ‘What do you do?’ I say I'm a chiropractor and they know what that means.”?

So I said, "Oh, well," as if it was the clearest thing in the world, "Oh, I'm an interface designer and an interactive multimedia artist." There's like this looong pause and I realized I wasn't in the Bay Area. Because when you're in the Bay Area and you say that, there's some kind of resonance. People have some sense of what the hell you're talking about. Anyway, so that is what I do. I'm an interface designer and an interactive multimedia artist. The form of my interactive multimedia art is primarily in the realm of digital storytelling. So now you want me to explain what the hell that means?

Interviewer: Let’s wind back the tape and say why the heck did you ever want to be a digital storyteller?

Abbe Don: OK. That's a good place to start. As any one who has ever seen any of my work knows I was very strongly influenced by my great-grandmother, who was an amazing storyteller. Her stories primarily took the form of first person narratives, autobiographies. I started listening to her tell stories from as early an age as I can remember. But one of the things I noticed somewhere around say, junior high or high school was that her stories weren't like conventional stories. They had this tendency to weave in and out, go back and forth, cross over on themselves, and double back. She could start many stories and not always finish them and come back to them later on the day. I thought that was really cool. But that wasn't what you were learning in school. Your stories were supposed to have a beginning and a middle and an end.

But because I was fascinated by her as early as 1975, I wrote her biography. It was an assignment called, "True Stories About Others". It was one of those kinds of experiments in the 70s about self-paced learning. So in my little self-paced learning, while other people were writing true stories about the head of the fire department in our town or the owner of the big grocery stores, I picked my great-grandmother.

In looking back on it, it sounds like a seventh grader trying to imitate good writing. I write about the babbling brook that went by her shabby little stucco home. Very – sort of melodramatic. Not dissimilar from the bad educational films I was probably being exposed to, right?

When I got to college, I – which was Pomona College in 1979, post modern narrative theory and feminist narrative theory, were sort of all the intellectual rage. I was exposed to a lot of those ideas about decentered narrative and multiple first person narrative, multiple perspectives – you know, reconstructing the master narrative, all that sort of stuff. I was also reading a lot of experimental novels, particularly Latin American writers like Julio Cortazar and Jose Luis Borges and suddenly discovered there was this world that thought about stories similar to the way that my great-grandmother told them and dissimilar from how I was taught stories were supposed to be.

So I was really strongly influenced by Cortasar's novel, Hopscotch. It was published in Latin America in 1966 and I think it was translated and published in English in the late 60s, early 70s. He called what he was doing an interactive novel.

So, based on his ideas, I called what I was doing interactive book making. I was interested in artists’ books, which was a medium at the time which was also very popular in feminist art circles. It was a way of doing multiples. It was a way of bypassing [ABBE FILL IN]... what I called an interactive book about my great-grandmother in 1983 called, [ABBE FILL IN]. One of the things I was looking at there, as well, was the interaction and relationship between image and text, playing around with the structure of the book. So things folded and unfolded, sort of like a pop-up book for adults.

It's a long story, but it has a point, which was the book was considered successful. We did a bunch of art exhibits. I was paraded around as a young, innovative artist, but, for me, it kind of fell short, because it still wasn't like being with my great-grandmother and hearing her tell stories. So I started working with video, but video didn't seem quite right either.

In 1984, I saw my first AT&T shopping kiosk, Touch Me shopping kiosk at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. I had this "ah-ha" moment that technology, combined with my ideas about storytelling was going to enable me to create the kind of experience that I had been hoping to create with the book, which was a more fluid and more interactive narrative, similar to the way my great-grandmother told her stories. It was like a "you are there" kind of thing.

So, I went on a somewhat circuitous route. Landed at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and made We Make Memories, which is the interactive family album that, ultimately, is about my great-grandmother as well as my grandmother, my mother and myself.

Now, you want the part about Apple and interface design and how it all influenced...