Even if you don’t know the name “John Underkoffler,” you surely know his work. His gesture-based interface for Minority Report influenced the 13 years of of user interface and hardware innnovation that have followed.

But Minority Report‘s magical UI is only one of many products to come from both his his days at MIT and his LA studio Oblong. And his consistent quality is why he received a 2015 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for interaction design. In recognition of the win, Underkoffler agreed to go through our seven-question wringer.

Minority Report // 2001-2002

What was the first thing you ever designed?

In ninth grade I wrote a primitive video game for the Apple II Plus in 6502 assembly language. The homage featured a bitmapped representation of the school’s math-and-computer teacher (name withheld), whose notable features included an elegant Sam Elliott mustache and an omnipresent pipe. In the game, his disembodied head bounced around the screen (squash-and-stretch courtesy of pixel-level replacement animation), while the player used the arrow keys to slide a stem-skyward pipe across the screen’s bottom. Tapping the space bar shot (ignoring actual smoker mechanics) the vertically arranged letters PUFF upward from the pipe’s stem. When PUFF hit the head, the head disappeared leaving the mustache to flap off like a sad bat–the game’s reward, such as it was …

(At the time, of course, I didn’t think of building this interactive software as an act of design.)

What is your daily work routine like?

Very approximately: consciousness 5 or 6 a.m.; cats’ needs; brewed beverages; starter-levain’s needs; quarter in the pinball machine of L.A.’s freeways; brewed beverages; meetings, often in one of several Mezzanine rooms, on topics from among [management, product design, code design, interaction design, customers (about), customers (with), pre-customers (with); partners (with), industrial design, copy, collateral]; another 25 cents back toward home; avocado trees’ needs; lively discourse with the fabulous Jen Fong, mostly involving the topic of whether either of us has heard from RISD-freshman son; arms of morpheus 11:45 p.m.