The Bleeding Edge

Founded in 1988, Clement Mok designs was a San Francisco–based start-up serving Silicon Valley. The studio provided marketing and product interface design services for high-tech start-ups. As technology and markets evolved, we found ourselves in uncharted territory, prototyping software for marketing applications that went beyond the cutting edge. This was the bleeding edge.

Our projects included digital prepress catalogs, CD-I and CD-ROM titles for the Mayo Clinic, and prototypes for interactive television navigation and chat rooms. Some of this early work inspired software and apps that followed.

The work shown here feels ancient. It is. But nearly 40 years ago, we were exploring unfamiliar territory—much as designers working with AI are today.

Making Zoom calls, binging on Netflix and posting a viral video on Facebook are all things you expect to do on your laptop today. But it wasn’t all that long ago when viewing videos on a computer was simply unthinkable.What would you use them for? It’s just like television with added controls, right?And this thing called the broadband super highway, how does it fit into the mix? We grappled with all of these questions when working with tech and cable companies to prototype and develop interaction models during those heady years of Silicon Valley