Father of laptop who put humanity in machines Bill Moggridge's awakening to the downside of the electronic age came at 4am one day in 1983. After buying a digital watch at a Japanese airport on the way home from a business trip - it boasted a radio and an earpiece on the end of a strand of wire - he had lost the instruction booklet. Programming its alarm then became pure guesswork. Hence the rudely beeping reveille. At least his wife Karin knew how to deal with the wayward device: with a hammer. IN Obituaries For Moggridge, a pioneering industrial designer who has died aged 69, the smashed watch was one of the calls to action for a career that was to have a big influence on the everyday experience of digital technology. Even before Steve Jobs" digital dream factory at Apple had come up with its first Macintosh computer, he championed bringing the human scale to technology. A self-effacing man with a knack for using humour to draw others into his way of thinking, Moggridge influenced a generation of designers working at the juncture of software and hardware to tame technologies that too often left users feeling frustrated and defeated. He also stamped an indelible mark on the history of industrial design with one of the enduring devices of the age: the first laptop computer. William Grant Moggridge was born in London on June 25 1943 and followed in the footsteps of his mother, a designer, rather than his civil service father. He graduated from the Central School of Art and Design and in 1969 set up his own industrial design studio. Growing up amid the dowdiness of postwar London had given him a fascination with the outer form of everyday objects. His parents had no car or television - perhaps one reason why he was captivated by the material abundance of American consumerism. It was the "impossible fantasy," he once told The New York Times. By the end of the 1970s he had set up shop in Palo Alto, California, which was emerging from the fruit orchards to become Silicon Valley. A chance encounter with John Ellenby, a Scottish engineer who had moved to the area, put Moggridge's new studio on the map. The result was the GRID Compass, which went into production in 1982. With a screen that flipped up and a keyboard that folded into its body, it became the prototype for the "clamshell" machines that are now the world's biggest-selling mainstream computing devices. At $8,000 the Compass made it to few consumer shelves, though it was used by the military and took a trip on the space shuttle. While the physical form of the hinged laptop may be Moggridge's most recognisable success, the experience of trying to use the machine came to shape his life's work. Struggling with the software, he quickly found himself lost in another world. "I felt that there was an opportunity to create a new design discipline, dedicated to creating imaginative and attractive experiences in the virtual world, where one could design behaviours, animations and sounds as well as shapes," he later wrote in Designing Interactions, a book that summed up his philosophy. This would be the equivalent of industrial design but in software rather than three-dimensional objects. It was at Ideo, the consultancy he formed in 1991 on the merger of his studio with those of David Kelley Design and Matrix Product Design, that the idea of "interaction design" took full shape. As much as a new conception of technology design, Ideo represented a breakthrough in process and culture. The aim, he once told the Financial Times, was to assemble a cadre of "T-shaped" people: those with deep expertise in a range of disciplines from cognitive psychology to computer science and industrial design who also had the interest and ability to apply their expertise in other fields. Apple's first computer mouse and the Palm V handheld computer were among the breakthrough products claimed by Ideo. Its work foreshadowed the world of smartphones and social networks. Long before Facebook, Moggridge came up with a system that showed bank workers pictures of customers when they called up details of an account, rather than just strings of numbers. "The bank workers loved it," he said - though, like many human-scale ideas in the early years of computing, it was scrapped in the interests of greater efficiency. Moggridge moved to New York in 2009 to become director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution. In the UK he was awarded the Prince Philip prize for design in 2010. Moggridge is survived by Karin and their sons, Alex and Erik. Speaking to the FT, he once criticised the technology industry for believing that its main purpose was to be "kind to chips." If humanity has finally been put back into the picture, the man with the annoying wristwatch deserves a lot of the credit.