In 1995, Jesyca Durchin accepted a job as a producer at Mattel Media under Nancie Martin. The then-fledgling game and software studio had fewer than a dozen employees and existed at a distance from Mattel’s more central toy business Barbie Fashion Designer (Mattel Media, 1996) was Durchin’s first major project and is widely credited with catalyzing the girls’ game and software market in the mid-1990s. However, as Durchin discusses throughout this interview, the game’s success was not as immediate or automatic as might be assumed. In the first weekend of its release, Barbie Fashion Designer sold only eleven copies; Mattel CEO Jill Barad’s enthusiasm for the project and willingness to invest in a television commercial salvaged the situation. Most companies attempting to create the games-for-girls market lacked the resources of toy giant Mattel, of course, and the reality that even Mattel nearly failed to break through speaks volumes about the level of inertia that defined the mid-1990s computer and video game market.
Over the past two decades, Durchin has worked extensively with Disney Imagineering; founded and sold her own startup, Digital Playspace; and today works as a senior producer at Warner Bros., where she is producing the company’s first AAA game featuring Wonder Woman. Her interests in storytelling, multimedia interface design, and play patterns have driven her professional trajectory and serve as useful examples of her audience-focused approach to media production. She summarizes her creative and design ethos as one of wish fulfillment, enabling players and audience members to experience the magic of making things better than they found them and using technology for creative ends. In this interview, Durchin reflects on her career, offering insights from her experiences creating games that girls love. She shares stories of early production discoveries that led to pivotal games like Barbie Fashion Designer, and she discusses the difficulties the field faced in trying to forge a more inclusive industry. Taken together, Durchin’s insights shed light on an important and often overlooked chapter of games history.
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Current commercialization status of electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) digital microfluidics
The emergence of electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) in the early 2000s made the once-obscure electrowetting phenomenon practical and led to numerous activities over the last two decades. As an eloquent microscale liquid handling technology that gave birth to digital microfluidics, EWOD has served as the basis for many commercial products over two major application areas: optical, such as liquid lenses and reflective displays, and biomedical, such as DNA library preparation and molecular diagnostics. A number of research or start-up companies ( e.g. , Phillips Research, Varioptic, Liquavista, and Advanced Liquid Logic) led the early commercialization efforts and eventually attracted major companies from various industry sectors ( e.g. , Corning, Amazon, and Illumina). Although not all of the pioneering products became an instant success, the persistent growth of liquid lenses and the recent FDA approvals of biomedical analyzers proved that EWOD is a powerful tool that deserves a wider recognition and more aggressive exploration. This review presents the history around major EWOD products that hit the market to show their winding paths to commercialization and summarizes the current state of product development to peek into the future. In providing the readers with a big picture of commercializing EWOD and digital microfluidics technology, our goal is to inspire further research exploration and new entrepreneurial adventures.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10171733
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Lab on a Chip
- Volume:
- 20
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 1473-0197
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1705 to 1712
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1039/d0lc00144a
