Interface Culture – The Desktop

A few quote from the chapter “The Desktop” in Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture:

“The modern shopping mall – with its teeming equivalent of displays and byzantine floor plan – is the spacial equivalent of today’s MTV-style advertising. In these high-velocity times, anything that disorients sells product”.

“The way we choos to organize our space says an enormous amount about the society we live in – perhaps more than any other components of our cultural habits“.

“Our lives now revolve around a more prosaic text: the computer desktop. Understanding the implications of that metaphor – its genius and its limitations – is the key to understanding the contemporary interface.”

“Engelbart and Sutherland had endowed the digital computer with space (see a previous entry about “Bittmapping“); Kay’s overlapping windows gave it depth.”

“We already have enough living rooms and hallways to go around; we don’t need them replicating across our monitors as well. A hallway is a perfect example of the limitations of real space, limitations that the computer needn’t touble itself with.”

“The real magic of graphic computers derives from the fact that they’re not tied to the old, analog world of objects. They can mimic much of that world of course, but they’re also capable of adopting new identities and performing new tasks that have no real-world equivalent whatsoever. People who get hooked on computers get hooked for this reason. They don’t become high-tech junkies because their machines remind them of their Rolodexes; they’re junkies because their machines do things they never thought possible. Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility.”

“Organized space implies not just a personal value system but also a type of community. This is true of architecture and urban planning, and it is also true of interface design. The cramped and crooked side streets of Paris up until the late ninetenth century invoked a human scale of neighborhoods and face-to-face contact [...] The most part of the city was a great celebrationof self-organization, a design etched out by millions of small-scale, local decisions, with no master planner in sight. This principle of self-organization implied a very specific understanding of what urbanism was about.”

“Instead of being a medium for shut-ins and introverters, the digital computer turns out to be the first major technology of the twentieth century that brings strangers closer together, rather than pushing them farther apart.”

“Intefaces designed to represent communities of people rather than private workspaces.”

“The pleasures of theses games (Doom, Quake, …) is as much the pleasure of mastering a space, learning to navigate through it, as it is the pleasure of shooting things.”

“The idea of sharing these worlds with other games suggests a whole new model for community building, where the exchange between individuals no longer simply takes place withing a space. Instead, the space servers as content, not context.”

“After all, the first spatial metaphors to find their way into the computer interface were mistaken for video games, and it took years for the DOS snobs and commande-line devotees to accept the computer desktop as anything other than a child’s toy.”