Toward a Special Semantics of OS UIs
I have many thanks for the eloquently stating of the ideas in the article “About the Finder… “
It really struck a cord with me because I’ve been thinking of, nearly, the exact same thing for the past few years. I’ve been using Macs for almost 16 years now, and the interface has been pretty much the most inspiring element of my experience.
The ‘search folders’ you describe is a concept that inspired me to create a database application in high school (before I knew they existed elsewhere) - so it’s wonderful to hear someone else talking about it. I spent two years in college studying interface design and never heard the concept presented.
A point I wanted to bring up about ‘Search Folders’ was it’s foundation in Relational Databases. The existing finder has been a spacial interface because it’s based on a hierarchical file system. Hierarchy inherently implies a ‘spacial’ metaphor: one thing is above another, or is contained within it. However, I’m not sure it’s necessary to say that these concepts define a spacial metaphor - or that a ‘spacial’ metaphor is even the model people use.
Many ‘spacial’ concepts are functions of relationship. Spacial concepts pervade our thoughts and speech because they are associated to our relationship to a thing. We walk to our car (in front of us), which puts our house behind us. We go to places which encompass a category of experiences and relate ourselves to certain subsets of that category. We may sit and watch a game, others may play in it, other organized the building of the arena, and others sell concessions.
Relationships define our understanding of a thing. The fact that an object is within a box (spacial metaphor) is entirely colored by it’s relationship to that box. We do not consider the object without the box (if we do then we’re absentminded and don’t get anything done =) Whether something is in and box, on a table, in the backyard, or under our bed - our understanding of the thing which it has a relationship to defines our awareness of it.
So I’ll present this: the “location” of a piece of information is an outdated and irrelevant concept. An icon may be The Folder Itself (the icon is the file), but it has a name - and that name is just as important as the rest of the experience. “How do we introduce the concept of search folders?,” is a relevant question to transition people to a new interface paradigm - but if they never were introduced to the old concept they would not wonder where it went.
Another idea you brought up that is very relevant here is metadata and ‘shelves.’ In the vision of this interface design I’d originally seen, all data is metadata. Another concept for the ‘shelf’ paradigm is “zippering.” A ‘shelf’ can be used to (temporarily) store and organize information pulled from a variety of sources. This information is ‘zipped’ together by that shelf and can be stored as a unique [meta]data file with it’s own journaled history. All information is a an amalgam of its sources plus the inspiration and creativity of its “author.” This interface paradigm reinforces that.
There’s another angle to the relationship nomenclature in these concepts that is similar to the way some languages function (particularly ancient ones). All nomenclature, to some greater or lesser degree, is archetypal. “Foundation” can refer to the base of a building, a person’s feet, an organization’s mission statement, the roots of a tree, or the legs of a table. A ‘relationship folder’ representing the thing “foundation” may have many ‘relationship folders’ within it. These relationships could be created by a private user on their computer, or influenced by a larger search/association service (Google-esque).
§Workflows with Hyperobjects
Workflow Description for Open Hypermedia Systems, by Sanjay M. Vivekanandan, David C. De Roure,
API methods as predicate handlers (lambdas), and therefor a method signature being a truly-typed relationship between N things, along with a resultant. This could even be metaphorized to a Feynmann diagram.
