Journal heironymouscoward's Journal: Heironymous' Pilespace 4
This is a design proposal for a new kind of desktop metaphor.
The origin of this idea came from an article in the Economist that immediately struck a chord with me. Yes, yes, I thought as I read this. A tidy desk is indeed the sign of a twisted mind, if you're a creative person who works by distilling order from chaos.
Clutter is not bad, clutter is the raw material from which Good Things come. My filing system is my desk, all my active work spread out in concentric piles of interest. I can imagine my paleolithic stone-chipping ancestors spreading their tools and raw materials out on a ledge inside a dry warm cave...
If it works on my physical desk, why not on my screen? Why does every filing system available insist on classifying, organizing, and structuring my data? What if the very act of structuring my data was incompatible with the creative processes?
Why, after 20 years of using computers, do I keep all my really interesting and valuable stuff in a single folder called "temp"? Bizarre, I don't usually think of myself as disorganized or inefficient. Quite the contrary, you should see my kitchen: when people see it for the first time, they ask how long I was in the army for.
Why are UI designers making "smart menus" that hide unused options? Clearly I'm not the first person to think of a self-organizing UI. But while tweaking a broken model may be one way of improving things, I'm don't think it's useful.
No, the first rule of design is that if the user does not use a feature properly, the feature is badly designed. Ergo the conventional concept of a hierarchical filing system, which I don't use correctly unless I am forced to create structures for other people to use, is badly designed.
What I really want is a simple UI that works like my desk, or desks. I can throw stuff down, organize my ideas and projects into rough piles, and each new item causes the entire mess to reorganize so that the most useful, current, important things remain most obvious, and the least used, oldest, most ignored stuff gets relegated into an infinite background.
This journal entry will serve as prior art to protect this idea from some predatory corporation that thinks it can make a buck from it. Too late, buddies.
I've looked around, but no-one is working on anything like this AFAICS. So, I'm going to have to put my money where my mouth is, and implement this in software. When a prototype is ready, I'll announce it here.
Filing (Score:2)
No, it's designed for other people to be able to find what the first person filed. So you are using it correctly for it's intended purpose, and it may not be the correct tool for something that you don't need anybody else to find. The problem is that there's not much thinking done on what is the correct tool for that type of situatio
Mabye On A Mac (Score:1)
There was some discussion on the Mac rumor sites for some time about this concept of piles [macrumors.com]. Stuff gets added to the pile on the desktop. Click hold to open the pile and scroll through for items that you want. Here's someone's demo [mac.com] in flash.
Apples and oranges (Score:2)
I'm a filer because of the nature of my work I have a lot of people who have to find information that I handle and I don't want to be bothered with them asking me for it.
My "pile" is on my Palm Pilot. I constantly update the schedule and task items in the Palm because my axiom is "if it's not on the Palm, it doesn't exist." My pile is there, I keep my
Filing and Piling (Score:2)
My problem is that my computer, primary tool for all my creative work, has no UI assistance for the primary way I organize my creative work. All the structured data stores I use (file system, CVS, databases, workflow systems, email inboxes, todo lists) are excellent in their domain, but somehow they don't click with about 60% of my work.
I find that now I create five or six "piles" as various temporary director