A very inspiring talk tonight in Neukölln with Mathieu Baudier. He was talking about his vision for a file browser where instead of some hierarchical structure on the left hand panel (or in the case of mac, some shortcuts) and a list of files in the main panel, the left panel would be a zoomable map which would also have a time slider and all content would be geographically and temporally searchable in the browser. We talked about how natural it was for humans to remember things in a landscape and of memory palaces and how we are not just users of our operating systems, but being trained by them (what a horrific thought, especially, unfortunately for Windows users but Mac users are not free of this orthodoxy). How computers operating systems are not yet working hard enough for us, how they force us into the crummy paradigm patched together in the 70s by computer scientists when we should be forcing them into OUR paradigm of landscape, interaction, embodied space.
Come on Linux people – let’s do it!