Beyond the Desktop Metaphor in Seven Dimensions

The ubiquitous use of the desktop metaphor as the primary means of interacting with information is perhaps the earliest, and arguably the most profound, landmark of user interface design. Ironically, such a success is both a great past achievement and a difficult future challenge to overcome. Computing technologies and user experiences available to people in our current web-driven world are evolving rapidly. In fact, the strict concept of the desktop metaphor is already a " straw man " notion, but it can help us characterize where we were and where we are going. We are already in mid-flight from the desktop metaphor to somewhere else. Although we cannot be sure where we are going, we can discern different dimensions in which things are changing. The research presented in the chapters of this book represents some notable efforts in moving beyond desktop-metaphor-based computing. In this concluding chapter we reflect and comment on seven dimensions of change along which we see future integrated digital work environments being different, as experienced by users, from today's computing environment. Our analyses and speculations are based on the chapters in this book and our own research, as well as the HCI literature and information technology trends in general. In the spirit of concluding this book, we do this in very broad strokes that try to capture major themes. Here, in a nutshell, are the dimensions of change that we will examine: 1. The basic change is that personal information is being liberated from the constraints of the desktop/office metaphor. It is being dispersed in the networked world in what we might call a " personal information cloud ". 2. Several other kinds of changes follow from this. The desktop metaphor standardized, and thus limited, the ways information was presented. New ways of organizing personal information are spawning a great variety of new representations and visualizations. 2 3. The desktop metaphor was designed for a standardized computational form factor, the workstation and laptop. The proliferation of new forms of computing devices both requires and exploits the information cloud to allow information to " follow the user ". 4. The desktop metaphor is built around keyboarding and pointing. The multiplicity of devices of different sizes and functions forces designers to develop new modes and modalities of physical interaction techniques. 5. Not only is information liberated from the desktop, but so also are software applications. Functional computations delivered as …