Jojo on UI

From: francis@ircam.fr (Joseph Francis)

fmhv@minerva.inesc.pt (Fernando Manuel Vasconcelos) writes:

rjc@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley) writes:

I'd like to make an appeal to people teaching UI design. Can you try to turn out some designers who realise that consistancy, while good when it appears accross the range of interfaces used by one user, is an evil when enforced across the interfaces of all users since each user is different.

I can certainly second that appeal. It seems to me that all this discussion if it prouves something, is that the choice of X designers not to impose a particular GUI , and the choice of MOTIF designers to keep the window manager highly configurable was a very wise decision !!!!

I would like to propose that all GUI designers eschew anything actually resembling visible display of an interface, and simply ship a library, and a loose 'conceptual' discussion of what effects the display should provoke, according to a psychological or astrological model of the user's personality (Jungian, Freudian, or Dosteyevskian), their latitutude and longitude, and blood sugar levels. It should be completely up to the user to specify a display (I believe POSEUR is addressing the shipment of design-free GUI design for user-transparent configuration: open, scalable, and extensible, the problem is almost PN complete).

Sample KIT (using a paradigm of an application which extracts semantic nets from French Literature in Translation):

  1. Parameters: none
  2. Two thick libraries, with enforced single-entry SlowRead(). and a single NoExit() for enforced modularity.
  3. Copy of More's /Utopia/, and a well-fingered /Neuromancer/
  4. One copy of Italian Vogue Summer collection '82
  5. Default Interface Processor (DIP) to generate a user-configurable default interface upon which one can generate proposed target 'research' examples.
  6. One copy of USA Today and Time (tm) magazine to be used for sample non-default graphical layout guidelines.

Sample concept discussion:

The pointer (I hesitate to use such a loaded word: for users who object to object orientation and simplistic Western-philosophy views of dichotomatic (not diatomaceous or deciduous, though wooden feelings might be appropriate for Environmentally friendly X displays) subject/object distinctions might prefer to discuss 'object compliment', or even 'compliment' (as in Complimentary beverage or Complimentary sugar-coated dry-roasted 100% genuine Virgina grown goober peas just the way they grew them in olden times) in order to provoke an awareness and create a more extensible scalable and transparent user environment for those who aren't really worried about domain/range distinctions in disjunctive noun mappings) should respond to a click (which is to say a simple tap, of varying duration depending upon the physical capabilities and inclinations of those who might be inclined to acutally depress the open, extensible, and scalable button on a mouse (though those of us who object to laboratory research mechanomorphization of living entities prefer to call 'mice' 'clickers', thus preserving the dignity of what we all must recognize is part of a larger Gaiaen web of life (which is, I must remark, open, scalable, and extensible, life that is, not the mouse) and metonymically convolving form and function into the open, scalable and extensible nomenclature of X).


XBorges.

One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate (open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to closed-form solutions.


Le Jojo: Fresh 'n' Clean, speaking out to the way you want to live today; American - All American; doing, a bit so, and even more so.