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):
- Parameters: none
- Two thick libraries, with enforced single-entry SlowRead(). and a
single NoExit() for enforced modularity.
- Copy of More's /Utopia/, and a well-fingered /Neuromancer/
- One copy of Italian Vogue Summer collection '82
- Default Interface Processor (DIP) to generate a user-configurable
default interface upon which one can generate proposed target 'research'
examples.
- One copy of USA Today and Time (tm) magazine to be used for sample
non-default graphical layout guidelines.
- XYmorph (tm): a new easy-to-use open extensible and scalable system
for randomly per/mutating user interfaces. A manifestation of the concept
of both stimulated healling and scatter-brain i/o in order to most quickly
reach suboptimal interface design with the least amount of effort on the
part of the designer or the user.
- Quagmire: a CD-rom collection of over 4 quadrillion possible interfaces
generated for a
Unix(tm)
open, extensible, and scalable graphical C-shell-feel-good-alike
system. Meets ANSI, K&R, A&P, S&H
- and other stamped standards in continental US.
- boraX: a user-configurable interface cleanser. Open, extensible, and
scalable, it removes all traces of design constraint from simple structured
systems and creates flat-design mazelike idio(syncratic/pathic/syncretic)
systems of fresh and clean code.
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.
- Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell.
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.