Adam Wilson

17 February 2005

Braindump: Virtual Space vs. Real Space: When does the metaphor become the origin? We had a fascinating discussion in my Online Communities class about "Virtual Architecture." Among the topics were metaphor and space design. Using metaphors to design virtual spaces is an incredibly useful tool to make them easily useful. Their usage, however, does significantly constrain the possible design space. There is a strange transcendence of mapping physical affordances onto virtual space that seems to suggest that it might be harmful in the long-term. Take, for instance, the desktop metaphor for designing computer interaction. This makes newer users of computers more comfortable with the radically different capabilities of a PC versus a desk. Folders behave somewhat similarly, documents look like their paper counterparts, even the background is a 2-dimension surface on which documents rest upon and overlap each other. It's fine and dandy. However, computers are slowly replacing the traditional desk. The desk increasingly only serves as a surface that raises the computer to a comfortable typing and viewing height. I know this is conjecture that hasn't come about yet (in fact in some cases, like paper, the opposite is happening), but what happens when the computer completely replaces the traditional desktop? The origin of the metaphor will be gone. No one learning how to use a computer will have had experience with a collection of papers, collating documents inside a folder, or laying out things on a desk. The origin of the metaphor will be the computer's environment itself. But, the computer was designed that way to give novices something to relate to. That relation through the metaphor will map only to itself in this future. What's the point of the metaphor, then?

The last few things I screwed with: