Archive for the ‘research’ Category
Bill Verplank
Monday, January 29th, 2007I have this impression that the people who worked on the Xerox Star at Xerox in the late 70’s and early 80’s possess an incredible intuition for metaphor. The desktop metaphor did not just appear to them, no. It resulted from numerous observation sessions. I have seen some proverbial sketches-on-a-bar-napkin insight leaps where the idea of the desktop as the guiding metaphor jumped forward another operational step.
Bill Verplank was working on the interface of the Xerox Star from 1978 to 1986. Today, his design process is fantastically succinct. It sums up as finding a motivation, gathering meaning (through metaphor) for that motivation, modeling the solution space and mapping the controls mechanisms of an interface to the hooks in the solution space.
According to Bill, the meaning of the design comes from the story that you tell about it and if you can spin a good metaphor, it will makes sense to people.
Chisholm did it
Monday, January 29th, 2007Robert Chisholm wrote the paper that I’ve had brewing in my head for a few months now. But he’s freed me up to expand the idea beyond the basic ground work to practical applications for metaphor.