Plants

To plant is to put in place – control. Wander off the beaten path into wilderness, and plants reveal their sentience. In the kingdom of living beings, they are independent from us. Beauty lies in their province. How might our interfaces exhibit such qualities of splendor: autonomy, wildness and variance?
Rama Chorpash

Relationships & distinctions

I have come to believe that a “universal means” is not desirable. User interfaces that reduce everything a common interaction pattern seem to imply everything’s the same–they squeeze the life out of the world’s variability and ignore distinctions that help us remember things and bring to mind the different mental operations we use on different kinds of information.

Here I show the huge variability in the way we name relationships and distinctions. We can see that the English language richly differentiates among kinds of relationships and the ways entities can be distinguished. Using the same means for all entities and relationships is a crime against the beautiful complexity of the universe; it’s a misguided gesture towards simplification as a way to help people remember how to operate on things in a interface–seeming to stem from the idea that people are stupid so if you give them fewer rules to remember they do better.

In fact, people deal with ten thousand objects and relationships a day in ten thousand different ways, and I’ve rarely seen someone try to operate on a bicycle as they do a fish. It’s the rich distinction in their physical forms that activates completely different mental tool sets, enabling easy heterogeneous operations on heterogeneous objects. As interface designers
we should not be looking for ways to make everything look & act the same, but make things suggest to us how they should be manipulated–as they do in life.
Brad Paley