Alternatives to the desktop metaphor

[IndigoGolem]

I have my own thoughts on this, but i thought i'd open up this thread and then later get them in order and share them here.


For those unaware, the Desktop Metaphor (in computers) is the metaphor that your computer is a desk. You have the desktop with icons and stuff, folders full of files, a recycling bin for files you don't need anymore, etc.

I don't know how much this still is true. I have a computer but i don't use the desktop (as in ~/Desktop), i just launch programs from the taskbar or the super menu (whatever pops up when you use the Windows key). I'm aware of the recycling bin but i rarely interact with it beyond selecting a file in my file manager and hitting the Delete key on my keyboard. I do use folders and files, and i do think of folders containing files and other folders.

Part of my uncertainty there is, i think, from the fact that i am not familiar with a desk. At least, the kind that computers are a metaphor for. I do have a desk, i'm sitting at it right now, but front and center on this desk (taking up most of the desktop) is my computer. There are drawers and cabinets with things stored in them, but i don't have nested folders of files, i just have a couple small folders in one drawer.

I also know that plenty of people use computers differently than i do. A smartphone has a homescreen (similar to a desktop), but focuses on apps rather than on folders and files (tho they do still exist there). What's the metaphor for a smartphone? I don't know if my computer still is a desk in an office, but i feel pretty sure that a smartphone isn't.

And then the point i actually wanted to make when i started this thread: what else could a computer be? I've read Doom as an interface for process management, but that's just one part of the computer and doesn't do anything about running programs or editing documents (another thing from the desktop metaphor). I got off topic again.

What other metaphors work or could work for computers?

[Dan Q]

What other metaphors work or could work for computers?

I assume you've come across what I'd call hyper-skeuomorphic metaphors like Microsoft Bob?

The most-popular non-"desktop" paradigm, I'd argue, is the hypertext document paradigm! We're using it right here on the Web! The key molecular unit is the document, and interaction is provided primarily by hit targets that do not (necessarily) "represent" any particular physical object at all! The document paradigm isn't new, though: even those it gave us the concept of the "desktop", the Mother Of All Demos always felt to me to be more document-driven (although not hypertext) than desktop-driven.

Prior to the popularity of the desktop as the metaphor for user interaction... we used the command-line. And we still do, because there's things at which it's simply superior to a full GUI!

But there've been a few other ideas, usually built "atop" desktop interfaces because they're established and popular. Some people have played with data-flow interfaces, "connecting" pipes of outputs from processes to the inputs of others: think Yahoo! Pipes for the classic example, but I'll bet somebody's come up with a visual metaphor for functional programming that would suffice the same, too. In fact, now I think about it many popular music production suites e.g. Reason use a "pipes" metaphor, albeit a skeuomorphic one to represent the fundamental hardware that's being emulated: an affordance for people coming from non-software solutions to software ones... just like the office workers who needed the "desktop" metaphor before them!

Here's another: the "room" paradigm used by some VR/XR-based computer systems. They're not very good (yet?), but I've played with several application environments where instead of "windows", your applications can be pinned to simulated physical spaces in your virtual environment. Because they are in reality backing-on to "desktop" applications, under the surface, they still feel a little desktoppy, but that's not a hard requirement: a person could build a VR-first operating system without that limitation.

Now I think of it, we're finding new paradigms in wearables and other portable non-phone devices too. Smart watches often feel like an extension of a mobile phone's OS... but they'll often pivot to a more "watch-like" interface, especially for user interaction. And in-car systems use all manner of UI affordances, from those reminiscent of physical devices like music players to icons like those from desktop environments to abstract representations of traditional car interfaces like gauges and dials.

And some ebook readers, like the early Kindles, have "book like" interfaces: even the e-ink menus require you to "flip through" the pages, although jumping between books is more like hypertext than anything else. Still: definitely no desktop!

No idea if any of that helps you; it's all very stream-of-consciousness! It seems to me that the metaphor is often part of an effort to integrate a device into its environment... and computers live on desks (or laps, but only for the lack of a desk!). And the things you can do at a desk are... anything! You can write a manuscript or a song, play a game, watch a movie, read a book... the desktop metaphor works because it's as versatile as a desk itself! It feels cumbersome when somebody shoehorns in a full desktop OS where it doesn't belong (you ever see an ATM, checkout, or digital signage board that's crashed and is showing a Windows desktop?), but it feels limiting when a "desktop" OS feels like it exposes a more-limited environment (like using a Chromebook, which feels like a "big mobile with a keyboard" rather than a real computer). The desk is universal and powerful, and so is the desktop metaphor. And I don't know how you'd come close to it in any general-purpose computer system.

[Kallistero]

Here are a few alternatives that come to me off the top of my head:

• The ZUI, Zoomable User Interface, plays nice with the tools for the desktop metaphor (as a "tables" metaphor) and it even has popular use cases in Google Maps & Prezi! You probably know how Google Maps works, it's a 2D space where you can zoom in & out to reach the info you want to reach using space & scale as your anchors. I would call the planetary metaphor a subset of this. I might be misremembering, but there may have been an era during which you could zoom all the way out of Google Maps and wind up on Google Moon. It's a lot of how Universe Sandbox works. It has meta-interface potential, where other less esoteric metaphors can be mounted within the zoomable 3D space. The limitation of things needing to be next to each other is even addressed with the idea of having portals that lead from one scale & zoom to another.
• The NUI, Natural User Interface, doesn't even have to be visible, can be controlled by gestures or voice commands or a degree of freedom of some part of your body (like the position of your foot on the gas pedal of a car).
• Airplane interface, or the gyro! In an actual airplane, you're always on the move and can control your acceleration in one axis & your rotation in three. However, I imagine that information can live along those rotational configurations, like a radial menu but with extra dimensions. Radial menus already have the advantage of allowing one to select from a few menu items without needing precision of position, only direction, with these menus often making up for low viable numbers of options by putting the options into a hierarchy where you can select more secondary options depending on the first option you selected, like in the Sims. But if those options were imprinted as if on a sphere around the user, they could have many more options, and even more than that if the user could do something like tilting their head to get a different set of options. This is a fantasy interface that I just now thought of   
• The metaphor of a tree that grows anything. It has similar structure as the desktop metaphor but helps to free the interface from the idea of paper.
• The 1.X-dimensional interface. You can basically think of it as how the Internet is structured, with discrete reachable points where you travel along links, where you could think of it as a nest of wires between electronic components but there's also the potential for semantic-axis travel, like through a comprehensive tagging system. If an architecture where one thing links to one next thing links to one other next thing is a 1-dimensional line, then one thing leading to 5 things that each lead to 15 things & some of those lead back to the first thing, you get a fractal 1.X-dimensional space. Then, if you allow travel along semantic axes (say, you tag a bunch of things as "orange" so you can travel along the "orange" dimension to see the other "orange" things), you have something like Lovecraftian wormhole space folding, even along that 1.X-dimensional space 

[lakes]

There are some interesting comparisons and alternatives here. But you know one thing I use when interacting with my desktop a lot? Workspaces, sometimes referred to as virtual desktops, and formally referred to as rooms. Basically if we think of each workspace as its own desktop (especially since XFCE lets you have different settings for the wallpaper and icons of each), then each account on a desktop OS could be argued to be a cubicle.

[IndigoGolem]

I started this thread because i woke up wondering what it would be like if instead of a graphical file manager or a CLI with the "ls" command, i navigated my computer like an IF or MUD game. It's not a folder but a room, not a file but an object. I don't cd or ls, i go north and look. I could elaborate but i don't think it would be very interesting so i won't.

Then i figured Melonland would have some interesting ideas about it, and that part was right.