ConcreteKisses

Hello! Thanks for the response. I'm admittedly still very inexperienced in regards to this field. Heck, I only just started to get serious about it when my frustrations about HTML boiled over a few months back. I have some things to say about your posts, but I'd rather not get into long dead arguments, so I'll just say this. The things that have been left behind, in talks clapped at but ever implemented, are still endlessly valuable stepping stones in research. It's why I encourage you to make the research you've created into something tangible, to test it, to make it weird, to see what works, and then to make it less weird. If it didn't yield results for you, it may yield results for another, and that's what counts. The goal in making interfaces, at least for me, is to encourage customization and homebrew research, and hopefully a Cambrian explosion of folk design. The visions that exist for desktop customization, even in the most extravagant desktop modding circles, I've seen a depressing lack of invention in making interfaces truly theirs. I want to help make the tools to change that. I think a desktop connected to the internet at all times being the sole medium for development is... horrifying. The keyboard and mouse, the screen, and hell, the desk and chair, should be parts of a future, not the whole future. I can't really elaborate on my solutions, as I'd much prefer to talk about it publicly once I have an actual demonstration released, and have that demo be replicable with moderate ease. A part of Ross's vision was a library of test builds that feature novel, experimental UIs. A trove of quirks and invention that may not always work, but can be valuable even through elimination. That's the kind of spirit that should flourish in inventing interfaces. Novelty, even if it can be silly, grasps for what isn't seen, and sometimes those grasps can grip onto something truly, truly special. Also, I'm an artist and a toymaker at my core, so even embarrassing failures can make for great jokebooks. Edit: My issues with the UI have grown to be quite different compared to Ross, so I'll just lay down my main goals in research. Building web-based media (or at least concepts for media) that encourages anyone to make a web-based art piece in an afternoon. Using that media to build environments where computing, programming, and peripheral design is accessible to anyone. Promoting and developing alternatives to the current internet, and not in the Tiktok/Facebook sense, but rather URLs and HTML. All of these are things that have irked me to no end ever since I embraced making art, and they'll irk me for quite some time.

Hi!! This video has been sitting in the back of my mind for nearly 3 years now, and has honestly developed into a quiet obsession and a deep frustration. I've slowly grown to loathe not just the GUI, but also the lack of development for peripherals, that the keyboard, mouse, and touchscreen have become the only media which to create. So I'd like to show some of the stuff that I picked up over time, mainly because I'm not knowledgeable enough to tackle these problems yet, and I know someone on here is. The Mother of All Demos (Douglas Engelbart and the developers at the Augmentation Research Center) I know there's a good chunk of people here that have seen this, but I don't want to risk not leaving this in. Engelbart's vision has been incredibly fundamental to the field of personal computing, with the above demo featuring windows, hypertext, and collaborative screen sharing programs. In 1968. Personally, the fact that his work has been reduced to the mouse is tragic. The mouse is wonderful, absolutely! But the other things he and his team built have been diminished to fit within systems that haven't changed since 1995. Hypertext has been funneled into the fickle, impenetrable language that is HTML. The mouse, as wonderful as it is, hasn't changed much in design, with the programs that are built for it requiring unreasonable accuracy to simply navigate. Priming your hand for use is clumsy too, which I think is a very fundamental part of why switching between typing and mousing is so awkward. Also I'm furious that the chord-based keyboard never caught on. It's such a wonderful idea compared to the mess that is hotkeys. Here are some other bits and bobs that I've found to be deeply valuable, and have given me hope. It's a short list, as I've only scratched the surface. http://worrydream.com/ - Bret Victor has made some wonderful articles about interaction design. (My Favorites: A Brief Rant, The Future of Programming, The Humane Representation of Thought) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7yLL5fJxT4 - ViHart's "1 Year of VR Research" is incredibly inspiring, though I wish this wasn't constrained to pairs of goggles and sticks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc - Alan Kay's "Normal Considered Harmful", while I have some reservations with it's statements on file size and computation, did genuinely confront and challenge me. There are other things that I've been delving into that aren't listed here, but they're more oriented to education, information design, and play. Thank you for dealing with my rant.