Watched three gentlemen at a coffee shop who pulled two tables together, with paper and laptop laptops spread out across them talking business. Wasn’t so much interested in topic, but I paid attention to how they were using the space to interact and manage their discussion. There were hand motions from one person. There was pointing at paper and shuffling between files with another person. All of them had a piece of their eye going towards the laptop, which had a privacy film on it. All of this in order to collaborate in a space and across several modalities that were comfortable to them individually, and collectively.

When looking at a canvas, we often think that work is some type of linear output. That things come in - as if they are shards of thought pointed together. And then ourselves or in collaboration with others we come to some kind of output that equals or makes more clear a solution for a dedicated outcome. However, the workspace is a lot messier than this. The workspace sometimes needs for us to pull together, artifacts that we don’t own, but are needed as a foundation to hold up other pieces. The workspace sometimes needs for us to have capability, ability, and distinction. We do more than just point and click. We, mold.

Some of the challenges about looking at spatial computing, gesture-based interfaces, or anything that is not a clamshell laptop with a pointing device, falls into this broken edifice of sculpting. The tools are not really things that we can use to sculpt as much as they are stencils for stacking. But, there are those people who play with interface elements, those people who design alternate means of getting to the same or different/remixed information who find more of their hands and mind’s ability to be leveraged. In metallurgy, one will call these people blacksmiths or alchemists. But it simply means somebody who’s able to take a multitude of context and meta-information and then create something from anything. Not simply just stacking, but literally mixing and remixing.

I wonder if software would be better served if it was something that we could mold… And I don’t mean code. But I mean a more tactile expression with intuition, tempo, and even dithering as part of the behavior of use?

I wonder if this silicon experiment ever gets into molding?