Nearly fifty-five years after the personal computer revolution, our ways of interacting with and within computational mediums — the actual atomic gestures, the clicking, the scrolling, the dragging-and-dropping — have barely evolved.

As Alan Kay, whose work at Xerox PARC instigated that revolution more than anyone else, put it: "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet." That line is now entering its third decade of being correct.¹

1. 1

   See Burquest (2010), especially chapter 5, for more information on this journalist's theory.

We are still, by and large, shuffling windows to and fro, seeing what we get instead of what we might mean. But something has changed. Not the interactions — the interlocutor.

Arrange interactions along these axes and something remarkable happens: you start to see the gaps. The combinations no one has tried. The territory between what we have and what we could have.¹

1. 1

   One reader told me that they did wonder what that meant & checked, but Google took them to the back posture problem instead — leaving them more confused than before!

The table is a tool for seeing the design space of human-computer interaction all at once, the way Mendeleev's table let chemists see the design space of matter — including the elements that hadn't been discovered yet.

We are still, by and large, shuffling windows to and fro, seeing what we get instead of what we might mean. But something has changed. Not the interactions — the interlocutor.

Arrange interactions along these axes and something remarkable happens: you start to see the gaps. The combinations no one has tried. The territory between what we have and what we could have.¹

1. 1

   See Burquest (2010), especially chapter 5, for more information on this journalist's theory.

The table is a tool for seeing the design space of human-computer interaction all at once, the way Mendeleev's table let chemists see the design space of matter — including the elements that hadn't been discovered yet.

Nearly fifty-five years after the personal computer revolution, our ways of interacting with and within computational mediums — the actual atomic gestures, the clicking, the scrolling, the dragging-and-dropping — have barely evolved.¹

1. 1

   One reader told me that they did wonder what that meant & checked, but Google took them to the back posture problem instead — leaving them more confused than before!

As Alan Kay, whose work at Xerox PARC instigated that revolution more than anyone else, put it: "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet." That line is now entering its third decade of being correct.

The table is a tool for seeing the design space of human-computer interaction all at once, the way Mendeleev's table let chemists see the design space of matter — including the elements that hadn't been discovered yet.

Nearly fifty-five years after the personal computer revolution, our ways of interacting with and within computational mediums — the actual atomic gestures, the clicking, the scrolling, the dragging-and-dropping — have barely evolved.¹

1. 1

   See Burquest (2010), especially chapter 5, for more information on this journalist's theory.

As Alan Kay, whose work at Xerox PARC instigated that revolution more than anyone else, put it: "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet." That line is now entering its third decade of being correct.

We are still, by and large, shuffling windows to and fro, seeing what we get instead of what we might mean. But something has changed. Not the interactions — the interlocutor.¹

1. 1

   One reader told me that they did wonder what that meant & checked, but Google took them to the back posture problem instead — leaving them more confused than before!

Arrange interactions along these axes and something remarkable happens: you start to see the gaps. The combinations no one has tried. The territory between what we have and what we could have.