_That was quite a remarkable evening, Bill Verplank presenting at BayCHI on Sketching Metaphors. First of all his presentation style. He had an overhead camera connected to the projector in a way that the audience could follow all his actions on the desktop. This gave him the flexibility to simply point to images in a book, show his note cards, or develop (and explain on the way) something entirely from scratch. For example on the image above Bill describes the origin of the window scrollbar and the dead metaphor of an elevator for the thumb control in the bar to the right [metaphors in italics 😉 ]
In a closing section he provided an enlightening diagram on various computer paradigms.
The computer as a tool you can use, the computer as media for information sharing and communicating with each other, and the computer as an intelligent person to interact with. If you go a step further the tools become vehicles, media becomes fashion (take Apple’s iPod as an fashion statement for example), and person becomes life – and ecosystem of self organizing systems.
Thank you Bill, for this framework of computer paradigms.