Learning From Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

20 years ago, Jef Raskin (the founder of the Macintosh project) asserted that the desktop interface strategy was “inefficient and inhumane.”

It’s a little depressing that these days we mainly use computers to consume fast and react fast. Task management turns us into more productive human machines. Rather conveniently for managers, human machines have higher predictability and lower inherent value – they’re easy to automate, replace, and erase.

Productivity is important, but it’s just on... See more

When Victor designs a software interface, he doesn’t do it to deliver functionality — he does it to advance an argument, in much the same way that 20th-century utopian architectural designs were never really intended as functional building plans. Victor’s UI demos are primarily manifestos on the sorry state of computer-assisted thought, framed with... See more

we’re going to look back at how we designed the world around computers with the same regret that we look at how we’ve designed cities around cars