Thinking with Interfaces  For over four decades, the desktop metaphor has shaped how we think about the computer interface. Introduced with the Xerox Star in the early 1980s, it framed the computer as an office-like environment populated by familiar objects: files, folders and documents. By grounding interaction in everyday physical experience, the desktop metaphor provided users with a stable mental model for navigating an otherwise immaterial system. The desktop did not sim

Within organisations, when thinking needs to be done, a team session is often treated as the natural setting. Faced with a problem to be solved, the default response is to bring people together and work it through. But thinking does not automatically improve when it becomes social. Some forms of reasoning benefit from interaction; others require time to form individually before they can be productively shared. The difference is not whether people collaborate, but when  and ho

While thinking tools describe how individuals reason, thinking systems describe what happens when thinking is distributed across people, structures, and technologies. Most meaningful decisions today are not made by isolated minds, but by systems: teams, organisations, institutions, markets, platforms, and increasingly, human–machine hybrids. In these contexts, thinking is shaped less by individual intelligence and more by incentives, feedback loops, communication structures,