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Accumulated Drift
Walking through the British Museum on a lunch break, I noticed dust settled inside some of the display cases. My job at that time was designing the digital interface to the museum's vast online collection of objects. I wondered if I was looking at a leak in the archive. Pieces of museum objects mixing with today's dust. I asked an archivist whether that dust might contain material from the objects themselves, mixed with contemporary particulate drifting in from outside. They

Colm Lally
Feb 254 min read


Interfaces that Think With Us, From Map Readers to Fellow Travellers
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

Colm Lally
Feb 197 min read


Speculative Interface 01: Surfacing Latent Space
Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) scan of a paint fragment A fragment of paint lifted from the wall, magnified until it becomes terrain, then returned to the place it came from. The surface and its interior occupying the same coordinate. What appeared flat now holds ridges, fractures, crystalline architectures. Nothing was added. Nothing was discovered. The vastness was already there, compressed into the appearance of smoothness. The scan does not explain the wall. It does n

Colm Lally
Feb 193 min read
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