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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
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