The Personal Information Environment beyond the Personal Computer

FireFly - one thousand computers on a Christmas tree

vfridge - a fridge door on the web

abstract

The interface to personal computers has changed little in more than 30 years since the landmark Xerox Star. Beneath layers of metaphor for the user and window management system abstractions for the developer, there is a deep underlying model of disk + processing + screen & mouse/keyboard. While the mouse and physical keyboard have sometimes morphed into touch screen and soft keyboard, and network and cloud devices masquerade as local disks, the underlying model is unchanged. However, users have seen their personal information, which was previously fragmented one filing system, email, etc. further dispersed onto Flickr, cloud services and social networks. To some extent mobile platforms, iOS, Android, Windows ME, present a different model, but if anything often heavily fire-walled Apps further fragment the user experience. What might a personal information environment be like that took seriously the fact that the objects of interest to a user are photos and documents, not files stored on disks, jobs to be done not apps?