Alan Kay reflects on the history of user interfaces as a field, his involvement with them, and where he sees them going. This is the paper where he most clearly unpacks his ideas about personal computers being a medium—a new set of structures which people will internalize to decode and generate expression. In print, that was rhetoric and abstract thought; in computing, its processes and systems.
One of the other key claims of this piece is that transformative ideas for user interfaces come from transformative ideas about cognition. I want this to be true… but his examples (LOGO, via Piaget; Alto via Bruner) aren’t all that persuasive to me. Maybe this is just the naive and foolish view of someone who wasn’t there, but I think that team would have arrived at icons and overlapping windows without Bruner’s taxonomy, given NLS’s existence.
On the state of UI design as a field: “Everyone seems to want user interface, but they are not sure {whether they should order it by the yard or by the ton}.”
Q. According to Kay, when the did the dawn of UI design occur?
A. When designers noticed that better understandings of users’ minds could create new paradigms of interactions.
Q. Where did Kay first see a flat-screen display?
A. University of Illinois
Q. What argument led Kay to realize that the computer is a medium?
A. McLuhan’s claim that the printing press transformed society not just by making books more available but “by changing the thought patterns of those who learn to read”.
Q. Kay contrasts the idea of computers as a medium with what (2) other metaphors?
A. tool, vehicle
Q. For McLuhan, why are new mediums necessarily transformative for their users?
A. To receive a message written in a particular medium, you must have internalized the medium enough to decode the message expressed within it.
Q. In what sense did Kay hope computers would be “the opposite of” television?
A. By being so interactive, they wouldn’t induce the same passive stance.
Q. What example does Kay give of the idea that better understandings of users’ minds could create new interaction paradigms?
A. He points to Piaget’s influence on LOGO’s design (which I don’t understand).
Q. Why does Kay suggest that the iconic system is so creative?
A. It doesn’t get blocked because it’s always darting around, so it’ll usually find some interesting pattern.
Q. Explicate the significance of the word order in “doing with images makes symbols”.
A. It’s best to start with the concrete (“doing with images”), then use that intuition to expand into the symbolic.
Q. In the Alto system, what part corresponded to “makes symbols”?
A. Smalltalk.
“I have always believed that of all the ways to approach the future, the vehicle that gets you to the most interesting places is {Romance}.”