[IxDA Discuss] Bumptop

[Jonas Löwgren]

To me, the Bumptop demo seems a very well crafted example of  
captivating interaction. High scores for pliability, in the sense  
that you can expect people to start playing with surface well beyond  
any instrumental reasons for approaching it in the first place --  
which means that they are more likely to discover content they didn't  
know they were interested in.

Given that, I am not sure a GUI desktop document demo is the most  
compelling one. Are there other examples of infoviz that would depend  
less on task-oriented search and more on serendipitous discovery?  
Products in an e-catalogue? Movie clips in a media archive? Snippets  
of web page content in a portal? Pictures in photo albums?  
Inspiration material in a sketching environment for designers (cf.  
Cabinet, PhD at Delft by Keller)?

Concerning explorative design/pushing the boundaries, it is  
interesting to note that Bumptop is the first compelling  
demonstration I have seen of the desktop-pile ideas that were  
advanced in 1991 by people at Apple Research (in a chapter of The Art  
of HCI Design, ed. B. Laurel). Apparently, it can sometimes take 16  
years for technology and design to advance to the level where a  
conceptual proposal starts making "practical" sense.

On the downside, I guess Bumptop suffers from similar problems as  
many other proposed GUI desktop makeovers. It doesn't really scale,  
it doesn't add a magnitude of qualitative value. Broadly speaking, I  
would guess that you can comfortably handle perhaps twice as many  
elements on a BumpTop surface (compared to a traditional GUI design)  
before occlusion, collisions during drag and other overhead outweighs  
the benefits. This is not an order-of-magnitude improvement, and thus  
would probably not motivate a massive phase-out of existing  
technology and investments in learning the skills of traditional GUI  
juggling.

I would look for other areas of application where the pliability/ 
captivity qualities of Bumptop could be used to even better advantage.

Jonas Löwgren
----
Arts and Communication
Malmö University, SE-205 06 Malmö, Sweden

phone +46 7039 17854
web http://webzone.k3.mah.se/k3jolo