• http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2107

Of desktops and coffee tables: What's your favorite surface?
Are you ready for the next major operating-system metaphor? Scott Carlson in his "Wired Campus" column for the Chronicle of Higher Education and Kate Marek in a guest post for "Tame the Web" point to demonstration videos—a couple from Microsoft and one from Popular Mechanics—for Microsoft's new "surface computing." Marek speculates that surface computing will amount to a major paradigm shift, and the visually compelling demos left me feeling that she might be right. But what is the paradigm and what is the shift?

For some time now, the 'desktop' has been the controlling metaphor for the most popular operating systems. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner offer a nice analysis in their 2002 monograph, The Way We Think:

...computer interfaces are prompts to activate, bind, and blend at the level of both conceptual structure and bodily action. The most successful interface is the "desktop," in which the computer user moves icons around on a simulated desktop, gives alphanumeric commands, and makes selections by pointing at options on menus.... The blend is an imaginative mental creation that lets us use the computer hardware and software effectively. (22-3)

So if we have been working on 'desktops' all along, why all the fuss about surfaces? I can think of at least two reasons:

1. First, the new technology narrows the gap between the physical and conceptual experience of working on a "surface." Most of the surfaces featured in the videos are horizontal. You rotate and move things with your hands. You 'hand' them to a friend, or you stack them and shuffle them in ways that are significantly more like handling physical documents than the corresponding ways of negotiating the mouse- and keyboard-mediated virtual desktop. To connect your camera to your computer, you don't need a cable and you don't get an icon on your screen; instead you just put the camera down on the surface. Of course, there is still plenty of work for the imagination; we can't normally enlarge photographs just by stretching them.
   
2. Second, although "surface" is a highly schematic concept, Microsoft seems to be inspired by a few rather specific varieties of surfaces, the coffee table being perhaps the most prominent. And a coffee table differs from a desktop in some rather inviting ways. Real desktops are often about solitary work, maybe even drudgery, while coffee tables are all about leisure and, critically, socializing. The videos feature several collaborative scenarios where users are seated around a surface. They face each other, not the screen. And like many a real coffee table, the surfaces here are a place to find glorious visual images or good things to eat and drink.
   

The emphasis on leisure and entertainment is not subtle, but it is tantalizing to imagine how a coffee table metaphor might facilitate increasingly social forms of scholarship. (See a previous posting.) If that is going to be the case, however, then we in academe will need to identify our own appropriate domain-specific surfaces. As one reader of the "Wired Campus" posting puts it: "If I use this for work, I'm going to spend 8+ hours literally hunched over a low table. If I manage to limp over to see my chiropractor, he will kill me." For her part, Marek imagines "fully automated, intelligent surface circulation desks," but I think that interactive contexts are at least as intriguing as automation. Think seminar tables and blackboards.