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Rethinking The Interface: Minimalism
Ryan Tomayko has an interesting post on his blog where he discusses a minimalistic approach to web interface design. He apparently had an epiphany after watching Edward Tufte’s critique of the iPhone. A central concept to this approach relates to "computer administrative debris":
The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface – not computer administrative debris.
More precisely, anything that exists outside of the content, or that does not fit naturally with the information being presented, qualifies as administrative debris and is therefore a candidate for elimination from the design. While this definition is not exactly synonymous with minimalism, the end result in practice may be very minimalistic indeed. As an example, we need look no further than Ryan's blog, a snapshot of which is shown in the image above. Ryan took the concept to heart, and overhauled his blog. As you can see, the result is quite low in debris.
This sort of rethinking of interface design will be essential to the evolution of ubicomp. In my previous post: What Can We Do Differently With Ubicomp? , principle #2 states:
We will layer the interfaces onto our environment and blur the line between information and things.
Clearly, we will not be able to blur these lines until we remove the "debris" we have tolerated in computer graphical user interfaces, and make them more compatible with design principles which have evolved in the non-digital world.
rk
