Interior Decorating and Computer Architecture

"Architecture" is a word often used in Computing. And yet in the field of interaction design, we often ignore this rich profession's history and learnings. And we also never let the interior decorators in. I saw a great BBC documentary yesterday from a series called 'Grand Designs'. The episode I saw (Episode 6 of series one.. sorry, no direct video link available It's actually Series 6, Episode 1, Channel4 website info on the show, with video.. Thanks Dean!) told the story of building a novel partially underground house. The amazing thing to me was how spacious, lighted and beautiful the resulting rooms were.

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A sense of space What 'worked' about this house was the sense of space created by this inner 'atrium' and by the use of glass instead of solid walls. Glass roofs brought in views of the sky. But what is a 'sense of space'? Sounds very artsy. In this house, it was the ability to see into the space. Even if you could only get there by walking through another area, the eyes seem to love being able to catch a glimpse into the distance, whether that's the far corner of another room, or the blue sky above. Could a computer user interface be so beautiful and feel so spacious? We face the same challenges as house architects:

Making as virtual room within four sides Guiding the flow of our guests Avoiding people getting lost And creating spaces to store our guest's expanding collections of 'stuff'

So where are all the references to the hundreds of years spent learning how to do this in traditional architecture? How can we apply the same learnings? I've never read a book on house architecture with the intent to apply it's teachings to UI design.. but I want to.

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You don't sell an unpainted house Tim and Zoe are the couple who built the house. Tim was in charge of initial construction, and Zoe guided the end stage. Until Zoe got an opportunity to be involved, the place looked like an underground carpark -- and with good reason, as it was essentially an underground box made of poured concrete. Zoe brought color, life and æsthetics. Each room has a particular color and set of painted features to better define the space. In computer terms, this looks like the concrete carpark.

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Whereas this has far more contextual information. (Æsthetics aside)

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Computer interfaces still look like they came from the set of a 50s Science Fiction TV series. Polished metal, shiny everything. We're fast approaching the ability in computer graphics to create any kind of space we want. Would that be a shiny shuttle interior or would it be a spacious, sunlit, gentle atrium view?

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