Summary and Analysis of:

Donelson, W. C. (1978). Spatial Management of Information. In Proceedings of Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH 78) ACM Press, pp. 203-209.

By Lance Good

Quick Summary

The author presents a system to manage and give more intuitive access to various forms of data. This system hopes to capitalize on the users innate knowledge of physical space by allowing zooming and panning through a large virtual space. The majority of the paper discusses the detailed inner-workings of this system.

Motivation

I found the motivation for this article similar to the motivation for just about any User Interface problem, namely, "How do you make technology usable for humans?" All the motivations applicable to JPad seem applicable to this system (and vice versa).

Analysis

Given the context of this paper, I found it very insightful. However, in hindsight, I would like to have heard more about problems, such as those with navigation, and approaches used to solve them. The cow pasture metaphor was okay but I couldn't actually apply it.

Comments

• Is this paper one of the first to implicitly talk about the desktop metaphor?
• I was really surprised by the similarities to JPad!
• The room dimensions are very close to the golden mean
  • Width x Depth = 18x11 = 1.636
  • Width x Height = 18x11.5 = 1.565
  • Golden Mean = 1.618
• A media room with an 8'x6' screen, octophonic sound, and joypads! Those were the days!