I had a good bit of fun today in both my First Year Seminar and Literature and New Media class riffing off of Dickie and Cindy Selfe's critique of the desktop metaphor. First, it's always helpful to make visible things we take for granted like the ways interfaces construct our computing experience. We hit upon familiar concerns such as the potential gendering and economizing of computing based on the metaphor. And we touched upon what might be gained by alternative models like sandboxes and such. We harkened back to tensions between work and play and the history of graphical interfaces; I even snuck in a reference to an old standard, "Not Maimed but Malted". (I really need to go back in time and fix those server-based image maps on that article.)

And the discussion pointed out issues I had not yet thought about, such as the residue of play and the tension in the office space with activities like cutting and pasting.

Perhaps most enjoyable, however, was our development of the kitchen metaphor to provide a conceptual underpinning for our initial foray into Web building. We really got into it, debating whether cabinets or refrigerators work best to represent file storage, wondering about pre-processed food in the microwave versus home cooked meals and exploring how one might shop for ingredients, alter composing recipies, and serve what one makes to others. We mapped street addresses for a kitchen/restaurant over domains and URLs and looked at the ways public and private spaces on servers can help us cook and serve new media meals. It's impossibly inadequate, but I tried to capture a bit of the conversation on the white board [flash movie]. Finally, the Web building we did after the discussion went quite well, especially the file management and server connection steps.