User: AlainV

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I have been doing sometimes intensive, sometimes relaxed, research on the nature of virtual desktops for the last 8 years. Before that I did regular readings on digital documents and their gradual introduction in office environments.

In 1988 while I was preparing and teaching an introductory course in Office Automation at Université du Québec à Montréal's Faculty of Management, I discovered Thomas Malone's famous article "How do people organize their desks? Implications for the design of office information systems." (ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1(1):99--112, 1983.). This article was quite an eye-opener because it made me realize I was not the only one wondering about the "mundane" aspects of the transition to virtual desktops.

In August 1996 I was violently struck by an article in the Communications of the ACM: The Anti-Mac Interface, by Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen. The authors proposed in fact an anti-direct manipulation interface. I considered the direct manipulation interface (as embodied at first by the Xerox Alto prototype and later commercialized as the Lisa and the Mac by Apple) to be a newborn baby, in need of parenting, and general care by an extended family, in a variety of ways. These gentlemen seemed to want to choke the infant in the crib. Worse still they seemed to want to replace him (or her) by a changeling which looked, to me, like a throwback to the dark days of the command line interface. This spurred me to undertake a period of intense study on the topic of the direct manipulation interface in general and document representation on the (virtual) desktop in particular.

I am, of course much grateful to Gentner and Nielsen for having motivated me so, just as I am grateful to Malone. But in addition, I have also a lot of gratitude towards Nielsen,for making me discover usability testing, through his numerous publications on usability. I hold just about as much gratitude for Gentner, because of his work on the guidelines for the JAVA look and feel. I have never worked with JAVA or worked with people using JAVA, but those guidelines are so well written that I keep holding them as an example of how to write user interface guidelines correctly, with just enough illustrations in a variety of media. The anti-Mac article had left me so stunned that I had scoured the Web for everything about or by Gentner and Nielsen, and that is how I discovered usability and the JAVA interface guidelines. Both proved to be extremely useful in my research work.

About a year and a half ago I needed to cool down a bit, and get a wider perspective on what I was looking for. I did not want to stray too far however, so I kept my mind busy with readings on a related topic: The evolution of real desk forms and related "office" work through the centuries.

My research on glyphs, icons, thumbnails and the myriad ways of giving an original graphic identity to digital documents is not quite ready for prime time. On the other hand the readings, the notes, the references I have taken down on the topic of desks and desktops should really go out somewhere. This is why I have started writing a series of Wikipedia articles. I am doing it very gradually, starting at A with Armoire desk and adding a bit every day, with more articles at first and then some "encyclopedic" items to the same articles, like references and illustrations. The list of desk forms and types is partly a summary of the desk articles I have started.

I am also making additions to related articles such as ones dealing with the user interface and others dealing with the industrial revolution. The different phases of the industrial revolution (or the first industrial revolution, the second industrial revolution and so on, if you prefer these terms) all tie these elements together from an historical point of view. The article on the office of the future and others linked to it tie up things from the point of view of the user interface issue.

And I am making a few additions to articles related to Military History and to the History of Technology.

And I made the Whippet disambiguation page