Dancing_without_gravity: A story of interface design

Abstract

An interface must perform just one function: to serve as the mediator between the user’s wishes and the abilities of the machine. Good interface design has this goal as its beginning, but moves forward to advance the properties of ease, logic, elegance, consistency, wit and beauty in its form. The digital cartographic commodity as ideal map vernacular proposes an extension of the possibility of the paper map. This is only realizable if we remove the map from allegory and free it from metaphor. Interface metaphors have become redundant and clumsy, dampening the experience of “using the map”. As much as possible, the map must serve as the means by which the user explores the information. It is through this confrontation with the programmatic agenda that a rich form/content dialectic can be engendered. These are the understandings that served as the starting point for problematizing the design of interfaces used in decision-making environments developed in the Earth Sciences Sector of Natural Resources Canada and the Canadian Geomatics industry. This chapter will discuss these approaches.