the lexiaProject public gui initiative

project history

During the winter of 1995, my dream of attending a graduate program called the Visual Language Workshop (VLW) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab was shattered when I learned that the program had been suspended due to the tragic loss of its leader, Muriel Cooper. Through a very strange set of circumstances, and my own determination, I ended up applying for a teaching position at the VLW. That August, having survived the first cut, I visited the Media Lab to give a lecture as part of my application process. Various images from my 1995 lecture, Spacetime Text. The topic was inspired by reading the text on the side of a soda can. The premise of my lecture, called Spacetime Text, was that all design efforts should be considered four-dimensional. In other words, designers must always remember that time is an integral and essential part of every experience a user has with a designed object or artifact. The example I selected to demonstrate this philosophy was reading text on a computer screen. Because reading is inherently a temporal process, I argued, it might be better conceived as an animation when using an electronic media, rather than as a static imitation of paper (as is typical with window-based computer interfaces). I have spent several years investigating the notions introduced in that original lecture and the result is documented by this web site.

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