In the image above, there are 2 types of cards:

• On the left is a deck of cards that are neatly stacked together. It can easily fit in the palm of your hand and is ready for you to shuffle it, play with it, or do whatever you want to do with it.
• On the right is the same set of cards scattered all over the floor. It’s messy, chaotic, and confusing. You don’t know what to make of them or what to do with them, but to pick them up and stack them back up into a nice little deck.

So it looks like keeping the cards neatly stacked in a deck is the better way to organize them, but let’s entertain the thought that there could be a benefit to having the cards organized in a scattered, or “organic,” arrangement.

While it looks like a unicorn threw up all over the place, that’s how Mark Twain, Einstein, and Steve Jobs had their offices arranged, so there has got to be some sort of a good reason for such arrangement, right?

First — Better visibility.

Unlike a stack of cards, where everything is tucked away, you can see all the cards in plain sight with the organic arrangement.

Second — Meaningful patterns.

Let’s pretend that I intentionally arranged the cards that way by:

• Keeping the cards I like closer to me, while keeping the ones I don’t like away from me.
• Grouping certain related cards together.
• Having the cards I need face up, while having the ones I don’t need face down.

Third — Control.

Let’s imagine that we have some sort of magical power to control these cards any way we want, like this kid:

So if this organic arrangement actually offers better visibility, has meaningful patterns, and can be controlled freely at ease, it would no longer be inferior to the stacked arrangement.

But since we don’t have a magical power in real life, organizing things in organic arrangement may be a bit challenging, so we have chosen a limited but more manageable way to arrange things in life.

From papers to books, shoes, groceries, cars, and houses — everything in our whole world is organized in a “stack” or a “grid” arrangement.

But how about in our digital world?

Since our digital world is a magical place fueled by powerful machines where anything is possible, maybe we have figured out more efficient, interesting, or beautiful ways to do certain things, right?

Nope, not really…

The default view of anything we access on our latest computing devices is still in some variation of a “list” or a “grid” arrangement.

We still browse our files like some 1920’s office clerk shuffling through papers.

We still scroll through movies like books in an ancient library.

We still showcase our products no better than the way we used to with some dead animals and sh*t hanging on the walls at an old ass flea market.

We are trapped in the illusion of reality.

In our digital world where anything is possible, we are still limiting ourselves to the same rules and restrictions of our real world.

We still play music like the way we used to on a cassette player.

Our latest touchscreen camera apps still use the same old conventions that originated from physical camera interfaces that haven’t really changed since the introduction of The Leica I in 1925.

Now we have extended this insanity to our AR and VR space by creating interfaces where we would have to interact with tiny little buttons in fixed positions as if we are still trying to scroll, point, and click with a mouse on desktop computers that have a finite amount of one-dimensional rectangular interactive space.

So the big question is:

Are we continuing to use these conventions because they are truly the most efficient, beautiful, or interesting ways to perform these tasks with the technologies we have?

I’m gonna take a big f***ing chance, and say “no” — simply because I refused to believe otherwise.

I do not wanna live in a world where we have already reached the peak of human achievements and nothing can possibly be better than the way things are now.

Like my friend above, many people have already given up and think that we will have faster, more powerful, and lighter computing devices, but “there is not much new to be done with it.”

The year-over-year growth of smartphone sales shown below seems to reflect such sad, disappointing outlook of people on our future.

I can’t really blame people for thinking that way because even the company they consider as the most innovative in the world hasn’t introduced anything better in terms of human/digital interactions over the last 10 years.

I believe that there is a better way to interact with our digital world.

Throughout this series, I’ll introduce a new set of conventions that will allow us to interact with our digital world more efficiently and provide enhanced experiences that are not dictated by the physical shape and size of our computing devices or by pre-defined rigid linear structures of the past.

(To be continued…)

Our digital experiences take place in a bizarre world of 1’s and 0’s, so we have applied layers of realistic contexts to make sense of it.

Like skeuomorphism, these realistic contexts helped us understand how to interact with such space.

But as we got more and more familiar with our digital world, those layers have become barriers.

They have become mental blocks that prevent us from exploring the possibilities beyond the limitations of our reality – because we have applied the same restrictions and rules we face in our reality in our digital space.

We need to start peeling off some of these unnecessary layers from our digital space.

Minimalistic interfaces, gesture based interactions, and Organic Information Structures – these are not just design choices, but the “red pill” we must take to realize what we have been missing out and make fundamental changes to take a real step towards the future.

Don’t be fooled by the illusion of reality. There is something much greater out there.