User:AlainV
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I have been doing sometimes intensive, sometimes relaxed, research on the nature of virtual desktops for the last seven 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 growing up and changing. 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.
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. I am keeping it, and all things directly related to it out of the Wikipedia, for now.
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.
