from FAZ.NET, 7th 3. 2011
Our new Bauhaus
We criticize anything, but not the aesthetics and functionality of any computer software. We should understand that technology needs of art and design. We need a Bauhaus aesthetics for the digital era.
By David Gelernter
parts 
Twitter 
Who even throws in a look at a classical Greek-style building that can see that it consists of vertical and horizontal elements, which interact in a certain way. One need not between columns differ freestanding columns, half columns and pilasters, between architraves, friezes and cornices in one of the Five Orders, to see how a classic building.
cyber worlds are similarly varied in detail and simple in basic structure. But for several reasons it is difficult to discern the basic structure of software. First, we are not accustomed to regard critical software. We live in an age of criticism, literature, art, architecture, Cultural criticism, not criticism of the software. Second, the industry would not want us to recognize the simple structure. And finally, like many journalists, technologists and engineering simplicity, restraint and elegance do not distinguish the Parthenon or the Dessau Bauhaus. Enter rococo palaces with their hidden staircases, hidden caves and underground lakes in preference, such as Microsoft Word or Apple's iTunes they represent.
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However, everything that happens in the world of digital information processing - like everything in the classical architecture - the variation of a simple theme. It is time to reflect on this issue. The two orthogonal basic elements of the cyber world are space-and time-related information structures. Spatial structures operate on the principle of a desk, bookcase or Shop window. We remember where the information resides. The Windows desktop, a conventional website, the app screen of a smartphone, the screen with the results of a Web search and the Music Finder on an MP3 player - are all the spatial information structures.
Time-based work structures, such as musical scores, scripts, screenplays and diaries. Who is moving it from front to back, moving forward in time. Who goes backward, moving in the past. A roll of film is a period role. Of course, borrow from time-related structures of the room a dimension to represent time on the screen. This procedure is known since the first time a chronicle of war in parallel lines engraved on a stone tablet or was spiraling on a winning column moved in the air.
the subject
The entries on a blog, the news in a mailer, the tweets on Twitter, the notes on a Facebook Wall or in any other "Activity Stream" are elements of time-related information structures - like the successive frames on a roll of film. The above-mentioned time-related structures are all examples of Eric Freeman and I invented the mid-nineties "Lifestreams" ("Activity Streams"). But time-related structures as such are as old as the first written diary, the first written history.
folds of the digital desktop
These simple facts would be in the very first section of a textbook on Cyber structures, if that would be. We like to say, from information to be fascinated, but have no time for this basic knowledge - and this is strange. Maybe we allow ourselves to be blinded by the very gifts of the gods technology (which appear to be living in a valley in California), that we were to resign as a step and think about. Any practical information environment requires the interaction of space and a time-based structure. In any rational cyber world, there are open borders between separate space-and time-related structures, so that information can move easily between them. The problem facing policy spatial structures (Cyber surfaces) is the fact that computer screens are too small. Most are smaller than the average desk or work table. But the size of an average desk reflects the average size and the work habits of the people. Information surfaces need to use the small space efficiently if they have good potential to collapse the Cyber furniture or to compress and unfold as needed.
desktop icons to offer this end, sites and search engines offer links; Smartphones offer App Screens. Icons are compressed files, windows or applications, links sites are compressed and so on. Icons, links and similar devices, the inflatable liferafts the information world. They are all ultimately the same thing. Although as the icon on your desktop may click on a file that resides on your hard disk, while a link refers to any site in Mongolia. The icon is an image, while the Link usually consists of words. Icons are scattered across your desktop, embedded links, however in a text. But these are arbitrary distinctions that have no meaning. Instead of complicating the appearance of the site's text, one could place links to the edge of the document and plot.
migrations on the screen
There is no compelling reason to show why MP3 player apps on top of the screen level as music icons and others at lower levels. If one resorts to a song more often than on a particular app should be a Icon that represents this song, walk up and get a place alongside the other icons on the top screen, while the shift is less frequently used app on a deeper level. Which icon should represent a piece of music? How about if we were to offer the user several thousand icons and would leave him the choice? The "iconic turn", the turn to the picture, ensuring that images for us today are as important as speaking. However, there is no evidence that our ability to image - carefully - to be considered, would have improved over the last centuries.
fact may be that the huge number of images are all around us, images can appear cheap, so we perceive them only in passing and sluggish. "Choose an icon" would be a simple exercise that could improve our vision in subtle ways. The MP3 player raises an interesting software problem. Apple deserves credit for the creativity and the skill with which the company developed its pod. But the software makes it almost unsuitable for a serious approach to music - although it is probably one of the best listening tools ever developed. There are a few apps take care of this problem, but here it requires a fundamental redesign. Music files must be loaded together with basic information about the performers and the performance.
It must be easy to download the sheet music. It must be easily possible to provide the score with notes and share them with others. You have several performances of a song phrase by phrase easily compare and relate to each other if necessary, additional information from the cloud can. You press a button, and as long as you press it, pour in. more information - to the instrumentation, the performance history, the life of the composer. Of course you should connect the player to a larger audio system and use it as a TV screen can display. The process should be characterized by a high degree of integration, ease of use and a nice design.
transfer files between all devices
I have spoken of information surfaces, but of course, a spatial structure are three-dimensional. As Xerox scientists in the seventies, the modern, invented on windows based graphical user interface, they turned the computer screen in front of an opaque surface, as a sheet of virtual paper. But she would have just as well described as a transparent window with a three-dimensional space on the other side. You should file can move apps, music and videos easily by simply dragging a cyber surface to the other. You should be able to easily drag a video from the mail program of your laptop to your TV or digital music from your computer to an audio system or photos from your phone to your MP3 player or text files from the PC to the laptop. How does it work? Click on your laptop on "All my devices, and display a list of all your devices so you can move data and files between them. Such a button is not there yet, but he will soon be - if the users just want it. Unfortunately, computer users tend to passivity. We only want what the industry offers us already.
With Cyber surface each time-based structure and vice versa. The time-related structure is a story of their past (or its expected future) use of the surface. Connected to the Windows Desktop is a History is open or generated files and apps. Save with the Cyber surface on the mobile phone number, a history of calls placed and received calls, sent and received messages is connected. With MP3 players connected, time-related structures are a history of the track being played. A playlist is a time-based structure with information about a sequence of songs you want to play in the future. Time-related structures (short streams) based on several interlinked requirements. If you want to find a document, you must be able to browse the stream and to browse - it has a graphical display type that you as a desktop enables easy browsing for items, that is, to jump forward and backward through the various elements, as you leaf through a book or magazine. The stream must act as a real-time communication channel and as a permanent archive. The stream must act as a private or collaborative media.
past and future flows
The stream may contain documents that belong to you, and to which only you have access. Or is it completely public - users around the world see the same stream, while new items are added. Or is it a combination of private and public stream. The stream must have a past and a future. The past is history. The future consists of plans - appointments, reminders, guidelines, and the like. In practice, different types of streams have different characteristics. E-mail streams are private. Twitter streams and blogs are public or part of the public. E-mail streams show only the past. Playlists point to the future. And so on. To illustrate
To the basic equivalence of the different types of streams, we want the court of a large tenement imagine on an old-fashioned clothes line tension. The clothesline can e-mail system for communication among the residents act. If anyone would like another resident of something, he writes it on a sheet of paper, folds the paper, the recipient's name written on the outside and hangs it on a leash, and indeed at one end or the first free location. The messages accumulate, and they start at one end of the line and work your from there to the other end. If anyone sees his name on a message, he goes out and reads them. Then he hangs the paper back on the leash so he can remember where it is.
As each e-mail system is also a washing line system for storing old messages. Everyone can see the line, but only read the messages that are addressed to him. This system, we could directly translate into software (an Internet e-mail system), by the line drive you stored in the cloud stream. The residents could use their clothesline for public announcements. You write them down and hang the sheet on the lead, fold up without it.
Now we not only have an e-mail system, but a simple form of Twitter, a tweet is a public release. Every resident who has an eye on the washing line provides each tweet as soon as it is published. Of course, someone could restrict their tweets to a subset of the people by the hand and folded it as "Ground floor only" to write. Let's say, twenty people shared the washing line stretched across the yard. Then it would be an e-mail and a social network system for twenty participants. But at twenty million subscribers, the system does not help. In short: Mailer are basically the same as Twitter, the same as the Facebook Wall, the same as any blog or Activity-stream. All streams are, like all Cyber surfaces, basically the same.
humanization of technology
Lifestream Our original system was connected to its own spatial structure that we have called a register. If a user wanted a new incoming stream element stopped in front of him, instead it sank further and further into the past, he pulled it out from the stream. The system assigns the extracted elements automatically. on the screen was no more room, just took the extracted element automatically replace the element one whose use lagged the furthest.
Where the Bauhaus, when we need it? In its early days was followed by the Bauhaus to the motto: "Art and technology - a new unity". In its short history it has developed further, but it was always considered both to art for art's sake as well as a humanization of technology. His greatness lay in the collective brilliance of the artist, which combined led to Klee and Kandinsky, Feininger and Albers, Breuer and Mies and Gropius. A new Bauhaus could never imitate the old. It belonged to the essence of the Bauhaus, to never imitate anything. But the name reminds us of the twenties, in which self-consciously art occurred and the largest energy of the best minds levied, a time when people understood that the technology needs of art and design, so it is a blessing for the people and not just a bubbly money source.
did what probably a new Bauhaus? It set about, first of all to design a decent MP3 player.
David Gelernter born in 1955, the foundations of the World Wide Web has created. In 1993, he was hard by an explosive device of the Una-bomber Ted Kaczynski injured. He now teaches computer science at Yale.
From the American Michael Bischoff
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