This is Not my Beautiful House: Examining the Desktop Metaphor, 1980-1995

Been browsing the author’s writings and wanted to share this one. The part that stuck out to me was them commenting on how desktop icons like files and folders don’t feel like a means to access the content, but the content itself. A folder icon on your desktop feels like it’s physically existing in a real space, rather than being just a 2D image. When skeuomorphism doesn’t feel skeuomorphic anymore!

I considered for a bit writing an article for the good internet magazine about something like this but for websites instead, especially early internet ones where people would map out their site with terms borrowed from real life (e.g. calling their homepage the “living room”). But as someone who’s internet usage started in the 2010s this would take a bit more research.

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If you do decide to do that research, check out Microsoft Bob. It did its best to make your desktop an actual living room.

(I mostly used it as a very early version of The Sims build mode!)

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The essay did bring that up, and explored the implications of its design in great detail as well (like how it very specifically emulated that upper-middle class white suburban house interior). And ur right, it is pretty similar to those made up house tours of the early web :kissing:

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