After browsing a new exhibition called “The New Simplicity”, I came across the excellent work of Alexander Hulme. In addition to being graphically striking, his calculator prototype also has two features that I’m surprised are not more common in calculators (both digital and physical): an inline display that shows the entire calculation & a visual memory display that also doubles as an entry key.
This simple innovation of exposing the hidden brought my thoughts to the “copy-paste” command on computer operating systems. Why does such an important & ubiquitous tool so often obscure its contents?
When we want to remember a bit of information in the real world, we scribble it on a scrap of paper, in the margins of our notes or newspapers, and even on our hands. This sort of informal and intuitive note-taking is basically the copy-paste of the physical world.
The digital world lacks these kind of informal places for scribbling things to remember in the short term. There are probably thousands of note-taking applications out there, meant to capture small bits of information—but I have yet to encounter any that match the spontaneity of the tangible world’s solutions, or the casual ability to place bits of info in a visual manner. Where is my digital version of the desk blotter, the back of a receipt, or painter’s palette?
