Emulating paper or moving towards a new paradigm?

Danie spoke at the recent 27 Dinner about moving away from traditional paradigms of interacting with our data on a computer and took us through virtual models that had very different ways of conceptualising the data itself. I came across this post by Stii with the following video of an alternative desktop:

I think the interface is fantastic and I’d love to see if it works throughout the operating system or if this interface is limited to the desktop. One thing I was thinking about while I watched this video is whether we want an interface that entrenches the old model of how we interface with our data or whether we should perhaps adopt a different paradigm, like the virtual, more conceptual model Danie introduced us to?

I was reading a post by Seth Godin about publishing ebooks and he linked to a lens he created on Squidoo and he briefly discussed the format of the ebook and said that it should basically be resized to fit a 800 x 640 screen and should contain hyperlinks. That is already a shift away from our usual size books that don’t have hyperlinks. To me that was a small indication how we need to change how we present our data when we do so on a computer and that is really just a small change.

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virtual desktop, 3d desktop, virtual worlds, paradigm, conceptualise data