Millions stigmatized for having a messy house or office felt their shame lighten a bit in January with the publication of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place. The authors, Columbia University management guru Eric Abrahamson and journalist David Freedman, argued that modern culture unjustly glorifies neatness, and that a moderately messy environment can actually be a spur to creativity.
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Method in the muddle: People who use Anand Agarawala's Bumptop PC interface can be as messy or as organized as they want, leaving file icons in jumbled piles or arranging them in tidy stacks.
Credit: Anand Agarawala
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Readers must decide for themselves whether this idea is validated by the authors' pile of anecdotal evidence or is simply a comforting defense for the chronically disorganized. But for people who use computers and genuinely thrive on chaos, there's now a program that turns the PC desktop into the equivalent of the paper-strewn office. Called Bumptop, the software discards the old notion of organizing computer files into tidy folders-within-folders, substituting a 3-D environment in which waferlike icons representing electronic files can be scattered, stacked, spun, stuck to walls, and even smashed into one another.
Indeed, the Bumptop interface--the brainchild of Anand Agarawala, a graduate student in computer science at the University of Toronto--looks more like the set for a computerized air-hockey game than like a traditional workspace. It uses lighting, shading, and animation techniques directly borrowed from the world of video-game development, along with a so-called physics engine that makes the icons move as if they were subject to real gravity, momentum, and friction.
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It's all possible thanks to the growing graphics-processing power of today's PCs. And while it may sound like overkill, Agarawala believes it's worth a few extra CPU cycles to add realistic spatial cues to the static, 2-D graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that have been a mainstay of personal computing since the debut of the Apple Macintosh in 1984. "The 'PC desktop' was supposed to be a metaphor for managing our files," says Agarawala. "But my real desk looks nothing like my desktop. I have all these piles subtly arranged on top of each other in a way that may look chaotic to someone else but is personally meaningful to me. The idea was, How can we bring that feeling onto the desktop?"
Agarawala has founded a startup in Toronto to commercialize Bumptop, which is currently a prototype but will be ready for beta release (in his words) "hopefully, soon." He says he has been fielding a continuous stream of phone calls and e-mails expressing interest in the technology ever since he demonstrated the Windows-based software two weeks ago at the exclusive Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) Conference in Monterey, CA.
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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3-D software video games