"The desktop is dead," declares David Gelernter. Gelernter is referring to the "desktop metaphor"-the term frequently used for the hierarchical system of files, folders and icons that we use to manage information stored on our home or office computers. At the annual gathering of technophiles at TechXNY/PC Expo 2001 in New York last June, he told the rapt crowd attending his keynote speech that the desktop metaphor is nothing more than virtual Tupperware. "Our electronic documents are scattered by the thousands in all sorts of little containers all over the place," he said. "The more information and the more computers in our lives, the more of a nuisance this system becomes."

For the past decade or so Gelernter has been campaigning for a new metaphor to overthrow the desktop-first in research he carried out at Yale University, where he is a professor of computer science, and now as chief scientist of his new company, Mirror Worlds Technologies, with offices in New Haven, CT, and New York City. In March, Mirror Worlds announced a novel metaphor called Scopeware, software that automatically arranges your computer files in chronological order and displays them on your monitor with the most recent files featured prominently in the foreground. Scopeware is far more sweeping than a simple rearrangement of icons, however: in effect, it transfers the role of file clerk from you to the computer, seamlessly ordering documents of all sorts into convenient, time-stamped files.

If you have ever forgotten what you named a file or which folder you put it in, you probably will agree that it's time for a change. The desktop metaphor is decades old, arising from early-1970s work at Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center, and was never intended to address today's computing needs. Indeed, the product that brought the metaphor to mass-market attention was Apple Computer's 1984 Macintosh; it had no built-in hard drive, and its floppy disks each stored only 400 kilobytes of information. Today we're using the same metaphor to manage the countless files on our ever more capacious hard drives, as well as to access the virtually limitless information on the Web. The result? Big, messy hierarchies of folders. Favorites lists where you never find anything again. Pull-down menus too long to make sense of.

In other words, the desktop metaphor puts the onus on our brains to juggle this expanding collection of files, folders and lists. Yet "our neurons do not fire faster, our memory doesn't increase in capacity and we do not learn to think faster as time progresses," notes Bill Buxton, chief scientist of Alias/Wavefront, a leading maker of graphic-design tools. Buxton argues that without better tools to exploit the immense processing power of today's computers, that power is not much good to us.

That's why many researchers-at universities and startups like Gelernter's Mirror Worlds as well as giants like Microsoft and IBM-are searching for alternatives. They're examining metaphors taken from other media, such as books or diaries or film; 3-D schemes that use our sense of spatial orientation to create the illusion of depth on-screen, so that documents look closer or farther away depending on their importance to us; alternatives that borrow from video games the notion of having an intelligent guide, or avatar, to help us find what we're looking for; or even theories that radically change the notion of what a "computer" is, so that we no longer think of devices as computers at all and are therefore open to new ways of interacting with them.

"The desktop metaphor made assumptions about how we use computers that just aren't true anymore," asserts Don Norman, cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group, famed critic of computer design and author of The Design of Everyday Things. "It's time to throw away the old model."

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