The primary context for the development of all information technology artifacts has been to represent. The design language for software and display is, essentially, a representational language. Computing systems have evolved along a track to allow human to create representational artifacts, and the design language and patterns have been consistent with that primary focus.
Humans operate in the physical domain, the domain of here-and-now, in the present focusing and functioning. It is a structural domain, a domain that has its own physical language, fundamental and distinct from representational language. Yet the representational domain has remained elusive in terms of generating a design language. Certainly there are systems, such as an avionics control package, that needs to respond to physical generation in the here-and-now. But this language is transduced into the representational, then back into the structural. The design language for such systems is—by necessity—representational.
What we are proposing is a way to capture the structural language of the user in the device. This does not merely provide capture, it provides, intrinsically and by design, access to the structural dimension, and allows a language of structural system design to merge. Having the capability to interact in the present, and capture the structural language that occurs around processing, generating, expressing, storing, etc.—all of the representational activities – will provide a new ground on which representational activities can be developed.