There is much that we can understand from the design of things and while the higher order of search means well in the holistic design of everything; it is quite different than other things I have. Search feels alien and it ruins things. And that is all about the idea of “Spatiality”. I do love Maestro Victor’s idea of big spaces and spatial and tangible feeling of things. But then there is the idea of connections and finding things:

With these things; one has a partial sense of where things are. The search however deprives a person of this.

In Waihona Ike there is no popup or hover information: There are arrows that show you connections without rearranging or modifying the space. Things are tangible and spatial. But then how can such a thing be realized in search interfaces?

This is hard to resolve. Spatial understanding of data; makes possible for the person to internalize the data. One internalizes a book by reading it and it is not expected of anyone to locate things in a body of linear text.

All the great work of the previous people on interfaces has been to make possible the search for information. One can find the placement of information in a PDF but not a physical book. And this is a huge progress. Yet that itself is not in the human nature. Language conveys information coming from a network of Embeddings in our minds. How can such a thing re-enter our brains? How can we ask for concepts? LLMs they see Vectors and can understand. But they too do not help with spatiality.

What if it draw maps; connections; paths; spaces that made you see the spatiality of the data? This would be incredibly hard to make for the Waihona Ike. But what if I could have made it?