Focus: A MA at Lincoln University

I have started a Master at the University of Linconl in England. The Master is about Design and my specialization is on Graphical User Interfaces, my mentor will be Neil Maycroft.

Here is a fragment of my rationale:

I was born in the decade of the 80′s.

At that time Graphic User Interfaces where just beginning. Apple was a pioneer on making a metaphoric system to understand how to use the personal computer and IBM with Bill Gates kept on using the command line system, (DOS Digital Operating System) which is not yet a GUI it self. Meanwhile Linux people were not thinking into a business but into a project on how to better develop software.

I have seen a very interesting evolution of the operating systems representation, and with that the born of the cell phones, the MP3 players  and the digital cameras that started using also interesting GUI.

I always have a close relation with machines and computers interfaces; I love and hate them since 1989.

But at this point I have several questions:

Who is designing these interfaces?
Are they explaining or hiding how things work?
Can we make them better, more efficient or maybe even more poetic?

It’s not just a matter of design, there are so many things in behind:

The technological “evolution”,
The target of users and their semiotic code; how people understand the machines.
Economy is also influencing the GUIs as long as they become a very powerful tool to guide users into different paths and behaviours.

I definitely find all this things passionately interesting and it have become my motivation to specialize myself on this subject.

I want to study different Operating Systems GUIs working on different devices, I want to study why they are like that and what design fits better on them, I want to create a proposal of GUI that involves social subjects behind, that considers our way of understanding things, and that shows us and explains us in a more honest way the magic about computing.

My project will be based on:

FOCUS (an Operating System Graphic User Interface)

• A research on actual graphic interfaces of several devices.
• An investigation on how we use and understand computers and operating systems.
• An exercise to rethinking in a global way the basic actions of computing.
• A simulation of graphic interface to manage the operating system giving special attention to how we understand space, focus and metaphors.