Spatial workspaces

[Lauri Kainulainen <lauri sokkelo net>]

Hello everyone,

sorry if this idea has been presented before. I just joined the list and
I didn't find any previous posts on the subject.

By "spatial workspaces" I mean having support for unique workspaces that
may be organized individually. For an easy introduction see [1]. This
spatiality could be supported by having different workspaces present
different backgrounds, different fonts, etc. But the most important
thing would be to have different desktop contents on each workspace.

This way one desktop could contain documents needed for work (working
hour calculation, etc.), another might contain pictures and one could be
full of project directories (like an eclipse workspace). I would say
that the metaphor here relies on people seeing different workspaces as
distinct tabletops, which have different contents laid on top of them. I
don't have any research to prove it, but I would argue that people who
use workspaces tend to sort the windows on them according to their
purpose or meaning (so that you have an IDE on one desktop, IRC-window
on another, www-browsers on the third, etc..).

This could also make it possible to have collaborative workspaces. For
example a small office could keep it's documents in a shared directory
which would be then displayed as one of the workspaces to all the users.
This would work like a common shared folder, but because the contents
would be displayed on the workspace spatial hints would be available.
One co-worker could for example give directions to find a document by
saying that "it's in the top right corner" instead of uttering a path to
the file.

The whole idea was partly inspired by the BumpTop-environment [2].

Does this make any sense to you :) ?


Best regards,
Lauri Kainulainen

[1] http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars
[2] http://www.bumptop.com/
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