How many discrete objects are in your home? Try to estimate the pieces of furniture, appliances, entertainment devices, books, DVDs, ornaments. Then drill down even deeper. How many dishes, pictures on walls, pens in drawers, toothbrushes, paper documents and sewing needles can you add to that number. I bet there are tens of thousands of distinct things in your home that you could put your hands on within 60 seconds of searching.
Now turn to your computer. How many separate files on it? If you're a developer with ten years of history, it might number in the high end of the thousands. The average user will have less. How long would it take you (or them) to find a specific file? Even with Vista's improved searching could take a tens of minutes. In fact, it might prove impossible to find that file at all.
Why is that? It's because your brain has been wired through eons of evolution to work in three dimensional space. You remember things in a 3D context, and you learn the geometry of your own home because you spend so much time navigating through it. In contrast, a computer directory is a two dimensional hierarchy of words. Its completely alien to your evolutionary past and to work with it you have to develop new skills. Up until you saw your first files-view, you had never spoke that way or thought that way.
In Medieval times before paper was prevalent and when most people couldn't read, the scholars used a technique called Memory Theatre to remember lots of unrelated pieces of information. People would imagine themselves walking through a large cathedral and they would make associations between objects encountered in such a walk with what they wanted to remember. Later they would retrace the walk to recall all of the items. James Burke does a brilliant recounting of this in the "Matter of Fact" episode of his "The Day the Universe Changed" series.
Wouldn't it be cool be we could walk though our own home and find all of our computer files on the walls and in the drawers?
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