Increasing volumes of information are fueling a need for new ways to interact with data. Keyboards, mice and computer screens have served us well so far but they come from a time when we manipulated information personally. Today we have so much to work with that just cant do it all on our own anymore. So we have started building tools to do it for us. Rss feeds, podcasting, del.icio.us are all tools we’ve built to help us agregate information but these a designed to address the problem of finding information. What about displaying information?

Imagine you are a gardener. You grow your own network garden where each plant, which you have already selected and planted, grows up fed by your communication data.

!http://jee.manme.org.uk/img/garden.jpg!

“GORI”:http://jee.manme.org.uk/ars2005.php means ‘an open hook’ in Korean and it is often used to represent human relationships. Here it is used to express the image of ‘fastening or loosening the relationship at your will’

The project intends to explore the relation between an individual and his or her everyday social experience in the network and represent it by using metaphors of nature.

Pretty cool huh? More conceptual than practical Philips, however, has also announced a really “impressive bit of technology”:http://www.polymervision.com/New-Center/Press-Releases/Article-14693.html:

!http://www.geekzone.co.nz/images/news/readius.jpg!

The Readius is the world’s first prototype of a functional electronic-document reader that can unroll its display to a scale larger than the device itself.

Now thats straight off the pages of scifi novels. In fact I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Age”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553380966/103-3514303-4171801?v=glance at the moment which revolves around a book that works a lot like the Readius (it’s more advanced though). The book generates content tailored to Nell, the little girl who finds the book, printing it in plain text or animating it thanks tothe stolen technology that was used to create it’s pages.

These interfaces are slowly becoming a reality…