Place Memory and Icons

As human beings we have this great facility for remembering where things are in space. If I ask you to remember a list of ten random words, you might not do so well, but if you were asked to name the towns around where you live, you'd probably list more than 10 without trouble. Further, you'd probably even be fairly good at remembering which ones are next to which other ones. Granted, maybe you've had more time to study that data than the hypothetical list of random words, but the point here is that the overall inter-relation of Things In Space makes it easier to recall the information in question. It gives all the pieces a context in which you have some means of addressing the thing you're looking for in relation to the things you're immediately aware of. This is the heart of the trick of remembering your computer passwords not by remembering the exact sequence of characters, but by remembering the shape they make on the keyboard when you type them. As people, we're good at getting around in the world, and this is mainly due to the fact that most parts of the world stay put most of the time.

Now, what's up with my ICONS? As our hard drives get larger and we all accumulate more and more stuff, we're all faced with the growing problem of finding 'that document I was working on last tuesday', or the 'list of things people are getting for christmas', etc. You probably don't have too much trouble with finding the things that you are working on in the immediate time frame, but if you're like me, if you haven't touched the file in a week, the Big Search begins. This is enough of a problem that there are even things like Google Desktop to help you search out stuff on your own machine. I want to argue that a good deal of this confusion could be eliminated if icons would just stay where you put them.

If the Macintosh got anything right, it's that when you arrange icons in a folder, they stay that way. (Or at least, last time I used a Mac, they did.) Maybe you put all the lists off to the left, and some notes-to-self in the upper right, and some relevant urls in the lower middle, or some such. If you didn't come back to that folder for Months, it didn't matter, when you came back, there that arrangement would be, just like you left it. When was the last time you visited your home town? It probably didn't change too much, and to the extent that it's the same, you would be able to find places in it you hadn't even thought of for years. Our brains retain information spatially like that, are excellent at that.

If your OS would just manage to preserve the spatial relationships of icons, you could use all those zillions of neurons that are adapted for just that purpose to good effect. As it is, if things in the Real World worked like your folders and icons, every time you went back to your home town, everything would be in a different place.

Another metaphor: let's say you want some popcorn. How do you find the popcorn in your kitchen? Do you find that unseen little gremlins re-arrange everything every time you close the cupboard doors, so that you have to engage in a random search to find the one specific item? No! You use this great place-memory; the popcorn is next to the oatmeal is next to the pasta; hey! there's the pasta! Look next to it, and again, bang-o, you have the popcorn and you didn't have to look at every last thing in the cupboard - because the relations of what's next to what are preserved over time.

In short: if OS vendors (coughMICROsoftahem!) would just find a way to stop messing the icons about, we could all be more productive.