[johnknowles]

I've thought about this for awhile, and I can only come up with two ideas: a) laziness or b) lack of imagination.

It's a bit of a harsh criticism, but we are spatial creatures who live in a world full of objects that are organized into different forms. The "list" is a very valuable organizational structure and convenient to implement digitally, but it is a rather simple structure, being a 1D-structure. We use "lists" (in the form of shelves and stacks) to store objects and give the collection order, but in order to interact with objects, we remove them from their list and interact with them in higher dimensions (spreading out on a desk, pinning to a wall, arranging in space, etc). The fact that we only have 1D structures in most software UIs may well be that higher-order structures are too complex to practically implement or are not viewed as necessary, but again, this is an argument out of "laziness", convenience to the developer who is implementing the UI. Or, designers and developers genuinely believe that we are most-suited to composing with 1D structures (eye-roll).

[anoffvu]

Interesting point, I do really enjoy the spatial aspect of graphs being incorporated into many knowledge tools now. I guess the valuable insight is that if 1D is bad and unwieldy, what’s a good alternative? Like a bulletin board?