PC monitor has been delivered. Now in the containment area for 48 hours. Better safe than sorry. h/t @MLBrook @martin_eve et al

Hoping the larger screen makes me feel less claustrophobic; less constrained and oppressed by the smaller size of the laptop now that we spend even longer hours in front of it. We'll see.

Many a time I have imagined an Outlook inbox display akin to TweetDeck's or Trello's- not the two-column vertical layout but a customisable horizontal layout where instead of folders one can have as many columns as needed. Scroll sideways, not up and down.

I'd like to see what's there, at least at the very top of it, at a glance, according to current priorities, not being forced to see what arrived first by default, to the detriment of previous but potentially more important items.

There's something always-already constraining about the vertical column and traditional folder and file structures. Having to scroll down or go to folders or filter limits agency by replacing what's on your visual field, hiding the rest, which might need simultaneous attention.

Going for a wider, vertical working space and visual field might enable users (as in TweetDeck or post-it boards, think Miro) to consider the landscape first, choosing what we see first and comparing before opening or focusing on only one item or task.

Basically as an email user I want to be able to decide what goes into what columns and to see as many columns as possible, so I can make decisions and not be always-already worried about what's happening/happened in folders I cannot see simultaneously.

And well, yeah, you know me, indeed, kind of.

PS I meant "going for a wider, _horizontal_ working space." (I'm a bit dyslexic). I'm thinking of the relationship between paradigm and syntagm, and about resisting the imposition of an ongoing, sequential, first-come-first-served idea of scroll-down time and flow.

I am more landscape than portrait, more multi-tab spreadsheet than one-column text or even table. That.

We think of Roland Barthes and structural linguistics when it comes to time, but also, perhaps, of this:

"Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus

Now I wonder how much this has to do with me having learned to read with comic books- what appeals about the multi-tab spreadsheet is indeed the grid- one sees the whole page at a glance, then zooms in to read and look more carefully (or not).

For more context on our thinking around the grid, please cfr my article with @wilkinspeter The Question Concerning Comics as Technology: Gestell and Grid: http://www.comicsgrid.com/article/10.16995/cg.133 via @ComicsGrid #openaccess #HCI

And here an introductory deck of slides that explains Barthes's "rhetoric of the image", as well as other basic principles of semiotics, which is a background to the ideas I shared before on this thread. https://people.unica.it/luisannafodde/files/2012/04/FODDE-AD-2-GRAPHIC-.pdf [PDF]

Thread ends. Thanks for reading.