as paper, resists spilled coffee, and of course, allows the desk to act as an impromptu seat.

 

can offer once you let it influence how you work [ 4]. Here, I reflect on my experience and these different influences, and offer my perspective on the future.

 

November + December 2012

interactions

Technical Influences

Shortly after I sat down to begin work, one of the first things to become apparent was that the limited pixel density of the projection (approximately 20 DPI, relative to the approximately 96 DPI of a standard monitor) influenced what it was possible to use the desk for. For instance, while I was able to adjust to reading short bursts of text on the desk, I was never able to comfortably use it for longer, focused reading.

Prolonged exposure to bright
projected light soon became
unpleasant, especially in the win-
ter evenings. Fortunately, selecting
a black desktop background and
turning down the brightness of
the projector alleviated the issue.
However, if a window was maxi-
mized to the desk, it would again
flood my visual field with light.
Similarly, the differences in DPI
between the monitor and the desk
meant that windows that were
relatively small on the monitor
underwent a jump in size when
moved onto the desk. Although I
understood why it happened, this
was unexpected and annoying.

Usability Influences For most tasks, the fast and precise interactions offered by the mouse and keyboard vastly superseded the stylus. While their ease of use is undoubtedly affected by practice and the design of the UI, there are underlying reasons why they remained my preferred input method. First, after long periods of time, it became tiresome to repeatedly use the big muscle groups in my back, arm, and shoulder to perform tasks that could be achieved with a mere flick of the wrist using the mouse. Second, the mouse and keyboard could be used to interact with both the vertical and horizontal display planes. Since the monitor lacked a touch screen, the same could not be said for the stylus. Last, the adaptability and generality of mouse and keyboard meant it was easy to flip from task to task without worrying about interrupting my workflow to swap interaction modality.

Layout and Organization

To enable more ways of arranging the digital items in my workspace, I added the ability to rotate and scale certain application windows. This both looked good and offered a solution to the size jumps caused by DPI differences between the screens. Naturally, shrinking windows made them harder to read, but this was not always a big problem for applications that displayed video or featured large UI controls.

Larger display sizes are often considered a high-value feature [ 5], and I was keen to see what kind of impact the desk would