HCI2005: Ted Nelson's Big Picture is a Sour One

'In HCI, you see yourselves in a helping role, but you don't have the ability to go back as far as you need to: to 1945.'

Ted Nelson's keynote at HCI2005 was grumpy. Casting himself as the little boy who saw the reality of the "Emperor's New Clothes", he took a very big picture and started with a litany of computer metaphors that failed their users: 'Have you ever seen a vertical desktop? Clipboards that wipe what was there before? That are the same in all aspects but not in any other aspects?'

Computers are what we make them, he told the conference audience, at Napier University in Edinburgh. 'Just as the hamburger is not the true nature of cows, today's computers are a result of misunderstandings of human life and human thought – not the nature of computers but the nature of computer makers' minds, who see the world as hierarchical.'

Nelson is best known as the father of 'hypertext', coining the term in the 60s for a non-hierarchical way of organising materials and ideas. He has continued his work into structures that offer an alternative to the prevalent interfaces of our day. Whether or not he relishes his position as outside the mainstream, he used it to good effect in his talk, punctuating his descriptions of his own progress with lacerating comments on the industry.

'The word "Intuitive" means that it is retroactively obvious once you've been shown it.'

'Technology is the most pernicious word of our day because it cows people into submission. Is Windows technology? Is the Macintosh technology? Is the Web technology? No, it's packaging.'

'Anyone who uses technology is a sheep.'

'It all went wrong at XeroxPARC [home of the predecessor to the first Apple interface] – they committed a grave affront to civilisation. PUI for "pooey" – the PARC user interface… They say they wanted to simplify it for the man in the street, but that rang false. They were trying to sell it to the upper management of a printer company. We are stuck with a simulation of paper because Xerox sold printers.'

Nelson talked through his work: Xanadu, where it all began, and the ZigZag database he is building, based on constructions of spreadsheet-like cells in multidimensional space. And he mentioned "Floating World", which he demonstrated later at the conference, a system of flying documents based on the ZigZag engine, producing data in a 'simplified, unified, vivid and principled universe'.

Returning to his antipathy to metaphor, he offered 'construct' instead. 'One type of thing is different from another and metaphor only addresses the initial flash in the user's brain. The design of constructs should be at the centre,' he said.

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