Pretty much everything that has ever been designed is some form of balance between form and function, from modified car's to architecture to clothes and even user interfaces. In the modern age of material design, Visual Design Group's and Human Interface Guidelines this balance has very much shifted to be in favor of function over form, an interface that looks good is still important but looks always seem to play a distant second to usability.
The purpose of this talk is to explore what happens when you flip that idea and rather then focusing on creating user interfaces that are primarily usable instead focus on creating user interfaces that are works of art with a lesser regard as to how easy they are to use.
Fortunately this idea is nothing new, in the late 90's Raster founded the enlightenment desktop inspired by the artistic user interfaces of the games he played growing up, he brought these concepts to the desktop.
The advancement of graphics hardware in the mid two thousands lead us to the world of fish tanks inside cubes, wobbly windows and painting fire on the screen. Not because there was any real need or use but because someone could. Sadly since then the world of the Linux desktop has tried to go all professional and many of the fun interesting things have been lost.
Pretty much everything that has ever been designed is some form of balance between form and function, from modified car's to architecture to clothes and even user interfaces. In the modern age of material design, Visual Design Group's and Human Interface Guidelines this balance has very much shifted to be in favor of function over form, an interface that looks good is still important but looks always seem to play a distant second to usability.
The purpose of this talk is to explore what happens when you flip that idea and rather then focusing on creating user interfaces that are primarily usable instead focus on creating user interfaces that are works of art with a lesser regard as to how easy they are to use.
Fortunately this idea is nothing new, in the late 90's Raster founded the enlightenment desktop inspired by the artistic user interfaces of the games he played growing up, he brought these concepts to the desktop.
The advancement of graphics hardware in the mid two thousands lead us to the world of fish tanks inside cubes, wobbly windows and painting fire on the screen. Not because there was any real need or use but because someone could. Sadly since then the world of the Linux desktop has tried to go all professional and many of the fun interesting things have been lost.