When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time in the school library. I’m was not an avid reader, I was a geek. I loved browsing through tons of book. I would read a little and then skip to the next one. One of the subjects I was always fascinated with was Greek Mythology and culture.
I once read how the greeks had different concepts of time:
Named after the god Khronos. Is the masculine time, the time that we meassure, that rules our lives.
Named after Venus. Is the feminine time, you follow venusian time when you are in that state of love for your subject and time streches or compresses. You can see this in the stories of lovers that spend all night together, or artists that loose track of time while working on a project that they are very passionate about.
This is simmilar to the concept of Flow, a mental state that UX designers try achieve in their work. We want the user to fall in love with it’s subject. Software should help the user stay in venusian time, not interrupt it.
Which is eternal time. When something or someone escapes a lifetime. “That’s a classic!” is what we usually say.
It is such a beautiful concept. I remember this vividly because it has followed me through life. The problem is, I don’t remember the book where I got it from, and I can’t find any documenation on the web. Does anyone know about this? Please let me know, I would like to start using it as a citation.
Bill Buxton offers an interesting opinion on the designer/engineer relationship. I really like his layered approach.
These ambiguities always drive me nuts, it is so hard to put the issue to rest and be done with it. Jure does a good job at laying it to rest. It would be great to have an OS sniffer that switches the buttons to follow the respective HIG.
