By contrast, the Puma e-catalog has no rollovers or clearly defined turning regions - you have to guess in by ‘feel’ where the edge of the paper is, but you have no tactile feedback. It isn’t clear at first how the “hand” structure grabs - after lining things up by the thumb-pad or the curling fingers, you’ll discover that the pointer-finger stays still while the other fingers grasp around it. In retrospect, this is somewhat mouse-like - just nothing like how a real hand moves (try picking something up off your desk with thumb and pointer and notice how the thumb stays still). Finally, the required drag motion, which nonetheless results in a very cool display….

I’ve just spent quite a while trying to expand on “better at frustration,” and it has grown so long I think I’d better just make it a followup post - which see. Thanks - your question helped me refine my thinking.

There’s a future post in all of this about the tension between our desire for pixel-perfect fonts and our desire for accessible, abstracted XHTML that degrades gracefully. That essay has been written many, many times over in design-land - I’m just not sure what the text-art angle is, yet….

On the issue of usability, I’ve written a couple of articles about this (’Bloody Thing Doesn’t Speak English: Bow Wow‘ and Learning not Meaning: House of Tomorrow‘). Frustration can be used for effect, but are you saying that computers or that certain software programs are better at frustration? There are plenty of works that are ‘analogue’ that are designed to frustrate. I’m thinking here of a book that you cannot open — I cannot recall who it was by. I guess the difference is that computers can have so many different types of interfaces and so one is guaranteed to have a frustrating experience, many times.

Could you expand on what you mean?

Thanks for the positive comments on Taft. I created it and definitely agree with it not being especially useable - that word you use “validate” - what does it mean? ;-)

Nonetheless, your writeup is on target and well articulated. We must be from the same school of thought … most especially since you used “verisimilitude” in mentioning Taft.

Keep up the great work.