Paper by Benjamin B. Bederson, James D. Hollan (1994)
A zoomable graphical sketchpad. Documentation and more information can be found here.
… Pad++, an infinite resolution sketchpad that we are exploring as an alternative to traditional window and icon-based approaches to interface design.
There are numerous benefits to metaphor-based approaches, but they also lead designers to employ computation primarily to mimic mechanisms of older media. While there are important cognitive, cultural, and engineering reasons to exploit earlier successful representations, this approach has the potential of underutilizing the mechanisms of new media.
We envision a much richer world of dynamic persistent informational entities that operate according to multiple physics specifically designed to provide cognitively facile access. The physics need to be designed to exploit semantic relationships explicit and implicit in information-intensive tasks and in our interaction with these new kinds of computationally-based work materials.
P.S. for those who never tried a Zoomable UI, a more recent one that’s pretty easy to download & run today is Eagle Mode which is mostly a file manager, but also a showcase for various ZUI ideas. E.g. “Zoomable objects always have room for help texts and advanced options, without any limits.”
Sure, I suppose it is a weaker connection than some other efforts, so I’ll try to clarify how I think of it.
Pad++ allows users to place widgets wherever they like at any level of the UI, escaping the restrictions typically seen in most traditional UI systems. This sort of user freedom feels malleable-adjacent to me. They also “enrich” digital objects with history of where they’ve come from (e.g. tracking provenance of data, programs, people, etc.), which could for further user-specific needs.
Alternative UI schemes that are user-empowering like this feel instructive to me. They could be useful as a way to offer user-customisable control over aesthetics in addition to functionality.