This was extremely cool:
it's true.. after 25 years we could at least summarize what we've learnt.
I think it's obvious, we've become better at symbolic metaphors, there are more symbols now, aka icons, and they are more telling than they used to be.
Unfortunately we are still holding on strongly to the metaphorical concepts "window" and "file", which are very two-dimensional and limited to a very small set of spacial methods.
Search should get better, as Tracker plugins for Nautilus become stable.
I've been trying these every once in a while, and i'm confident we'll be presented with outstanding search interfaces soon.
The most intriguing thought you threw at us was imo Hyppocampus¹. The metaphor you are basing this concept upon is obviously:
* [neuronal network] - [relational memory]
this is not entirely new, since every mammal is born with it, but it represents an alternative way of going about our problem at hand.
I think this is most interesting and i will meditate over this metaphor again, since it is a path i have already identified as viable quite some time ago ;)
Great work, thanks a lot!!!
¹
http://lobotomy-project.org/wiki/Hyppocampus