Scorched Earth Labs
Home ASTP Research Projects Lab Notes About Connect
Project  ·  Interface Composition

Poseidon

What if the interface were a function of intent, not the application?

Traditional software binds interface elements to screens.

Poseidon decomposes them.

UI elements live as semantic objects in a graph. Their meaning, relationships, capabilities, and state exist independently of any particular rendering surface.

Poseidon composes the interface at runtime according to what the user is trying to accomplish.

Intent First

The user can ask Poseidon to:

ShowFocusCollapseSimplifyRestore
Poseidon  ·  UI Graph Sandbox
From an empty canvas to a composed view, then refocused by intent — 1 min 40 s, no audio.

Those are not merely layout commands.

They express how the user wants information organized around the current objective.

A command such as Simplify can reduce higher-load views while preserving the information most relevant to the task.

Personal by Construction

Users can arrange information according to how they work and preserve those compositions by meaning:

“Save as my Executive View.”

“Save as my Monitoring View.”

Those views are not limited to reproducing a fixed arrangement of pixels.

They preserve the user’s intended information environment so it can be recomposed appropriately on another surface.

Surface Independent

BrowserDesktopTabletVoiceSpatial computingAR / VR

The rendering environment changes how information should be manifested.

It should not require rebuilding the underlying interface model.

Poseidon composes according to the capabilities of the surface.

The user carries the intent.
The surface determines the embodiment.

Temporal Interface State

Poseidon also preserves the evolution of the interface itself.

That makes a different kind of provenance possible.

Not only:

What happened?

But:

What was the user seeing when it happened?

The interface becomes part of the inspectable causal environment rather than an ephemeral layer that disappears after the interaction.

This is lab work. It gets better with contact.
Continue · 08 / 12 Social Contracts