Traditional graphic design tools emphasize the grid for structuring layout. Interviews with professional graphic designers revealed that they use surprisingly sophisticated structures that go beyond the grid, which we call graphical substrates. We present a framework to describe how designers establish graphical substrates based on properties extracted from concepts, content and context, and use them to compose layouts in both space and time. We developed two technology probes to explore how to embed graphical substrates into tools. Contextify lets designers tailor layouts according to each reader's intention and context; while Linkify lets designers create dynamic layouts based on relationships among content properties. We tested the probes with professional graphic designers, who all identified novel uses in their current projects. We incorporated their suggestions into, StyleBlocks, a prototype that reifies CSS declarations into interactive graphical substrates. Graphical substrates offer an untapped design space for tools that can help graphic designers generate personal layout structures.

We present a new taxonomy for describing the conditions and implementation of interactions. Current mechanisms for embedding interaction in software promote a hard separation between the programmers who produce the software, and the communities who go on to use it. In order to support open ecologies of function and fabrication, where this separation is negotiated by communities of users and designers, we need to reconceive those mechanisms. We describe interaction in two phases: Co-occurrence, the prerequisite conditions for an interaction to take place; and entanglement, the temporary coupling and interplay between elements participating in the interaction. We then sketch a blueprint of a system where those phases and their adjacent mechanisms enable communities of users to build and use interactive software. There are many ways of conceiving this new design space, and we present three dominant metaphors which we have employed so far, based on chemical reactions, quantum physics and cooking. We exhibit different systems which we have implemented based on these metaphors, and sketch how future systems will further empower citizens to design and inhabit their own interactions, express ownership over them and share them with communities of interest. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction paradigms; Interactive systems and tools;

In this critique of Files as Directories (FAD) by Raphael Wimmer, I argue that FAD as presented applies primarily to traditional programming tasks, consider FAD as a broader subversion of app-like software, and speculate about the hypothetical design space of FAD beyond programming.