GNOME Storage: filesystem meets interaction design

Despite its shaping influence on the interactive structures of desktop computing, humancentered design has yet to be seriously applied to the filesystem. GNOME Storage is an evolving design and implementation for a document store that addresses many problems stemming from traditional filesystems. Some of the problems are: document folders are overflowing with hundreds of files, there's a strong separation on desktop computers between desktop and application, there's a strong separation between local and remote resources, most applications do not support real-time collaboration using multiple computers, localizing basic filesystem structures is very hard, and applications use a save-buffer model rather than presenting documents as concrete objects. We discuss these as design goals and how they are solved in the Storage implementation, in addition to providing a theoretical framework for understanding the filesystem's role.