This may not be the kind of feedback you are looking for, but I feel it’s important to frame this topic from a broader view first. And forgive me, I am going to go way out…
Our human cognitive abilities have been evolving inside us since long before we were even human. The two earliest of these, and thus most deeply “hard wired” in our physical brains, are what we can term spatial, and social cognition. In other words, we have been thinking about where things are—in relation to each other and us—and what those relations mean—family? friend? foe?—for a very long time.
For this reason—and skipping a lot of stuff—spatially persistent relationship graphs are the most immediately cognitively graspable forms of representation and interface.
Most of our computing GUI is based on various representations of text and glyphs. These function in what we might call “semantic cognition”, which is one of our more recent evolutionary acquisitions (followed by temporal cognition, which most of us still suck at).
Text and glyph UIs manifest as lists and icons; these need to be read and interpreted for semantic meaning, then, theoretically, mapped to some sort of understanding of the system we are interacting with. This puts a tremendous cognitive load on people.
Let me give you an analogy from a previous professional context of mine. (I was a design director at Nokia Maps, responsible for shipping maps and navigation service UX to millions of people all over the world.)
I can give you a set of directions to a place you have never been, textually, as a list of steps. You will slowly, gradually, step-by-step, make it to the destination, assuming two things:
- my spatial directions are semantically encoded in a way that is meaningful to you (in your language, clearly, with the same concepts of up and down and left and right and types of landmarks and sequence of steps) and
- you are adept at—and have the mental energy and experience to perform— transcoding text to real world experience, matching what you use read to what you see in the world.
(Believe me, in our extensive global testing experience, no two people produce, nor interpret written directions the same way… nor do they read maps the same way!)
So, when we speak of "finding files and data objects which are related to each other and proximate or distant to our current “context in the system”, why do we rely on long lists of texts and icons?
I propose to you, that the super power of Hook is not the “hooks” themselves, but the contextually appropriate maps (graphs) of your files that they enable.
I am very pleased, Luc, by your post above and I hope this discussion unfolds in a fruitful direction, where we can see all kinds of spatially persistent graphs and maps of contexts and relationships of the “files” and various objects which we work with everyday in our personal “computers”… or knowledge systems. 