Click Wheeling

Mechanical things are easy to understand because they are physical and visceral. You turn a steering wheel, and tires actually turn. You can feel the resitance in the wheel. Visually, too, the steering wheel echoes or reminds us of the thing it controls. Like the tire, the steering wheel is a circular object that turns in space. In other words, it is an inversion or transposition of the tire. We can simply call it a type of metaphor, one that visually and viscerally signals its meaning to the driver.

Digital things are harder since they are abstract and incorporeal. And that is why the iPod ClickWheel is brilliant. It blends the mechanical domain with the digital domain. It connects the user in a physical way to the aac encoded bits and bytes that are the sound files on the iPod. Today the wheel interface looks like the obvious choice. But I’m sure it was risky and controversial when first floated by the Apple design team.