The project imagines an alternative file system beyond folders and icons. Files appear as geometric objects whose form and materiality carry meaning about versioning, relations, and collaboration. Organisation emerges through interaction, specifically filtering on the search level. The system becomes a spatial illustration of what files are today: dynamic, networked, processual, fractal.

Visual impulses, partially based on data visualisations exploring file structures that laid the ground for designing with time as the main compositional and organisational factor, alongside a second concept that approached files as semantic entities capable of forming meaning-based clusters carrying a strong visual impulse led to translating the information within a file into 3D geometry.

This translation operates on two levels: intra-level geometry generated from data through rules, and inter-level material and colour communicating relational information.

This concept opened up a new position of visual representation of a file on the scale of minimization or abstraction and informational value that stands between the icon as a strongly abstract entity and the preview as a direct, non-translated representation.

When bringing a third dimension into the matrix, which is the user distance, an expression summarizing informational value and abstraction the geometry positions itself again somewhere in between, possibly nearer the preview, holding up the position for even further deconstruction of its visual parts and contents holding the potential for recognition and file-specific memorability.

The system is search-based, relying on time, relationships, and type rather than names. Filters enable detailed, customizable search, allowing users to move between files through relational chains in time. Files can also be grouped within collaborative spaces and tagged in more complex ways using nodes for automation supporting tagging, and collaboration-based classifications.