UI Museum
The history of how humans learned to interact with machines.
Room 01
Before interfaces could be generated in seconds,
they were designed one decision at a time.
Each one started as somebody’s experiment and had to beat the alternatives before it reached billions of screens.
The hamburger icon was drawn for the Xerox Star in 1981. The Mac put its menu bar against the top edge of the screen so you can’t overshoot it. Pull to refresh came from a single Twitter app in 2009.
UI Museum is an open archive of those decisions.
The interfaces.The people who made them.The constraints they worked under.The ideas that won, and the ones that didn’t.
Room 02
Why now?
Anyone can generate an interface today. Type a sentence, get a screen.
What comes back is an average of everything that came before. It looks right because it copies what worked. It can’t tell you why it worked, or what was tried and thrown away.
That knowledge lives in old manuals, dead websites and the memories of people who were in the room. Some of it is already gone.
What was tried before?Why did certain patterns win?What disappeared too early?Which mistakes keep coming back?
Room 03
An archive for whoever builds next.
UI Museum will document decades of interaction design,
from Engelbart’s 1968 demo to the phone in your pocket.
If you’re about to design something,
you should be able to see what was tried before you.
Coming soon
Built to preserve what we learned, before we forget how we learned it.