Another metaphor for interface design:

The 17 Designs That Bell Almost Used for the Layout of Telephone Buttons

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/the-17-designs-that-bell-almost-used-for-the-layout-of-telephone-buttons/279237/

“This layout is so standardized that we barely think about it. But it was, in the 1950s, the result of a good deal of strategizing and testing on the part of people at Bell Labs. Numberphile has dug up an amazing paper — published in the July 1960 issue of “The Bell System Technical Journal” — that details the various alternative designs the Bell engineers considered. Among them: “the staircase” (II-B in the image above), “the ten-pin” (III-B, reminiscent of bowling-pin configurations), “the rainbow” (II-C), and various other versions that mimicked the circular logic of the existing dialing technology: the rotary.”

Stephen