Can you redesign the Bloomberg terminal?

Three design studios had a crack at it, at the bidding of Conde Nast and their (physically) enormous new financial magazine, Portfolio.


http://www.portfolio.com/infographics/2007/06/terminals


What really surprises me is how shallow these designs are -- they don't seem tied to a meaningful sense of what the users actually DO all day with their Bloomberg terminals. One design takes away the user's keyboard and replaces it with . . . a puck. Why??

More generally, this exercise reveals (at least to my mind) that there's a lot of learning left to be done in the area of large screens. In IDEO's design, as users "drill down [on the left], new information is added to the right". Based on how big these screens are, this would have strange effects. When you're working with a small graphic element on a surface, you don't expect (or really want) the consequences of your action to show up 24 inches away. This would have you swiveling your head back and forth all the time like someone in the front row of a tennis match.