Concept car

A computer's design-in-motion is something like a "concept car"

When you use a PC…

especially one that doesn't impose much structure on its usage, like Linux, which relies less on the 'desktop' metaphor and implied ready-mades

…When you use a PC, you "build it up", you separate out parts

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The parts of a PC for doing specialised things in an environment that doesn't structure its usage tend to go where the mind thinks they (would, could, should) go best.

In this way you end up constructing a sort of 'design' of the ideal working of a 'concept OS', a blueprint, and you might leave "trails" for yourself that point to the desired working

I've described this (when trying to explain it to others) as like setting up an "imaginary website" or an "imaginary app.

It's a design process, mainly concerned with what would go where, and what else it would interact with, and it relies on a desire to link up with other componentry.

This vision of componentry is less of a static ready-made, and more a placeholder for software that would process imaginable inputs into useful outputs, and it is these outputs which 'site' the placeholder. The placeholder is therefore spatialised in terms of the production from an imaginable 'feedstock', and as I usually envision them the placeholders are "dynamic processes".

This can fall flat, due to the loss of that driving motion that spurred on the initial blueprinting.

While that dynamic driving motion exists in your mind, the blueprint has a meaning.

…but as soon as your desire to create that process—which it is "sited" through—wanes…