Guarín-Zapata is an organizer. He has an intricate hierarchy of file folders on his computer, and he sorts the photos on his smartphone by category. He was in college in the very early 2000s — he grew up needing to keep papers organized. Now, he thinks of his hard drives like filing cabinets. "I open a drawer, and inside that drawer, I have another cabinet with more drawers," he told The Verge. "Like a nested structure. At the very end, I have a folder or a piece of paper I can access."
Guarín-Zapata's mental model is commonly known as directory structure, the hierarchical system of folders that modern computer operating systems use to arrange files. It's the idea that a modern computer doesn't just save a file in an infinite expanse; it saves it in the "Downloads" folder, the "Desktop" folder, or the "Documents" folder, all of which live within "This PC," and each of which might have folders nested within them, too. It's an idea that's likely intuitive to any computer user who remembers the floppy disk.
More broadly, directory structure connotes physical placement — the idea that a file stored on a computer is located somewhere on that computer, in a specific and discrete location. That's a concept that's always felt obvious to Garland but seems completely alien to her students. "I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it," Garland says. "They see it like one bucket, and everything's in the bucket."
That tracks with how Joshua Drossman, a senior at Princeton, has understood computer systems for as long as he can remember. "The most intuitive thing would be the laundry basket where you have everything kind of together, and you're just kind of pulling out what you need at any given time," he says, attempting to describe his mental model.
As an operations research and financial engineering major, Drossman knows how to program — he's been trained to navigate directories and folders throughout his undergraduate years, and he understands their importance in his field. But it's still not entirely natural, and he sometimes slips. About halfway through a recent nine-month research project, he'd built up so many files that he gave up on keeping them all structured. "I try to be organized, but there's a certain point where there are so many files that it kind of just became a hot mess," Drossman says. Many of his items ended up in one massive folder.
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