Topic

• ❑ Mark Bernstein
  • ❑ Tools we need to solve the navigation problem... People get lost in hyperspace, we need to give them support
  • ❑ When we built hypertexts and let people use them, they didn't get lost -- making footnotes useless
  • ❑ Clarity, Brevity, Sincerity -- not always possible
    • ❑ The World is baffling - you can't pretend otherwise
  • ❑ Hierarchy is not the answer
    • ❑ It's useful - but it's the easy part
    • ❑ Search is easier -- and less useful!
    • ❑ Context context context
    • ❑ The reader doesn't know what they want -- "that's why they're on your site"
  • ❑ Metaphor considered harmful
    • ❑ Marshall and Shipman (invented spatial hypertext)
    • ❑ Lesson from architecture -- let the structure express itself
  • ❑ It's kind of linked...
    • ❑ Spatial hypertext helps avoid premature commitment and rigid a priori structural infatuation
    • ❑ The problem that spatial hypertext solves is that links are there or not ... But what if the "link-ness" is muddy/messy?
    • ❑ How do I classify this when I don't know where to start? (Archaeology publishing lagging behind research)
  • ❑ Spatial Hypertext - Tinderbox
    • ❑ "Experimental IA" - connections a free flowing, agent-based, linking and unlinking, etc.
  • ❑ Patterns, not prescriptions
    • ❑ If you try to figure out how to write... writers won't do it, readers won't like it
    • ❑ Every narrative has its own structural imperatives
    • ❑ Sites (like buildings) change -- let the occupant adapt them, because they WILL adapt them
  • ❑ There and back again -- cycles reveal the presence of structure
    • ❑ People come back because they come back
  • ❑ Multivalence is not a vice
    • ❑ No page has one purpose
    • ❑ No page has one meaning
    • ❑ Everything is intertwingled
• ❑ Susan Campbell
  • ❑ Spatial metaphors can and should be used to guide people in information sites... Architectural metaphor is a valid organizational metaphor as well
  • ❑ Architecture = FORM, SPACE ,and ORDER experienced over time
  • ❑ Supporting Research
    • ❑ Kuhn and Blumenthal -- psychologist researchers
      • ❑ Memory -- common experiences in familiar spaces ... linking visual and auditory
      • ❑ Memory relies on sptial arrangements
  • ❑ Arch and IA are sister disciplines
    • ❑ They're applied -- without people/purpose there would be neither
    • ❑ Function is essential
    • ❑ Social responsibility -- structure of the building and activities inside
  • ❑ Architecture Methods
    • ❑ Rule-based
      • ❑ William Mitchell, the logic of architecture
      • ❑ Inhumane/gestalt... looking at raw forms... recombinations for meaning
    • ❑ Best Practice
      • ❑ Christopher Alexander
    • ❑ Building Blocks
      • ❑ Frank Ching - Architecture Form Space and Order
      • ❑ Broken down architecture into basic elements - legos
      • ❑ What is your reaction to the envrionment your in
  • ❑ Relativity - What happens when IA fails -- it doesn't allow any one to achieve their goal... missed opportunities
• ❑ Andrew Dillon - Shaping a space: metaphors, minds, and no mincing of words
  • ❑ Information as space
    • ❑ Natural/obvious mapping between physical and information space
    • ❑ Led to an obsession in navigation
  • ❑ Navigation as design driver -- it's the wrong driver
    • ❑ If you are 'navigating' you are doing something wrong
    • ❑ You go to information for meaning
  • ❑ Why are so many websites so similar -- similar form, similar look and feel
    • ❑ What progress have we made if we're still talking about navigation so much
  • ❑ Users never think metaphorically -- or they never share the designers' metaphor
  • ❑ What of Semantics
    • ❑ We're missing something human in our spatial metaphors -- information is about semantics, it's not about space
    • ❑ But... it *will* have to have some spatial relationship
    • ❑ But don't obsess on it
      • ❑ Meaning, emotions, affect, etc. All play a huge part on information
  • ❑ Shape of Information
    • ❑ Not easy to define, know it when it's right, feel when its wrong
    • ❑ Understood thru life experience of info systems you know and love
    • ❑ Narrative flow... structure of genre... where story is told...
    • ❑ What gives it cohesion?
    • ❑ Don't concentrate purely on physical representation
  • ❑ You come to a site with a life history of expectation of semantics
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