the (digital) place you love is gone

The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone:Loss in Space, or, Design for Permanence

Euro IA 2013

Joe Sokohl

@mojoguzzi

Saturday, September 28, 13

“Culture is probably one of the biggest obstacles to adoption” @chrisrivard

@mojoguzzi

Where to start

Looking at Place and Loss

3


Progress has an impact on our selves...not just physical progress, but digital as well. In our jobs, we certainly focuses on progress. I'm interested in “at what cost.”

MelissaHolbrookPierson.com


This talk provides some WHAT, not a lot of HOW. It’s meant to be a thought-provoking talk...So, I am starting with this great book by the wonderful Melissa Holbrook Pierson. She talks about how important place is to us...and what we experience when it changes, and changes drastically.


Her books like “The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles” and “The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing” deal with place, self, and change as well. “Deep down, my home, my cradle, is still where it always was. Your home is still within you, the box it made and then hid inside.”

PervasiveIA.com/book


I’m also heavily indebted to the great Pervasive IA that Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati put out last year...especially Chapter 4, “Place-making”


Place-making is the capability of a PvIA model to help users reduce disorientation, build a sense of place, and increase legibility and way-finding across digital, physical, and cross-channel environments.

“Space is not geometry”



“...[H]elp users reduce disorientation, build a sense of place, and increase legibility and way-finding across digital, physical, and cross-channel environments



+ = Place


In effect, I'm using the working definition of **place** as being the intersection or the amalgamation perhaps of **space** (in a physical or digital sense) and **time**, usually duration. So a sense of place exists because we spent time in that physical surrounding.


Our sense of self is strongly tied to place. Many of us can tie memory to a mall or house or synagogue. Here is where you kissed your first girl...there is where you shoplifted a bag of Swedish Fish......and when progress radically alters that landscape, we are lost. Now, the place you loved is so much broken signage....disappeared, non-existent shops......broken pavement, or at worst, simply nothingness. Atreyu lost. The Nothing won.

all the people that you can’t recall

do they really exist at all?

http://northforksound.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html


The great Lowell George of little Feat, in “Easy to Slip,” sings about loss.Our sense of self is tied to our sense of place...


Sometimes those memories have to do with family, with friends, with people...but usually people in a place.


What happens when we return to those places....and they're changed. Do those people really exist at all anymore? "Cognitive maps, formed by the brain upon first viewing a place, *really* don't like to be changed"

"Cognitive maps, formed by the brain upon first viewing a place, really don't like to be changed"


What happens when we return to those places....and they're changed. Do those people really exist at all anymore? "Cognitive maps, formed by the brain upon first viewing a place, *really* don't like to be changed"

@mojoguzzi

Loss in hyperspace

Digital Places

14


http://mashable.com/2013/09/20/evolution-ios-gif/Saturday, September 28, 13

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzAy71lQrbUSaturday, September 28, 13

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnpaultitlow/451069459/sizes/z/in/photostream/


Altered landscapes affect our cognitive processes, whether they're physical or digital. At one time, this is what folks longed for. Even Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan reflected its meme, now long forgotten.


Sometimes we look back with fondness at our first forays into a digital anchor. How many started here with TheFacebook?


Then renovation radically refaces our home. When several of these changes happened, lots of folks expressed their anger


...and when it moves the line even further afield, frustration, loss, and anger bubble up to the fore.


and, sometimes, our digital home just gets...bulldozed.

“Being hit with eminent domain is a bit like being jumped in a dark street late at night: One minute you’re waling along and the next you’ve got someone’s arm tight against your throat.”



Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, coming from the Greek for ”home” and ”pain” Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, coming from the Greek for ”home” and ”pain. The impending suburbanification of the digital experience promises to fragment our relationship with our digital homes. As carriers fragment connectivity with paywalls and tiered services, that sense of place breaks down.

suburbanification of experience

http://www.mobilebloom.com/


The impending suburbanification of the digital experience promises to fragment our relationship with our digital homes

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/LevittownPA.jpg



Others redesign existing experiences in a new way. Are they confusing existing users, or are they progressing gracefully? When Microsoft says they “will gradually replace its aging Hotmail,” how will they do that? Gradually as in a few people at a time, or gradually as in altering features incrementally?


Yet at some point, don't we just wanna go back in time? Strains of Huey Lewis waft somewhere behind us.

I coulda told you that!


And so at the end of every hard-working day, people find some reason to believe

@mojoguzzi

Four principled approaches

Mitigation

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Realize what your design decisions will do to any existing experiences or mental models. Know what people expect, and manage those expectations. As Andy Ihnakto tweeted, “Write software that sticks with people. We react to software same way we react to movies, music. The language of our lives.”think about how the design approach affects folks. Don’t create a disjunct in your design such that folks get angry, frustrated, sad, confused, or just distraught

Realize the effects that design changes have on users



Realize the effects that design changes have on usersAvoid unintended design disjunct




Understand how loss affects people



Know that we all will wanna go home, go back in time


Understand how loss affects people




Some firms have been working at radically altering how we think about debt, tasks, and time. Great stuff. They are, in Frank Lloyd Wright’s vernacular, “destroying the box.” Check out Realmacsoftware.com, getharvest.com, and readyforzero.com

Joe [email protected]@mojoguzzi

Many thanks!


the (digital) place you love is gone

Health & Medicine

meg ryan reected

andy ihnakto

users reduce

altering features

renovation

confusing

redesign existing

carriers fragment