Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:29 GMT

It’s great to see this issue come up again, with such a thoughtful approach (and great discussion). In grad school many moons ago I was part of that auditory interface scene (if there was ever a scene) Adam refers to. Some called it “earcons” while others felt that term wasn’t broad enough and on and on it went.

For my thesis I tried and semi-failed to create a tone language for navigating hypertext structure. This was pre-WWW, and was based on some naive assumptions about how people could or could not learn to move around virtual space. The research was really rudimentary but there were some intruiging things that people COULD learn to do. You can see a PDF of a paper I haven’t looked at for a long time at http://www.icad.org/websiteV2.0/Conferences/ICAD94/papers…

Steve Portigal — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:39:53 GMT

I first heard of this approach from the folks at Interval Research about 10 years ago (Eric Dishman and Colin Burns). They called it “Informance” and there was finally something written about it in Brenda Laurel’s recent Design Research book http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=CAA6…

Steve Portigal — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:28:54 GMT

I’m really looking forward to the event!

Steve Portigal — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 20:11:23 GMT

Great post, well explained and provocative. Reminds me that many years ago we did fieldwork with French mobile phone users and talked about technology and social connectivity. We got some very clear explanations about the difference between “copains” (i.e., buddies) and “amis” (friends), where an ami was for life and where one had far fewer amis than copains. Our French client had a lot of trouble understanding, then, our Japanese respondents who were (at that time, using Print Club, those small stickers) aggregating large numbers of shallow relationships they called “friends.” So you have the nomenclature issue, and you have the cultural issue. Even talking about it was tough, if the frame being illustrated didn’t match the existing frame.