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, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:36 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…

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Steve Portigal