A thought occurred to me tonight (while reading Visible Signs by David Crow), which took me back to Johanna Drucker and our interview with her over Christmas break.
Dan asked her about a recent article she had written regarding archiving ("Blind Spots" from the Chronicle of Higher Education), and she talked about the peculiarities of physicality…the coffee stain on a file folder that you use to remember a particular item. How researchers were able to locate records from a certain time by smelling documents to detect arsenic (used to ward off plague).
So, in relation to my project:
How could the idea of physicality or at the very least, imperfection, help my first stab at visual study #2?
How could these ideas further the notion of triage?
How could I help differentiate information/results so that they aren’t all visually equivalent?
Could I allow users to spill/smudge/scuff/mark-up their search results?
How can I marry the efficiency and malleability of the digital interface with the tangible and visual cues of physical space?
So, without further ado, here is my first visual study. (It is #2, because it corresponds to my second sub-question, even though it is the first study I'm attempting.)
Some details: This is housed within a browser as a standalone program (like Viewzi). I have been thinking about this as a system that allows the user to click, and drag and drop items and objects within the interface. This would be to enable the user to sort and clump information.
The interface has three different special modes: saved material, tagging & sharing, and filtering.
Users can drag pages they want to save to this space, where the information and websites can be sorted by different criteria: time, hierarchy, tag relevance, etc.
Users can also drag results off the edge of the frame to throw away pages they don't want.
The system recognizes which pages are already saved and thrown away, so these don't show up in future searches.
This space serves to hold material and allow users to sort through it as needed.
The drawer can be pulled out further, giving the user a larger space to sort upon.
Information still "being considered" is pooled together in the bottom corner in a small blob, which can be fanned out as needed by clicking on it.
Tagging & sharing mode:
This functions as a way to apply tags on the fly (and to organize them).
The user can also view how other people have tagged information.
The results window displays which tags have been applied to the current search information.
Filtering mode:
This is meant to function in a very flexible way—the way in which people create associations for materials and truly categorize them can be quite unique. So this mode would be very robust and flexible.
Users can filter by: source type, category, time, popularity, etc. (This is just the beginning of the kinds of categories and filters that could be created/generated by both the system, other users, and the current user).
Now is the time when I need to start making things for my project. However, this is proving a very daunting task. I have no idea where I want to begin, and making that first mark is very overwhelming.
So, to overcome this paralysis, I decided to do some low-stakes experimentation using objects at home and stop-motion photography. Here is a series of form studies I put together to begin thinking about how an "intelligent path" might start to take shape.
These four studies start to illuminate the complexity of the types of information and functionality I will be working with. What does each segment mean? How might they be differentiated (color, shape, position)? How might relationships be displayed and exploited to help a user better understand information and their movement through it?
This is certainly just the tip of the proverbial iceberg...
I had the opportunity to meet with Karen Dewitt, head librarian at the Design Library here at NCSU. She had a lot of great insights and ideas to share with me.
Karen Dewitt brought up faceted searching during our meeting, and showed me the advanced search functions of WorldCat and the faceted functions of NCSU’s online portal. This is very much in line with how I want to structure my system—showing a flexible landscape of options and allowing the user to easily navigate through them. NCSU’s site does this especially well—the path of a user’s current search a the top, and allowing them to turn their filters on and off at will seems very useful.
I've also been thinking about where I might want this to live. Obviously, my system has to live/function closely in tandem with Google—within or in conjunction with an internet browser. But does that suggest a browser plug-in? A browser extension? Its own window/program that aggregates from Google and other engines? Or is it a completely separate widget/program that can function independently on the user’s desktop?
I really need to parse these options out and think about the benefits, affordances and limitations of each approach. Perhaps my studies can each focus on one of these approaches.
Another thought about triage—even in the medical sense, this is about facing an overwhelming situation (chaotic and full of anxiety) and using a strict structure and routine (complete with very clear and concise criteria for decision making) to act. Without this structure and criteria for judgement, a user/person would be paralyzed and unable to begin making sense of things.
So my system could be about creating this structure and set of criteria to allow people to function. It just has to be flexible enough to work in many different contexts for different needs.
Every two years, NC State's graduate graphic design class develops, plans, orchestrates and hosts a graduate student symposium. This past weekend marked the culmination of five months of planning by 18 grad students and a few brave faculty members. We began brainstorming in the last sweltering days of August, in several white-board/post-it sessions that looked like this:
Over the months we refined our ideas, developed materials to request proposals and participation, booked facilities and catering, built a website from scratch, developed programming for the weekend, and invited several keynote speakers to come and share their insights into our topic: Design, Community and the Rhetoric of Authenticity.
Over 100 attendees gathered at the college of design on Friday afternoon from schools including: California College of the Arts, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Herron School of Art and Design, Otis College of Art and Design, Savannah College of Art and Design, and York University (Toronto, Canada). Our keynote speakers on Friday night were Elliott Earls from Cranbrook, and Brenda Laurel from CCA—they offered two different points of view in their twenty-minute presentations, and then, together, obliged us with a half-hour discussion moderated by Denise Gonzales Crisp. Saturday started with another keynote presentation by Jon Sueda from CCA, followed by several other presentations and panel discussions, lunch, and 12 breakout sessions.
The weekend was also peppered with 7 video interstitials, created by a small group of us over Christmas break (Caroline Maxcy Prietz, Dan McCafferty, Laura Rodriguez, Kelly Bailey and myself). The five of us carefully selected and contacted designers from all over the world, wrote pointed questions relating to both our symposium topic and the particular designer's work, and conducted interviews via Skype, capturing the discussion as a digital video. These videos were then edited and compiled, and played at intervals during the main stage events.
We had the opportunity to talk to Johanna Drucker, Dori Tunstall, Adrian Shaughnessey, Nolen Strals and Bruce Willen from Post Typography, Howard Rheingold, Rick Valicenti, and Jessica Helfand. Each Skype discussion lasted approximately thirty-minutes, and this material was then edited down to smaller nuggets to present during the event. Each interstitial consisted of an animated introduction and then two or three questions and answers.
These interstitial videos added seven additional voices (from seven very different places in the design world, in both geographic and philosophical terms) to the discussion. We hope to make these videos available to all the symposium participants (as well as the extended discussion with each interviewee) via the internet in the coming months.
Finally, I wanted to share a video I have created of the weekend. This should give you a brief overview of what happened here, at NCSU's College of Design, on a cold and rainy weekend in late January. The video includes music by one of Merge Records' artists, Spoon. Merge Records' own Maggie Fost sat on one of the symposium discussion panels (exploring how music industry design relates to authenticity), and gave a wonderful presentation of her company's work, philosophy and hopes for the future.
I started thinking about user search paths, and what shapes those might take online. Here are some sketches in that vein:
Attempting to visualize these search paths begins to illuminate the fact that there are many different kinds of users using search tools, and that their experiences can be very different, depending on individual skill level, context for the search at hand, and how hard the information online is to sift through. I'm not completely sure how these sketches will inform my visual studies in the next few weeks, but it has been useful to start thinking about this in a more visual way.
