Starting this month, I am going to be re-designing some websites for the organization I’ve been working with for about a year now.
Re-imagining the site(s) comes at a time of change for our organization, which records and archives lecture materials, making new kinds of knowledge available to the public. The availability of these resources invites predictions and visions for how it may be used.
In initiating this kind of site redesign, A List Apart’s “The Content Strategist as a Digital Curator” is a good place to start, and it addresses the relationship between digital space and physical space that has become more and more important for content specialists to understand.
Without diverging too much, let me say that my field jump into HCI started as my fascination with a troubling metaphor back in my new media studies classes in undergrad. At the time, digital media theory introduced the idea that digital space is like physical space, and must be navigated in cognitively similar ways. I noticed a conflict in treating the relationship of digital space to physical space as a metaphor and a reality, and I wanted to investigate further.
I didn’t know then that Information Architecture was a burgeoning field, and it bears mentioning that I once saw the relationship as a metaphor, and now, as a practitioner, I see digital space as a real, albeit different kind of space. Much like the terms “calculator” and “computer” once referred to the clerical professions of people and used those models for building the machines we use today, digitization has created a vast information landscape that exceeds the human resource of attention. The limitation of attention makes the problem of getting through information a problem of navigation (among many other kinds of problems).
So in re-imagining the archive, I decided to visit the newly expanded University of Michigan Museum of Art, this time while thinking about its goal to present and preserve a collection within the limitations of a physical space.
In doing so, I realized that UMMA recently solved a problem of limited space for a too-large collection by doubling the size of the exhibition space with the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Wing.
Physical space directs attention. When inside the UMMA, you see doorways leading to rooms, and in those rooms you can actually see the exhibition’s contents. While a user landing on a website can judge in a very short time about if they will stay or where they will go next (well under a second), and will not likely scroll down to do so, in a physical space a visitor can make that kind of decision just by looking through a doorway. UMMA augments this by providing information on the walls, guiding the way from exhibit to exhibit.
It’s a totally common strategy, but the limitation of information (only the nearby wings are shown, and information is reduced relative to the user’s position in the museum) within the physical space helps people get through it. And these decisions have been made in part by my SI colleagues, so you can bet they were well considered.
Physical space can hint at what’s next door. One interesting update to the museum were the “open storage” galleries. In these galleries, related objects were placed together on shelves with much less context than the exhibited objects. The related objects were sorted by collection on different shelves. And the structure of the shelves was suggestive of how physical space enables perception– the shelves were lit and separated by door dividers with opaque, vertical beams. However, when leaning in close to see the objects, you can still see into the adjoining shelf space, perceiving both separation and relationship at the same time. I took a picture:
When designing, a digital space must provide relationship cues in places that are available to the user to understand. Finding meaningful relationships between stored objects– in my case, lecture objects– and presenting them as neighbors may make an archive more browseable. What I’m talking about is grounding what we call recommender systems in a navigation scheme that takes its cognitive cues from physical space.
I’m a brand new designer, and it’s therefore just the time to wax philosophical in order to create extraordinary future design. How do we imagine our ability, as humans, to see and understand our vast landscape of information? If we best extend our ability to do so, what will we see? What will we learn? The question precedes understanding the difference between seeing the information landscape from a horse and buggy and seeing it from an airplane. And yes, that’s a metaphor.