# Spatial Interfaces Read https://christophlabacher.com/notes/screen-as-room  "The room becomes a medium for communication." Read [[John Palmer]]'s essays on this topic. Also, [[Barbara Tversky]] has done some work in this area. ## What Works about Spatial Canvases? - Mediums - Flexible meaning - can put anything anywhere, can choose your own structure - two dimensions, a variety of media types, text, sizes - You can effectively design your own "notation" - downside: _have_ to choose your own structure - this can actually be quite taxing - you develop fluency over time with a well-known notation - also, designing notations is _hard_ - designing one that accounts for all of your use cases is challenging. - Even today I had to think about that when presenting this information - How do I want to represent the good and bad of each of one of these attributes? - Fluid real-time collaboration - can see what other people are doing in real-time, each have your own space - downside: async collaboration can be frustrating - hard to make sense of someone else's space - like trying to find the silverware in their kitchen - hard to see what changed - Great at early phases of the project - exploratory work - downside: you'll need to work with another app for the "deliverable" and moving the info out of the spatial canvas is hard - "production process" phase work - Permanence - you can come back to it, things stay where you put them - downside: they get messy and have to be cleaned up, feels onerous to maintain them - Multiple media - true multimedia - can embed and relate almost any media - downside: generalists problem - end up being poor versions of almost everything - have to re-implement a text editor, image editor, photoshop, etc - implementers have a ## Rodrigo's Critique: The Tyrrany of Structurelessness - His critique: "there's nothing in them." - No norms or notations for how to use the space - Have to decide what the norms and notations are every time - May not share norms with someone else sharing the space - May not understand the norms of someone else's space - Architecture school: - Architects use a highly-specialized "2D canvas" to specify the shape of a building - Blueprints are the same the world over - They formalized the blueprint notation about 200 years ago - When two architects are looking at a blueprint together, they might point to a wall and talk about the way the light would enter the room - They can picture the room based on the blueprint alone because they have experience turning the notation into the full thing that it represents - They can discuss it meaningfully because they each possess the same idea in their minds, which facilitates meaningful communication - There is tremendous power in shared [[Notation]] #work/notes #inbox