Spatial Interfaces

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, photosho, etc
  • implementers have a

• 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

• 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