A Digital-Analog Distributed Whiteboard
The magic of thinking together at a whiteboard is a unique experience. Despite many advances in digital technology, the whiteboard medium is still far superior for analog collaboration. No app comes close to replicating the experience of two humans standing at a whiteboard, markers in hand, pointing, sketching, squiggling, writing, erasing with their palms, etc.
We can and should do better. By bridging the analog and the digital worlds, we can free computing from the confines of the screen and build off of the best of both the analog and digital worlds.
The digital world actually does offer some advantages over the analog world.
What are some of those advantages?
- Instantaneous archiving of images
- Unlimited undo, relatedly
- Easy duplication and sharing
- A more robust model representation - drawings don't have to be merely "pixels" but can have higher-order representations. See Paper by WeTransfer which automatically converts circular shapes into actual circles, etc.
- Integration and projection of other images into the shared whiteboard
- Infinite zoom - the ability to scale up and down with ease.
- Distributed experience - the whiteboarders don't have to be standing together in order to work together.
What are the problems with pure digital whiteboards?
- Digital input devices are lagging behind analog tools (marker and whiteboard)
- Analog tools are completely intuitive, even for small children. The mouse and keyboard and other digital tools are expert tools that require years of experience to master, while still not providing the expert user with the immediacy and fluidity of analog tools.
- Size of input space is typically much smaller (unless you have a $5,000 Jamboard or similar). Scale matters. Part of the beauty of a whiteboard is the ability to place ideas in space all over it and "step back" to observe the "big picture."
- Tooling for distributed discussion is limited to videoconferencing software.
Input. Display. Model.
I think of the challenge of integration digital and analog whiteboards as improving on three inter-related system: input, display, and model.
In an analog whiteboard, the input is the marker on the whiteboard, the display is the whiteboard with the markings on it, and the model is the representation created by the markings on the whiteboard.
- Talk further about why it's crucially important to separate display from model