Jist : Re-inventing ways of teaching, learning and research via novel interactive visual abstractions (interface design), first in the form of a newsletter, then a book and eventually a product.
Currently making a roadmap+syllabus to teach myself the skills to materialize it
PROBLEM:
A co-worker and I were lamenting how even when someone is willing to try an infinite canvas tool (like Mural), they still try to use it like slideware, creating uniformly sized boxes (slides) to convey information. It’s like they’ve taken a first step into an open space, but can’t let go of the decades of mental baggage and functional fixedness established by familiar tools…
HMW help others escape the self-imposed (slideware) box?!
(I was an early pioneer of the infinite canvas form circa 2003 with Spring at UserCreations)
One way to get folks to think outside of the uniform-sized boxes is to give them content that is scale-appropriate. When content is appropriately scaled, users won't try to resize it to fit boxes or crop it to fit. Also, show them how unnatural it is to rectangularly crop things like the human body. See attached.
Good point, also I was just thinking. Maybe another reason for this problem stephen pointed out is perhaps the way meetings are structured and scheduled?the expectations around it and how people have got used to skimming info, tuning out during a meeting?
Maybe folks don't think about “Zoom Out” and "Unbounded Timeline" because conversations structured in a meeting are too....transactional, quick?
Right, there's some level of sequentiality necessary for quick/efficient nav and the affordance for sequentiality may be missing in vanilla infinite canvases.
Indeed, actually Stephen I just had an idea thanks to Robb. How about for each of your pattern you also list a field that would most likely benefit from using that pattern to organize their meetings.
For example let's say Meeting of Costume Designers on a film set would benefit from the zoom out pattern challenge
Meeting of Epidemiologists would benefit from the unbounded timeline pattern
Like you could think about hmm for people who think more in dependencies...X pattern would be useful, for people who think more along temporal dimension Y
@impactology@stl8k yes—I love these ideas. I may go more with “situational” contexts, but also providing another bridge to specific domain examples would be extra helpful to convey/show relevance
In my own work, every instinct was not to introduce new major UI metaphors to accomodate past behavior, but to build new functionality within the existing infinite canvas metaphor to support that behavior.
Today, faced with a requirement to make an infinite canvas easy to present from, I'd start the exploration with a computational prediction of spatial clusters of objects where you could move between the clusters with a key combo, zooming each to fit.
But Stephen's point is also valid that there may also be a lack of imagination and providing these suggestions as practice challenges might help in changing how meetings our conducted
Not only lack of imagination. You can see the lymbic hijack “deer in headlights” fear in their eyes that this is something unfamiliar & they are worried about “losing status & looking bad”.
Make “I don’t know” and “I’m curious, tell/show me more …” part of the organizational vocabulary.
Our hypothesis is that by calling out these patterns (that we often take for granted), and reframing these as tiny (achievable) “try this when” challenges, we can provide scaffolding to help others work in more visual ways, ways not afforded by slides.
Over the course of a dinner, we identified at least 2 dozen such patterns!
@stephenpa "Our hypothesis is that by calling out these patterns (that we often take for granted), and reframing these as tiny (achievable) “try this when” challenges, we can provide scaffolding"
Stephen this is actually such a brilliant way to teach! Small "try this" diagramming challenges in an environment they are already familiar with but via which their entire perspective can change. I gotta ask were these patterns inspired by your book? :D
These sound good. I have a brainstorming template in a Google Doc that I default to pageless mode, sort of a baby step in that direction.
A problem I observe is that the complexity / richness of something like Mural tends to be overwhelming to people who only use any given tool like that once every 6 months. People who work in design / consulting and use the same tool every day have a completely different level of muscle memory.
@impactology How I see it relating to your work: We’d like to enable individuals to work in more visual (more powerful) ways to work out their own understanding and truly collaborate with (not present to) others.
The series of challenges (cards?) would be sequenced from easiest to more challenging (with most of the Collaboration patterns being more challenging, as these require shifting your mindset from broadcast to dialogue!)
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