The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone

!!!!!!!The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone: Loss in Space

BigDesign 2015!

Joe Sokohl

!They called me by name, they bought me that cheaply!They called me by name, I didn't know what to think!I watched their loud game and oh I drank deeply!Though no one had ever asked me to drink!And you know that stolen liquor it was sweeter than whiskey!And a thousand times quicker just to put me to sleep!But drinking with strangers can be very risky!The sleep it was long, it was twenty years deep.!

@RegJoeConsults #DigitalPlace

“Culture is probably one of the biggest obstacles to adoption” @chrisrivard

@mojoguzzi

Where to start

Place and Loss

!3

Progress has an impact on our selves...not just physical progress, but digital as well. In our jobs, we certainly focuses on progress. I'm interested in “at what cost.”

!4@RegJoeConsults #DigtialPlace

MelissaHolbrookPierson.com

This talk provides some WHAT, not a lot of HOW. It’s meant to be a thought-provoking talk...So, I am starting with this great book by the wonderful Melissa Holbrook Pierson. She talks about how important place is to us...and what we experience when it changes, and changes drastically.


Her books like “The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles” and “The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing” deal with place, self, and change as well. “Deep down, my home, my cradle, is still where it always was. Your home is still within you, the box it made and then hid inside.”


PervasiveIA.com/book

I’m also heavily indebted to the great Pervasive IA that Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati put out...especially Chapter 4, “Place-making”


“Space is not geometry”

Place-making is the capability of a PvIA model to help users reduce disorientation, build a sense of place, and increase legibility and way-finding across digital, physical, and cross-channel environments.


“...[H]elp users reduce disorientation, build a sense of place, and increase legibility and way-finding across digital, physical, and cross-channel environments

Place-making is the capability of a PvIA model to help users reduce disorientation, build a sense of place, and increase legibility and way-finding across digital, physical, and cross-channel environments.


+ = Place

In effect, I'm using the working definition of **place** as being the intersection or the amalgamation perhaps of **space** (in a physical or digital sense) and **time**, usually duration. So a sense of place exists because we spent time in that physical surrounding…or digital one.


Oliver Sacks, quoted by Pierson, Melissa Holbrook

“Discontinuity and nostalgia are most profound if, in growing up, we leave or lose the place where we were born and spent our childhood, if we become expatriates or exiles, if the place, or the life, we were brought up in is changed beyond recognition or destroyed.”!!

As Pamela said earlier this morning, the mall was a place that has a lot of memories for certain generations.


Our sense of self is strongly tied to place. Many of us can tie memory to a mall or house or synagogue. Here is where you had your first kiss...there is where you shoplifted a bag of Swedish Fish... ...and when progress radically alters that landscape, we are lost. Now, the place you loved is so much broken signage....disappeared, non-existent shops......broken pavement, or at worst, simply nothingness. !


Sometimes those memories have to do with family, with friends, with people...but usually people in a place. Looking at pictures of the northeast corner of the house where my maternal grandparents live, I remember my father sitting there. I remember hanging out with my dad and uncle and grandfather (and his dog). I remember the day my oldest brother got married and my dad was his best man, my other brother and I were groomsmen. The corner is still there…but yet not there. Not only is furniture gone, but so is my father, and my grandfather, and my uncle. I am still here…yet when I visit that house, these corners are not these corners.


What happens when we return to those places....and they're changed. Do those people really exist at all anymore? "Cognitive maps, formed by the brain upon first viewing a place, *really* don't like to be changed"


"Cognitive maps, formed by the brain upon first viewing a place, really don't like to be changed"

What happens when we return to those places....and they're changed. Do those people really exist at all anymore? "Cognitive maps, formed by the brain upon first viewing a place, *really* don't like to be changed"


We have been told that we can never go home again, based on the writings of Thomas Wolfe. [story of Wolfe going off to UNC and then NYC, writing this novel, then later writing YCNGHA based on his experiences of coming back home after he’d had a novel accepted by Max Perkins].

@mojoguzzi

What happens when digital emminent domain occurs

Digital Place

!14

Progress has an impact on our selves...not just physical progress, but digital as well. In our jobs, we certainly focuses on progress. I'm interested in “at what cost.”


Marsha Haverty’s excellent “What we mean by meaning” talk at the IA Summit this year highlighted the nature of meaning and its relationship to environment. As she says, !it’s not these surfaces, edges, textures themselves that we pick up, but the relationships among them. These relationships are invariant structure. And it’s the invariant structure that we detect, regardless of our perspective. This invariant structure is information. That’s what information *is*. !What if our cognition is phase-shifted, to use the Haverty Scale(™), in a way that interferes with the creation of and engagement with meaning? I think changing digital landscapes does just that.


“It’s never exactly the same. It fragments and splinters the whole community as it existed—does it ever really exist anymore?”

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/what-happens-when-digital-cities-are-abandoned/373941/

Laura Hall’s excellent Atlantic article last summer explored what happens to online worlds that are abandoned. !“You leave your hometown and maybe you’re still in touch with your old friends over time, but eventually that network of friends ceases to exist. People move away, they get married, they die, they move on,” said Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Tiny Speck and Flickr. “We were trying to build an environment where it was easy for people to create those kinds of communities. Although there were game mechanics and rules, the point of those was as a way of facilitating the creation of culture and community by the players.” !At some point, even Club Penguin (Thanks, Pam!) will fade into dystopian dereliction. !


“It’s never exactly the same. It fragments and splinters the whole community as it existed—does it ever really exist anymore?”

http://www.mmobomb.com/file/2011/03/club-penguin-6.jpg

Laura Hall’s excellent Atlantic article last summer explored what happens to online worlds that are abandoned. !“You leave your hometown and maybe you’re still in touch with your old friends over time, but eventually that network of friends ceases to exist. People move away, they get married, they die, they move on,” said Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Tiny Speck and Flickr. “We were trying to build an environment where it was easy for people to create those kinds of communities. Although there were game mechanics and rules, the point of those was as a way of facilitating the creation of culture and community by the players.” !At some point, even Club Penguin (Thanks, Pam!) will fade into dystopian dereliction. !

!17@RegJoeConsults #DigtialPlace http://northforksound.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html

The great Lowell George of Little Feat, in “Easy to Slip,” sings about loss. Our sense of self is tied to our sense of place...

!18@RegJoeConsults #DigtialPlace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aY1HfYN3X0

Looking at the changes in iOS from version 1 through 7 illustrate how, as things change, loss occurs. And now with iOS 9 hitting the streets, well… And it’s not just us old fogies. 79% of GenZ show signs of emotional distress when kept away from their devices a s Pam said this morning. !The 2013 video of a kid sobbing because iOS7 has radically changed his sense of digital place accurately showcases how many of us feel in similar situations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aY1HfYN3X0

!19@RegJoeConsults #DigtialPlace http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnpaultitlow/451069459/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Altered landscapes affect our cognitive processes, whether they're physical or digital. At one time, this is what folks longed for. Even Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan reflected its meme, now long forgotten.


Sometimes we look back with fondness at our first forays into a digital anchor. How many started here with TheFacebook?


Then renovation radically refaces our home. When several of these changes happened, lots of folks expressed their anger


...and when it moves the line even further afield, frustration, loss, and anger bubble up to the fore.


Reams of comments decried Google’s revamping of Gmail’s compose feature. Adding a layer of documentation is meant to mitigate the seismic shift in cognitive dissonance. We also know that, whenever documentation appears, a design failure has occurred.


and, sometimes, our digital home just gets...bulldozed.


“Being hit with eminent domain is a bit like being jumped in a dark street late at night: One minute you’re waling along and the next you’ve got someone’s arm tight against your throat.”

There’s also digital eminent domain….


Nostalgia is a powerful emotion, coming from the Greek for ”home” and ”pain. !


suburbanification of experiencehttp://www.mobilebloom.com/

The suburbanification of the digital experience promises to fragment our relationship with our digital homes. As carriers fragment connectivity with paywalls and tiered services, that sense of place breaks down.


http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1566998/images/o-NET-NEUTRALITY-GONE-facebook.jpg

The suburbanification of the digital experience promises to fragment our relationship with our digital homes. As carriers fragment connectivity with paywalls and tiered services, that sense of place breaks down.


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/LevittownPA.jpg

Maybe this house is someone’s ancestral home…but it’s also a bulldozed tract.


Others redesign existing experiences in a new way. Are they confusing existing users, or are they progressing gracefully? When Microsoft says they “will gradually replace its aging Hotmail,” how did they do that? Gradually as in a few people at a time, or gradually as in altering features incrementally?

!31@RegJoeConsults #DigtialPlace https://marcabraham.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/talbellcurve_single1.jpg?w=645

Time

We know about Beal & Rogers’ technology adoption lifecycle, primarily through Geoffrey Moore’s concentration on the chasm of adoption of moving product acceptance from early adopters to early majority. We as UX folks tend to design for the early adopters, and even the innovators. Rarely do we work for the early majority (and almost never for late majority or laggards). Yet over time, people move from being early adopters of a specific product to majority users of that product as it and they age. When we then come back and redesign that product, we create a design disjunct, because the now-majority users lose their way with the new product’s landscape. In addition, we iontroduce some complex ethical issues: what are our ethical obligations to preservation of users’ experiences and intent? As we heard from Mike Carvin yesterday, there’s also a reasonable accommodation needed for an aging population. What about peoples’ rights to use software the way it used to be?


Yet at some point, don't we just wanna go back in time? Strains of Huey Lewis waft somewhere behind us.


I coulda told you that!

And so at the end of every hard-working day, people find some reason to believe


In the digital world, we have a lot of representations of home. Remember how important the home button in Netscape was? And while we designers eschew putting a home button or a link in navigation explicitly to home, we know from research how few folks think to click logos to “go home.


I want to return to Melissa Holbrook Pierson’s book for, as she says, “a commonplace book of home.” Winston Churchill said, “We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.”


Know that we all will wanna go home, go back in time

Realize the effects that design changes have on users

“Design for the future” by designing for degredation and obsolescence…gracefully

Understand how loss affects people

Realize what your design decisions will do to any existing experiences or mental models. Know what people expect, and manage those expectations. As Andy Ihnakto tweeted, “Write software that sticks with people. We react to software same way we react to movies, music. The language of our lives.” Think about how the design approach affects folks. Don’t create a disjunct in your design such that folks get angry, frustrated, sad, confused, or just distraught. !Also, “What we are is where we have been.” MHP

Joe Sokohl [email protected] @mojoguzzi@RegJoeConsults

!!!!!!!Many thanks!

The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone

Design

Transcript of The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone