Wired has an interesting article on Jonathan Harris' 10x10 news project (which was briefly mentioned on Datacloud last November).
As Wired News notes, Harris was also the creator of WordCount, which rank-orders words in the English language by popularity and asks people to think about links among words near each other in the list. Among other projects, Princeton contracted with Harris to construct "nongeographic maps."
Such postmodern maps are, I think, going to be increasingly important to helping people understand their multiple positions in the overlapping virtual and real landscapes. Simplicity in interface design only buys you so much. At some point and for some purposes, complicating interface design yields more powerful results for users. Usability in interface design has spent too long solving usability problems by aggressively simplifying the problem space--cutting out various aspects of a problem or situation in order to make it easier to deal with. But while such abstractions will always be a part of interface design, we're just now starting to look at and understand ways that making the problem space more complicated (at least temporarily) can make people more productive in the long run, particularly for big issues involving "wicked problems" that have no simple solution, such as those covered in Barbara Mirel's work on interaction design.
[via Wired News]
Posted by johndan at February 22, 2005 08:04 AM | TrackBack