Metaphors and the Future
I found this blog post, BookWeb vs. GeoWeb to be a nice simple reminder, (passed on via the ever-interesting Mano) about the guiding metaphor of the web and how that is being problematized in certain domains. As a web developer, the days of creating single, static pages are largely gone, but the experience of interacting with pages via the browser is not, regardless if it was generated dynamically. It got me thinking, as our class dives into the more technical IR section focusing on the analysis and retrieval of documents, about how we may engage with information that doesn’t conform so easily to that metaphor.
In August the design firm adaptive path released a concept video series portraying “…a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve in the future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts.” (Aurora, pt. 1) Whatever your reaction, it is interesting to see echos of our discussions about the semantic web perpetuated here, as well as to count how many elements of the scenario are already observable in our present day web, although perhaps in nascent form.
Also, recently there was a demo from the University of Washington showing a not yet released project aimed at exploring the temporal dimensions of the web, capturing and visualizing what are often ephemeral flows of information. (Zeotrope: Web crawler archives historical data for easy searching) Watch the video for the full effect.
The last thing I wanted to add is that after recently hearing a couple of fantastic talks on the work being done in non-desktop environments (and the challenges it presents), one by our own Kimiko Ryokai, and another by Mirjana Spasojevic, a Nokia Researcher, both hosted by the Berkeley Center for New Media, I wonder how a shift in the devices we use to interact with information will spur the reformulation of the primary metaphors we use to frame our experiences.