The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone

The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone:
Loss in Space, or, Design for
Permanence
Euro IA 2013
Joe Sokohl
@mojoguzzi
Saturday, September 28, 13
“Culture is probably one of the biggest obstacles to adoption” @chrisrivard

@mojoguzzi
Where to start
Looking at 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.”

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 last year...especially Chapter 4, “Place-making”

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.

“Space is not geometry”

“...[H]elp 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.

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 kissed your ﬁrst girl...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. Atreyu lost. The Nothing won.

all the people that you can’t recall
do they really exist at all?
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...

Sometimes those memories have to do with family, with friends, with people...but usually
people in a place.

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
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*

@mojoguzzi
Loss in hyperspace
Digital Places
14

http://mashable.com/2013/09/20/evolution-ios-gif/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzAy71lQrbU

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.

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.”

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

suburbaniﬁcation of experience
http://www.mobilebloom.com/
The impending suburbaniﬁcation of the digital experience promises to fragment our
relationship with our digital homes

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

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 will they do that? Gradually as in a few people at a time, or gradually as in
altering features incrementally?

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

@mojoguzzi
Four principled approaches
Mitigation
30

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

Realize the effects that design
changes have on users

Avoid unintended design
disjunct

disjunct
Understand how loss
affects people

Know that we all will wanna go home,
go back in time
disjunct
Understand how loss
affects people

Some ﬁrms have been working at radically altering how we think about debt, tasks, and time.
Great stuff. They are, in Frank Lloyd Wright’s vernacular, “destroying the box.” Check out
Realmacsoftware.com, getharvest.com, and readyforzero.com

Joe Sokohl
Joe@RegularJoeConsulting.com
1.804.873.6964
@mojoguzzi
Many thanks!

The (Digital) Place You Love Is Gone

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