Web Concepts

• Internet
• Effects
  • Process
  • Organizational
  • Social
• Strategies
  • Objectives
  • Design
  • Practice
  • Action
• Theories
  • Assumptions
  • Observations
  • Principles
  • Nature
  • Speculation
• Opportunities
• Tactics
• Quotes

Internet

• A reliable system composed of loosely connected imperfect parts that work with no one in charge
• Usefulness is increased exponentially by the number of users
• From geek cloister to thriving parallel universe
• Allows people to deal with more than several others
• Innovative incubator of new ideas
• Internet years are dog years
• Technology looking for a story
• A lattice: if a part doesn’t work one goes around it
• Infinite, multidimensional, interactive, unexplainable canvas
• Free space
• Sprawl in a box
• Aladdin's cave of treasures

Effects

Process

• Inclusiveness
• More options
• Fluid intellectual capital
• Information richness affording better decisions
• Dynamism allowing discovery processes
• Rewards experimentation and innovation
• Spontaneous order and evolved solutions
• Peculiarities cherished and diversity valued
• Vivid continuous doing and saying
• Modes of search as well as shear drift
• Manages knowledge by putting people in touch with other people not just with vast databases
• Watch and read content of our own choice
• Relevance and control
• Technology wrapped in small town service
• Empowers uniquely personal process
• Many people -- one computer; one person -- one computer; one person -- many computers
• As print did, the Web will transform our information ideas and experiences
• Mobility across ideas and time
• Speed as tool
• Risk -- loss -- new
• Augmenting human intellect
• Ecology of expression: manipulation, perfection, expansion
• Mechanical to imaginary
• No more rules
• No more chemicals
• Room for thinking
• Secrets given away
• Continuous partial attention

Organizational

• Decentralize
• Flatten
• Bigger & smaller
• Timeliness
• Coordination of disperse knowledge
• Complete overhaul of education industry and institutions
• Fundamentally new business
• Changed work practices
• Distributed collaboration
• Interdepartmental institutions
• Culmination of mediums incorporating painting architecture performance and storytelling
• We can dig words out of databases on the other side of the earth faster than we can find them on our own bookshelves
• Choice Indexed Access Control
• Puts the tools of production into the hands of just about anyone
• Dislocation
• Totalizing medium
• Delineating reintegrating

• 	who
  how	<------|------>	where
  	destination

  
  





• System and pattern
• Omnipresent media space, extensible from the intimacies of self to the complete evocation of a company or industry
• Companies have stories that help make them what they are

Social

• Challenges the status quo
• Colonizing the world subconscious
• Ascendancy of local knowledge
• The best attributes of Each can stand out and make a difference
• More steakholders
• Ubiquity makes it the lowest common denominator
• The future as flea market
• Robust relationships are formed and information exchanged
• People simply want to find out what happens next
• Reflects the disjuncture and fragmentation of modern fast paced urban life creating new meaning through juxtaposition
• A democratizing medium
• It's about the customer not the company
• Shifts the perceptual mode by which people understand reality
• Ends the hegemony of the informed elite
• Iconic Revolution
• A new terrain where information becomes almost a substance with the power to reshape social arrangements
• Shared experiences of the heart
• A powerful tool attracting people to lively carefully orchestrated spaces that connect them to culture
• An intimate media reasserting private values in opposition highly institutionalized values
• Addiction to innovation
• The new work space reverts to pre-industrial familial work space
• Mitigates the general difficulty in modern and contemporary art with presenting shareable meaning

Strategies

Objectives

• Psychological signature of the host community
• A place, not just a bunch of disparate text and graphics
• Use metaphors and languages that people understand and associate with and that are life like and rich
• Create a very engaging entertaining environment that appeals to common interests
• Offer challenge, dignity, interest and reliability
• Content; fresh, deep and easy to navigate
• Goals: maintain focus; diversify offerings; provide tangible value
• Provide perceived value at the end of a click
• Add value by creating an emersive experience
• Keep it lean: small, creative, efficient, nimble, simple, inviting and innovative
• Forge alliances, partner other sites and affiliations in keeping with mission
• Promotion: across media; toot our own horn
• In the five channel world, being different was unhealthy. In the infinite channel world you better be different
• A web site must sum up everything an institution is
• Everything about a site -- how it responds, navigation, features, applications must reinforce the image you want
• In who's interest and to what ends
• Experiential real-world feel
• An edited publication
• Postmodern functionalism must begin with fun
• It has to be useful, usable, and desirable
• Realness, richness, ritual, the three Rs
• New and different with a sense of history
• Don't make me read
• See before we go
• Not just logical but emotional
• Meet desires as well as needs
• Make space for visitors to bring the unexpected
• Must have a developed personality
• Great comfort in knowing what to expect, recognition
• Quality and style
• Transcends content
• Fulfill expectations, exceed expectations
• Animated cues

Design

• Clarity of vision
• Internal coherence and purpose
• Consistent feel as it evolves yet reward visitors with newness
• Setup, buildup and payoff; like a joke
• Connect with rhythm, tone and mood -Smoothly slide one into another
• ABDCE; action, background, development, climax, ending
• Each page continues the subplot
• Each area is a character: how do they speak; why are they here; what do they know; what is their part in the whole story
• Every area is a showcase for it’s occupants values and personalities, give information about who they are
• Dialogue: sense of privy to inner workings; voyeurism
• Offer details, clues, images, invention, fresh ideas and intuitive understanding
• A likable narrator -Intuitive interfaces to existing archives and databases
• Question the conventional industry approaches
• A story with characters will work across mediums
• Avoid a wall of information, guide visitors to features
• Content is always mediated by design
• Design helps direct how we perceive and feel
• Don't show too many links, promote understanding by figuring what shouldn't show up for 3 or 4 levels of drilling
• Methods of content mediation
• Understanding the interaction between design and technology contributes to strategy
• Design out of the mess
• Structure: node, chain, ring, tree, web, flux
• Don't dig a tunnel from every room to the bathroom
• new<------beg------borrow------>steal
• Design illustrates the transition
• Icon as pal
• Design as exercise in hacking
• Show little bits quickly through our visual system
• Put the graphics first and parallel process 1,000s at once
• Use the grain of the wood
• Content, emotion, interaction vs. lost in space alone
• Design for the five senses, emotion, journey, products & services, experiences, transparency, personalization
• Stylist vs. conceptualist
• Tools, skills, concepts
• Beauty helps guide the way
• Through patterns
• Think of the body to add something of sentient being
• Bend the picture frame until you can walk away from it
• Group things you use together
• Don't stop at the obvious metaphor
• Interactivity: dumb it down, simplicity, ease of use, speed
• Keep the flow by making assumptions, details can be corrected later
• provide focus and context, map and page in one view
• Architecture: marking space; making space

Practice

• Collaborative vs. client based
• Be open to differences and exposed to alternatives
• Draw on strength and creativity of all
• Avoid narrowly focused agendas
• Teach ideas, values, energy and edge
• Contrast the component view with the composite view
• Don’t do things because you can, do them because they are appropriate to the message
• Focus on the enabling capabilities not the technology
• Competing with imagination is more successful than locks and keys
• Improvise off of sketches
• Synthesize with a theatrical flair
• Balance research with capturing the moment
• Don’t be afraid to look silly
• Solve problems and get specific information
• Third party products means doing more technical support
• Demonstrate not just portray
• Make individual connections
• Take service seriously
• All web team members are brand managers
• Most software need to be spanked
• Expect not only a good product but a good experience
• Construct the audience as the work demands
• To inform is good to inspire is even better
• The trend is toward more research and strategic development
• Strong understanding of technology informed by aesthetics and ethics
• Encourage novel ideas and knowledge diffusion
• Embody a self critical level of understanding to make the visitor less lost and more expert
• Codify the models upon which we act
• Nouns vs. verbs relates content to structure
• Create stable and consistent spaces
• Favor interacting directly on the stuff
• Learn by thinking about doing
• Think in plural, simultaneity
• Become the subject matter
• Make room for the monster rather than cage it
• Establish relationship with reception
• Place in the larger community
• Recognize the subtleties
• Be yourself: integrated, consistent, all embracing
• Logistics: track action & respond; database capacity; response times; customer service
• Freshness: commit to currency; non-static environment; content, structure, functionality
• Use the digital to find our way in the analogue
• Think of what you can't see
• Think, feel, define why

Action

• Captivate with challenge, fantasy and curiosity
• Express emotion
• Optimize all assets
• Exploit the unexpected -Be selective
• Learn to adapt to fast change
• Coordinate mass individualization
• Don’t control, get others involved - Adopt and shape with a web of players
• Avoid marching too steadily to the drumbeat of your purpose
• Balance between technology and understanding the social dynamics and how behavior evolves in these environments
• Find a metaphor for the unconscious, non rational part of your mind and let it boil up
• Like a box of Xmas ornaments with no tree - get to know them until you see their story
• Innovate with in the limitations
• Pay obsessive attention to your visitor's total on-line experience
• Be what you say you are
• Translate business goals into user experience
• Use graphics for branding and consistency
• Organize the information how end users see the business
• Illuminate the objectified
• Craft what happens
• Look at the best real places and people to create experiences that are amazing and graceful
• Animate the transitions
• Teach the space
• Spotlight results in the same space
• Get out of the middle
• Express things in universal ways
• Give it body
• Navigate with maps of spatial notions
• Give it body

Theories

Assumptions

• Creativity is more valuable than smart
• It’s smarter to be nice
• Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
• More people watch video than read
• We have learned to live within our allusions
• Producing the idea of something produces nothing
• Telling a story on television is like writing with a one ton pen
• Traditional media reacts to conditions of new media
• No one can say its wrong because no one has done it before
• We must tend this garden in this bucolic place
• Early narrative was a life changing narrative, postindustrial narrative is a collage
• A little bit of friction can be detrimental
• Digital will find a way
• Paper is god
• Power is at the ends
• Low resolution is poetic
• Technologists are afraid of personality
• Memory of an experience not a product

Observations

• Great Web sites embody whereness
• Mystery, discovery and seduction draws the audience into a space
• Architecture is now just a part of place making
• Visceral reality brings people to a new day
• Closed routes cause fragmentation of community and rigidity of thought
• Messy is friendly
• The game is forward motion
• The meat is why we are here
• A good car, if you pay attention, tells you how it ought to be driven
• You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away business and find surprising connections
• Linear type fonts developed an expressionless, undemonstrative, un-illuminated, colorless, silent, non-tactile, odor free conception of narrative
• The images through which the world was seen become the images through which the world will be seen
• Technical advancement in any communications medium gradually flows toward creating real work experiences
• Performance and environmental design create an experience
• Corporate content of the most innocuous kind is not devoid of political bias
• Feeling states are experienced all at once
• Conduct expresses more than content
• Each artist has their own channel
• Design is about slowing things down
• We like structured paths
• Grids aligned with fantasies, ideologies
• Hiways are run by amateurs, drivers
• We live in an empire of signs
• Sprawl jury-rigs aesthetics on at the end
• AOL is mapped and aggregated as a town; Yahoo is arranged around the phone and by libraries; MSN is organized alphabetically
• Bulletin board is always there
• Brand is what people say about you when you are not around
• Space without duration is only fragments

Principles

• Everything is driven by the message
• It’s about character not looks
• Archeology in reverse defines character by giving it a history
• The development of relationships creates plot
• Showmanship skills and performance experience enable one to play with an audience and create powerful work
• You do your best work when you put some of your self into it
• Most compelling projects result from a deep collaborative process
• Metaphors explain the unknown in terms of the known
• Deep understandings that can be put into images by precise depiction, models, representation and diagrams are more accessible, concise and powerful
• For compression within context use the common human experience
• Narrative is a hand rail
• Three layers: linear, interactive and reference
• Open is good, closed is bad
• A game with a story has a goal
• Every detail of a site has a direct impact on how an institution is perceived
• Web image is a business fundamental
• Timeliness, directness and usefulness count more than politics and finesse
• In nonverbal communication no symbolization interferes with direct appreciation of reality
• Metaphors have multiple levels of meaning that are perceived simultaneously
• Right Brain; Being, images, holism and music: Left Brain;: Doing, speech, abstraction and numeracy
• Inflection and rhythm are crucial components of understanding
• Images and metaphors help us attach meaning and relevance beyond utilitarian concerns
• Metaphors connect with aspirations, core values, sense of individualism or need for community
• Information is worthless until it is drawn into a unity, "unity in diversity"
• Cyber space is infinite and everything is just a click away
• Interface: journey, transition, connectivity, guide, reveal, think map, plumb design, choices, limits
• Time: attention is the most precious resource; marks in space; shared place
• Interaction: ceding authorship; enabling
• Transparency of experience equals natural tendencies
• Direct relationships are crucial
• Thought is given a home in architecture
• Good purge vs. shameful purge
• Success is based on proximity of behavior and needs
• Media migrates from conduits to control points i.e. gateways
• The lowest point a mass audience can deal with
• From print and distributed to distribute and print
• The lowest point a mass audience can deal with

Nature

• Fundamental value is either information, utility, or entertainment
• It matters everywhere how one object relates to the next
• The placement of every object determines itself almost by inherent law
• Sense of place within the bigger picture changes in time; by day, season etc.
• Logos: ideas, exuberance, values
• Technologies with limitations have personalities you can have relationships with
• Limitations tell one something about context, where it sits in time, and by invoking that world deepen the resonance
• Imperfection breeds interest
• Perfectionism is a muscle cramp
• Diversity sparks a creative edge
• Creativity is like tea time with all the dolls at the table
• Community precedes transactions
• You can’t not communicate
• Everything about how a web site is designed and built affects the perception of your institution
• Design, strategy, technology
• Representation of realities, interface, and expression
• Its unique excellence is at the same time its tragic flaw
• Conflagrations of clarity
• Metaphors allow one to leap across a chasm from one thought to the next
• Reading requires only a small circle of tunnel vision
• Time, exchange and metamorphoses replace stasis
• The public realm is an electronic surface enclosing the globe
• Both/and rather than either/or
• Ad hoc, nomadic and episodic
• Deep information and relevant content
• Indexable image
• Anyone anytime anywhere
• Reactive agency for change
• Incorporation of popular traditions where the educational potential is joined with aesthetic and political concerns of the time
• Organized differentiation
• alone<------paired------>crowed
• truth<------my truth------>truth
• overview<------|------>detail
• universal<------cultural------>individual
• journey<------anywhere------>plan
• Products aren't digital because they contain digital components but because they were in a computer
• Perspective: seeing -- accessing
• Human -- task -- setting -- artifact -- information
• Disposable play
• 3 I's: information, interaction, interactive
• 3D, 4D/time/motion, 5D interactive
• The gap between what our bodies know and our minds understand
• Complex, simple
• Centralized, distributed
• Simulation as well as a data base
• Nature of order
• Reason/senses
• An orphanage for objects
• Electrosphere
• Most activity on the periphery
• Media is multi-layered
• Conduit of contrast
• A whole relationship that is essentially a concept in the public's mind
• Beyond demographics and age groups, crosses boundaries

Speculation

• The Machine is Using Us - the video
• If someone isn’t changed, what is the point
• Chemistry or composition, structure, properties and reactions of substance as a complex of emotions is a large part of what can be offered as a venue
• The collision between thesis and antithesis produces something much greater than the sum of it’s parts
• The spoken word required repetitions and traditions, the written word broke down this need and allowed for new ideas and inventions, what will the hyperword do
• Company portal replaces intranet
• 40% of 170 million Web users in 2005 wont use a computer
• Cognate images by simultaneously integrating the component parts in the field of vision, synthesizing incongruous elements al-at-once
• Craft, logic, strategy and arithmetic range the mind back and forth along the line of past, present, and future
• Consumption, lifestyle and transience become the program
• Telematic culture and disembodiment no longer supports object culture
• Everything that can be digital will be
• Kind to chips, cruel to users --> General purpose --> Connected information appliance
• The room will become a computer interface and the computer interface will become a room
• Convergence vs. divergence
• If you have the answers before hand the results will not be true
• Know your feelings, emotions and point of annunciation and you may have something to say
• Control representation and control all
• The written word that appeals to the mind is giving way to images, sounds, and textures that are more quickly perceived
• Education must be a living process and our pedagogy must be adapted accordingly

Opportunities

• Distill, organize, filter, locate and highlight the essence of a body of information
• Information redistribution
• Point of view
• Show from many views
• Explain why and welcome suggestions
• Use internal expertise
• Make visitors partners
• Connect and create ongoing communities
• Bring from lost to found
• A shot at expression
• Conscious field-awareness synthesize multiple converging determinants so the mind can grasp the senses input all-at-once
• Emersive environments
• Internal observer, inside the image
• Enable access to objective data to facilitate decision making
• Important artistic medium that can directly and effectively reach large numbers of people
• The best of both worlds: virtual and real
• Aesthetics of behavior in real time 3D environments
• Beyond the self
• A brand is: a medium for value exchange; idea - identity; service; experience; relationship; expectations

Tactics

• Learn what visitors want, what is cared about most
• Discover objectives, requirements
• Outline
• Storyboard
• Timeline
• Intermediary software tools
• Organize choices
• Access and aggregate
• Navigate
• Critique
• Showcase popular spots and articles etc.

Quotes

• The electronic global village is a new laboratory of the spirit: Mcluhan/Rheingold
• The more one knows the more interesting consciousness is: Gore Vidal
• There are good reasons not to notice too much: Marvin Minsky
• Pictures rip moments out of time and provide our initial glimpse of the instant: Mitchell Stephens
• Photos are inherently surreal: Susan Sontag
• One needs enough chaos so something can happen that one would not think of: Robert Roschenburg
• Is the point really to be a good member of the late 20th century global economy and keep my web site up and answer all my e-mail? I'll bet there's something else: Laurie Anderson
• You must be willing to ignore a lot in order to figure something out:; Schwartz
• What you are taught to do is inherently less valuable than what you learn to do by your own discovery: John Simmons
• The dominating idea; to fill space in a beautiful way: Georga O'Keefe
• By continually exercising judgment and personal feelings you gain creative ability: Arthur Wesley Dow
• The arts in education are a way to learn forms and disciplines in a joyous way: Lynord Bernstein
• We are all getting in voice to sing the songs of ourselves: Walt Whitman
• Consumption is a treatable disease: Tibor Kalman
• I'd rather watch a fat man and a dwarf walk down the street than go to the ballet: Jeff Scher

Collage Concepts