This personal website acts as the owner’s resume and online portfolio. The website makes me feel adventurous and puts me in a fun mood because I am enticed to explore all the elements on the webpage. There is something very addictive about the elements on his webpage that make me want to keep on playing with them even if I know what will happen. The abundance of small animations which can be interacted with using our cursor tells me that the owner is a very playful person with a very good understanding of interactive design. The website feels ‘alive’ and the action of exploring his webpage allows us to explore his works and personality as well. I chose this website because I loved how each box/section has a different interaction that helps us understand the owner’s personality. I was attracted to the color scheme and the type as well.
“Metaphors We Live By”, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
In this short essay, the two authors explain how metaphors are used in our language as a way to understand an abstract concept through spatial or systemic associations. I found this piece really interesting as it dissects the ways we think and talk about concepts that we physically cannot experience. Metaphors are so fundamentally embedded in the way we think and act, I don’t consciously notice how it's rooted by culture. Relating the idea of spatial metaphors to the design of the web, it made me think of how natural cursor movements like “scrolling up” or “dragging” were based on physical movements we make in real life. The movements we make on the trackpad or mouse physically corresponds in a way that makes sense to us, which is why these actions are easy to pick up. When it comes to designing a website, its “flow” comes into mind: does the website give you a “smooth” or “choppy” experience? To me, using flow as the metaphor for describing a website’s experience implies that a smooth experience is pleasant and efficient, whereas choppy is frustrating and unpleasant. These connotations must be concepts that I should be consciously aware of when designing websites to best articulate the website’s purpose.
“Metalogue: Why a Swan”, Gregory Bateson
Through a conversation the author has with his daughter explaining what he means by “sort of”, Bateson touches on how different objects can be categorized into many subcategories only for them to be unconsciously fused together into one single meaning in our minds. The circular and constant jumping-back form of the conversation mirrors the topic of how to categorize something to find its meaning. I found this piece rather hard to read (I had to read it at least twice word by word before “sort of” understanding its bigger meaning and even then I don’t think I fully grasped it, which I think is the point) and understand. Using the “sort of” metaphor, websites can be thought of as a designed page which is comprised of things that it pretends to be, pretends not to be and what it really is. All the factors that make a website memorable or understandable to the user are made in separate parts, but when it all comes together into one holistic experience, the user’s unconsciousness should be able to form an idea of what they think the website is trying to do. The revealing relationship between form and content can be related to web design because to a certain degree, most websites are designed so that the structure of it reveals what the content of the web page is and how to experience it.
“Broad Band, Chapter 10: Hypertext”, Claire Evans
In this chapter, Evans interviews different women who were involved in the pre-web hypertext movement. Through these intimate and vivid descriptions of the women’s journey in creating a hyperlink system, I felt very close and empathetic to them. I think that through this type of narrative, the author is trying to emphasize that computed systems are all about the connections we make between people, not just about the data and code behind them. Links between people, and documents likewise, should be meaningful and not anchored to one thing that could easily be lost. The Web was chosen over Microcosm because it was cheap and easy for everyone. I feel like we have become so accustomed to doing mindless, superficial clicking on each web page we come across, we have inevitably lost the feeling of meaningful connections between things. This chapter also made me think about how we have been choosing convenience and ease at the cost of substantial value. Design is so often talked about as a vessel to get information across as quickly and efficiently as possible, it makes me forget about the value of the information it is carrying and how easy it is for us to overlook the overlapping of simple ideas between two pieces of information.
Questions
1. How could we implement the Microcosm way of hyperlinking ideas into the web today? Is it possible?
2. How would two-way links work today?
‘A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, Ursula Leguin
Leguin provides a new theory, which she later on compares to writing fiction, in that weapons were not the first tools which were invented, but the carrier bag was. After reading this, my main takeaway was that this was a very feminist approach to looking at world building and how the most fundamental things, albeit somewhat mundane, are always overlooked by the exciting, action-filled stories or people. It’s never a collective story that focuses on everyone, but always about the action and the hero — who tends to be a man. I think her metaphor of a carrier bag as a perspective on world building is interesting in that everything gets equal treatment in terms of status. The ‘hero’ isn’t put on a pedestal, but instead mixed in with all the other characters and events. In my mind, the web acts kind of like a carrier bag already, just without the equal treatment of all the information. Without hierarchy in the web, or even on one webpage, it would be extremely difficult to navigate through all the information. Given the amount of information that has been put on the web since it began, it would be chaos to try and find anything if information wasn’t already organized in chronological order, with the most recent or most relevant information coming up first. I suppose a better metaphor for the web would be a filing cabinet. However, I think that her theory of storytelling would be interesting to implement into the design of a personal website. It could become the formula to creating an immersive first-person storytelling based website, perhaps similar to a choose-your-own-adventure story.
‘The Tower of Babylon’, Ted Chiang
The author paints a very vivid and immersive story as a way of explaining how Earth is shaped in this fictional world. It is revealed that the vault of heaven, and subsequently the entire earth, is somehow buried within itself. The earth is actually a paradoxical shape which our brains cannot fully comprehend or visualize (much like the tesseract). Although the beginning of the story was a bit hard to get into, once they miners began their journey upwards, I found myself fully invested in the story. From this reading, I was able to understand the world Chiang created, and I think that designing a website is like creating a world. It has motion, it has life, it has activities that happen or don’t happen depending on various factors, and most of all, its rules are dictated by the person creating it. Just like how Chiang details the changing scenery as Hillalum ascends, a website also reveals more about its function and itself the more the user progresses forward in interacting with it. For me, this story illustrated how through good world building (not just through words, but perhaps graphics and design too) it’s possible to create something/an experience that is paradoxical yet perfectly understandable and functional to another person. Oftentimes, when I begin coding a website for class, I am overwhelmed with the possibilities. However, once I begin to create constraints and think about how a user would intuitively interact with my website, the world I want to create through my website becomes clearer.
‘Library of Babel’, Jorge Luis Borges
In this short story, the universe consists of hexagonal libraries which are adjacent to one another. Throughout the book, the narrator gives us more information about the books that are in the library and how the people in this universe have reacted to the knowledge that there must be a knowall book present in the library. What I found really interesting was that in both this short story, and Chiang’s Tower of Babylon, God or faith is often pulled into the story as a way of dealing with the unknown or the infinite. Interestingly, there is now a virtual library of babel (which I actually learnt about through a Vsauce video a couple years back) containing tens to million different permutations of the letters a - z, all lower case. With the amount of information that already lives on the web, the library of babel is comparable to the web. When reduced down to binary, the web and the information that lives on it can also just be seen as an array of ones and zeroes that just so happen to form the words and sentences we understand. As I was reading this, I was filled with dread and anxiety as I imagined living in this world. Constantly obsessing over finding a comprehensible book in an almost-infinite library where the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against humanity, would obviously scare anyone. From this, it yet again reinforces the importance of hierarchy and order to me. Without it, we too, would be drowning in the library of babel.