SpaceVsInformationFlows

• Web designers trained in 2D graphic design missed that the web is a move-forward medium and tried to apply conventions and techniques that worked for print and TV, on the web. (WebVsPrint)

• Town planners are too often misled by aerial photographs into thinking of the 2D spatial structure of cities, and trying to simplify and organize that. (TheCityAsInformationSystem.)

• Maybe, after a while, users of SpreadSheets are blinded by the 2D spatial layout and fail to abstract further to the real information flows in the spreadsheet. It gets hard to escape the constraints and conventions of the sheet metaphor.

: Guess this is always the problem of metaphors, but it would be nice if there was some imaginative thinking on this in spreadsheets. Is anything happening here?

See also :

• SpatialConstraintsOnInformationFlows : when space matters

• Translation between spatial characteristics and information flows may be analagous to, or a special case of TheSwingBetweenTimeAndSpace

• The role of space in decomposing web pages : SpaceAndModularizingWebPages

• TheFlowInternet looks at the internet particularly in terms of information flows

• Also JakobNielsen on 2d better than 3d : http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981115.html

• JornBarger on WhiteSpace : http://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/2005/12/theory-of-whitespace.html

Counter

And what, prey, business is it of ThoughtStorms, an entirely move-forward medium without pictures, to presume to understand and comment on 2D spatial design? (See DesignStuff)

I need to read visual wiki : http://visual.wiki.taoriver.net/