[Sigia-l] IA Summit presentation materials posted

[George Olsen]

Jesse James Garrett  wrote:
>The IA of Everyday Things (with notes, and amended to include book 
>recommendations from the audience; 921 KB):
><http://www.jjg.net/ia/jjg_everyday_031702.ppt>

Thanks for posting it!

I'd like to note that your print examples are really just describing 
publication design. Us folks with a graphic design background have 
been doing that part of "IA" for centuries, even if we don't call it 
that.

There are a few books that have drawn the connection between IA/UI 
and traditional design:

"Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques "
by Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0133033899/interactionby-20/102-2178995-3529718>
does an excellent job of showing how traditional graphic design 
principles should be applied to UI design. (It was written pre-web, 
so it focuses on software UI, but the principles are equally 
applicable to web work.)

"Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers"
by Karen A. Schriver
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471306363/interactionby-20/102-2178995-3529718>
which talks about an integrated approach (words and design) to 
designing publications. A little academic but worth the read.


Your presentation is also an example of why I think "Elements of 
User" needs to be extended include beyond content and behavior to 
include form, i.e. "the web as (interactive) multimedia system."

Filmmakers spend a lot of time thinking about how to convey 
information (even it's fictional), so they've got a lot of teach us.

Sight, Sound, Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics by Herb Zettl
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0534526772/interactionby-20/102-2178995-3529718> 
is one of the classic works that looks at this area.

The landmark "Technique of Film Editing" by Karel Reisz, Gavin Millar
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0240514378/interactionby-20/102-2178995-3529718> 
dissects the editing of sequences from films in a variety of styles. 
Its section on how to edit an instructional film singlehandedly 
destroys a paper from last year's CHI that purposed to show that 
animation doesn't aid learning (which I suppose is true, when you use 
badly done animation for a purpose it's ill-suited to).

"Film Directing Shot by Shot : Visualizing from Concept to Screen" by 
Steven D. Katz
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0941188108/interactionby-20/102-2178995-3529718> 
provides some great examinations of storyboards from several famous 
movies, including a fascinating comparison of between a critical 
sequence from the novel "Empire of the Sun" and its filmed version -- 
and the "cinematic translation" that took place between the two.

Finally, the regrettably out-of-print "The Hollywood Eye: What Makes 
Movies Work"
by Jon Boorstein
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060923253/interactionby-20/102-2178995-3529718> 
is a masterful look at the three types of appeals -- intellectual, 
emotional and visceral -- and how they work in the movies, sometime 
in unexpected ways. For example, did you know the climatic scene in 
"Sophie's Choice" was actually edited like an action sequence, to 
move it beyond an emotional kick-in-the-guts to the visceral 
"profoundly disturbing power of recurring nightmare."

And I haven't really talked about the use of sound and/or music, 
which can be hugely useful.

Here's a quick example: NPR's "Marketplace" uses two pieces of music 
that play behind their stockmarket report -- "We're in the Money" if 
the market is up, and "Stormy Weather" if the market is down.

Once you've listened to the program a couple of times, you instantly 
know what the market did that day, even before the announcer fills in 
the details.

And you'd probably pick up on it during the first listen, due to the 
different emotional tone of each piece of music -- the first is a 
happy and bouncing, the second is subdued and blue.

Another example comes from Jon Franklin's Pulitzer Prize-winning 
story, "Mrs. Kelly's Monster" about a high-risk neuro-surgery 
operation. 
<http://users.deltacomm.com/writerl/jon/jonwft/drama/monster.htm>

Franklin needed to describe a point where the operation runs into 
difficulty, but didn't want to break the moment to describe the heart 
monitoring device. So he described it early in the story and 
associates it with the regular "pop, pop, pop" noise it makes. Then 
mentioned the noise again several times.

When the critical moment comes to remove the tangled veins of the 
brain aneurysm:

"Gingerly the tweezers attempt to push around them. Pop, pop, pop . . 
pop . . . pop . . . . pop . . . . pop. 'It's slowing!' warns the 
anesthesiologist, alarmed. The tweezers pull away like fingers 
touching fire. . . . . pop . . . pop . . pop . pop, pop, pop."

Franklin doesn't need to *tell* you the patient might die right then. 
The (implied) sound tells you all you need to know.

It's an amazing piece of writing and in his book, 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452272955//interactionby-20/102-2178995-3529718> 
Franklin provides an even more amazing annotated version where he 
describes sentence by sentence what he's doing and why -- and how he 
used references to a variety of senses to communicate the story.

As Jesse says, one definition of IA "is the juxtaposition of 
individual pieces of information
in order to convey meaning." And many more folks than IAs do it.
-- 
______________________________________________________
George Olsen                           george at interactionbydesign.com
User Experience Architect                                     310-993-0467
                      http://www.interactionbydesign.com