[Sigia-l] 3-D workflows

Joe 10 Enterprises joe at joe10.com
Wed Jul 10 22:21:18 EDT 2002


I'm going to return from the definitions  of  3D space to the origin 
of this thread, or more accurately, the fork I care more about; 
whether isometric projections help or hinder.

George put forth his very nice "Client.com" and Cf added in that 3D 
is a bit much for that use but could add to the visual pleasure. I 
was going to reply with "Real men (and women) keep it flat and color 
coded" and wait for JJG to add "Make sure it fits on A4", then I 
stopped and remembered all the oohs and aahs I've received with 
isometric diagrams in conference rooms... man, stick Acrobat and MS 
Word icons on the appropriate files and you're home free!

What I mean is, Flat is fine for us who enjoy information but tends 
to elicit blank stares from the suits, so we dress it up with 60 
degree angles and they "get it" for some reason.

But it still rubbed me the wrong way, so I printed Georges map and 
nice arrangement of multivariate data. Then I went to Dynamic 
Diagrams to find they'd nuked Mapa from their offerings.

Next I found a site mapping tool I bought a while ago and played 
around and came up with this:
http://www.joe10.com/sitemap/isom/map.html
then this:
http://www.joe10.com/sitemap/flow/map.html
and finally this:
http://www.joe10.com/sitemap/cloud/map.html

All of which are pretty silly if you ask me.

And it occurred to me;
1) the Web isn't 3 dimensional. Neither is information.
2) In the effort to "Escape Flatland" we layer data to show time 
passage, simulate volume, indicate concurrence and represent 
multiples, none of which are necessarily well served by skews and 
drop shadows.
3) in a low res environment like a screen, isometrics rarely pay back 
what they waste in precious pixels, especially where text is 
concerned. Prints up nice though.
4) this type of diagram used as a metaphor breaks down when it comes 
to technical interaction articulation, but so do most, if not all, 
others. Like electricians have their symbols, so we are developing 
ours.

In the end it's a matter of audience. Just like different people 
require different levels of detail in a functional spec, the picture 
you give to the "higher ups" may be different than the one we use to 
plan and different then the one we hand to engineers.

And the problem that George originally posited has given me a great 
idea for a mobile

sorry for the ramble,
/Joe

At 1:58 PM -0400 7/9/02, Lord, Ralph wrote:
>I'm looking for info on whether Visio or another Windows app (sorry, no Macs
>here) will let me create 3-D workflows. What we have is lots of
>interconnected flows.  The invidual flows are on separate pages and need to
>stay that way for simplicity. However, when we try to put them together to
>illustrate the big picture, it gets messy. Either we have one giant
>confusing diagram (and no plotter to make it more bigger), or we have
>several documents with "contact points" labeled that cause confusion. (What
>is circle "C" on page 3? Oh, that's where the output goes back into page 6.
>Where? Here, down in the middle of the page, see the other circle "C"?)
>
>   If I could stack the flows up (like a 3-level chessboard) and show the
>contact points as lines between planes, it might be clearer how the
>individual flows are related.  Of course, I'd like the planes in the big
>picture view to be linked to the individual flow docs for easy editing and
>updating.  Anyone know of such a thing?
>
>Thanks,
>Ralph Lord
>CDC Bioterror Project
>------------

-- 
Joe Tennis
Information Design Honcho
Joe 10 Enterprises
2430 5th Street
Studio L
Berkeley, CA 94710
510-649-1744
joe at joe10.com
http://www.joe10.com
Usability Consulting | Information Architecture | Interface Design
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