The city of software
My best friend is writing an essay about correspondances between urban planning and software/web design. She read the introduction to me last night and I wanted to hear more.
There is a navigational aspect to the web, but it hasn't worked out the way we might have expected. Gibson was very prescient, but all the ideas about net as cityscape have not come to pass. We don't represent different web sites as buildings of various sizes, and we don't ride light cycles between them. That may partially be an accident of technology, that VRML was too-wrong, too-soon. But it's also not clear that it would be useful: why would I want to perambulate when I can click straight to the destination?
And yet, different places on the web have feelings, as different parts of a city do. Some are hard and shiny; some are slums; some are street markets; some are homely.
Stephane's paper is much less rambly than this.
I'm going to take some photographs on the weekend for use as illustration.
posted Wed 20 Oct 2004 in /software/usability | link
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