Groundhogs in the source code: Navigation as cross-channel sense-making
Of old, narrative and storytelling were used to weave useful pieces of information into stories that could be handed down orally, generation after generation. These stories were often conceived in the form of quests, rhythmically built on redundancy and interlacement and laid out on a map.
In the past hundred years, storytelling has progressively distanced itself from this model: mechanical reproduction of music, images, movement, and text has transformed the language of communication across these media and channels, turning seamless immersion into self-conscious reflection, physical struggles into psychological tensions, and traveling the world into traveling emotional landscapes.
Organizing space to represent or visualize experiences is a fundamental human trait, so, in what is both a predictable but unexpected turn of events, the Web, mobile, and digital media have brought once again journeying and quests center stage. Navigable space can both represent physical spaces and abstract information spaces, but what kind of space are we talking about? Some XXI century version of MS Bob? Some glorified FPS?
Using such examples as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, camp musical videos from the early 1980s, early 1990s videogames, and movies such as Groundhog Day, released 1993, and Source Code, released 2011, this presentation will argue that as digital matures and becomes one again with physical, immersion in cross-channel experiences will be rather achieved through abstract navigational grammars and place-making, rather than through literal, skeumorphic, in-your-face representations of the real, and will offer a few rules of thumb for turning information patterns into navigable space and actionable places.
