Physicality and the poetry of online
Don Norman has recently been emphasising the importance of the physical and its return to prominence, through devices like the Wii. Physicality of a different but obviously connected sort has been playing on my mind for quite a time. How do we capture taste, touch and texture in the digital environment?
Clearly these things are physically impossible on a simple web page or an RSS feed. But that never stopped novelists or musician striving in other mediums that seemingly didn’t lend themselves to the physical. In many ways the more abstract one is forced to be in creating these things, because of a lack of practical concreteness, the more effective and emotionally resonant something can become.
Poetry is perhaps the best example of a seemingly simple medium that can carry the heaviest weight of texture and tone.
They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
(Excerpt from Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney)
As the web changes and becomes a more fluid experience - moving from the old pageview-to-pageview approach, to a richer more dynamic set of interactions - surely there is the opportunity for the evocation of physical experiences. Perhaps we might even find a little poetry and emotional connectedness in even the harshest, commercially driven websites.
Now that would be a ‘user experience’.
