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I call this the tangibility factor. When I worked at MetaDesign back in the late nineties and early zeros we had something called RedBooks. RedBooks were most

I call this the tangibility factor. When I worked at MetaDesign back in the late nineties and early zeros we had something called RedBooks. RedBooks were most of the work we had done for a specific client printed out in tabloid size bound into a spiral back book and put on a large shelf system. We also had a matriculate digital folder system with projects, searchable and the same pages as PDF plus much more accessible from your computer. Guess which one we used the most? With the RedBooks it was very easy to pull out the book and look through it for inspiration, talk about how we did this or that and so on and with the book we only put in the things that where somehow relevant. The computer folders on the other hand had everything because, yeah well why not. But what they had in quantity it lacked in human relatable tangibility. Computers are great when the amount of information become so waste that it's impossible to manually search through it all or if you need to share a lot of your things with other people. It turns out that for all the great things computers can help us do it still haven't solved tangibility.

agumonkey 10y ago
I thought about that a lot, since I grew up in love about computers and believed they would be the solution for everything; even books. But as many said, "digital" mostly made us realize they were other things than the "pure" content. I believe our brain just crave as much sensations as possible, and writing, flipping pages, seeing a device move[1], touching, watching, etc ... basically the task of dealing with the physical world is not entirely a cost but a pleasure in itself. On the other hand(sic) computers send you a massive amount of symbolic informations (think text search in folders, it's "faster" than any physical archive), that tickle another part of your brain but not all of it, also, I think that our brain doesn't actually like too much of these because it evolved to abstract flows into new concepts. And these concepts are either a bit hard or simply not exposed to the users (think relational queries). There's a detrimental mismatch. [1] I booted a PIII desktop last year, to extract files from a TRAVAN backup tape. I cannot describe the pleasure I had watching that HP Colorado tape wake up and move. No matter how "slow" it was compared to anything today. It was so cool. Even the slick sound of tape moving ..
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Yeah you can say that technology is great for finding the artifacts in a complex world with lots of variations. But it's not as good for experiencing these artifacts unless they are obviously only possible in the digital space itself (gifs, animation, interaction etc.)
- jessedhillon 10y ago
  I was trying to explain this to someone ~10 years younger than me the other day. I was telling them about how, when I was in high school (late 90s) I had a portable minidisc player/recorder. In so many ways, listening to music on that device was better than listening to it on Spotfiy + smartphone, even despite the obvious advantages. Something about holding music in your hands, feeling a drive seek the next track, pressing physical buttons to control playback -- it all feels terrific, and I didn't realize until this conversation that there's a whole generation who hasn't experienced that. BTW those minidisc players still go for $200-400 on ebay!
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    MD were such a beautiful thing. I still wonder what would have been if Sony decided to drop it as an open storage medium. Considering it was released in 1992 ... could you imagine. There's something I recently felt deep and weird about. The society is a double rotating system. We live, we want to solve problems, the solutions become a new ground replacing the past, not solving it. When I look at old tech (big hifi tuner, vu meters, etc), I still deeply love it. The electro mechanical beauty is still there. Same for video games, or old software (I love win3.1 and 95 to bits, if I could patch the flawed core without changing the UX of that period I'd do it...). Without the commercial need to appeal money that fueled future versions like XP or Vista. I saw things like the pico8 project, which gives a somehow modern hardware but with 8bit mindset: low res, 256 colors. People made damn beautiful games out of it. Really cool animations, gameplay, design. No need for a PS4 pro. My new pleasure is tweaking old platforms to give them "modern" day usage. Like retrofitting BT in a car radio. Or modding an old HP calc (longer battery, usb).
    - 10y ago
rhizome 10y ago
I think the "digital folder" part is the loser here. It sounds like the difference between grabbing a collection based on the client and project (or date, or...) with the RedBooks, vs. reading a book via its index (digital folder). That is, the UI for a RedBook vs the UI for accessing a digital folder are fundamentally different, and the digital folder hierarchy is/was demonstrably worse. Sounds like a banal conclusion I'm sure, but the organization of these kinds of assets can actually be done wrong.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  I think you are right but I am also not sure how to change that. We have Behance, Dribble, Pinterest, Instragram etc. all streams of great work which is kind of a different approach. But I think there is value to the tangibility and history of creating these folders and having them there. It's just a what humans find valuable kind of thing.
  - dustinblake 10y ago
    It comes down to the curation. Those books were the result of one or a few people consciously deciding what was important to include. They made value-based decisions to decide what would make the cut. Constraint forces choices which lead to a more valuable experience. In addition to the physicality of the book, browsing them meant the viewer didn't need to sort through the cruft (someone had already done that work for them), allowing them to use their own energy/thoughts to build upon that work resulting in new ideas and creativity.
Certhas 10y ago
> the amount of information become so waste That is a wonderful typo.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Hah sorry vaste of course :)

agumonkey 10y ago

I thought about that a lot, since I grew up in love about computers and believed they would be the solution for everything; even books. But as many said, "digital" mostly made us realize they were other things than the "pure" content. I believe our brain just crave as much sensations as possible, and writing, flipping pages, seeing a device move[1], touching, watching, etc ... basically the task of dealing with the physical world is not entirely a cost but a pleasure in itself. On the other hand(sic) computers send you a massive amount of symbolic informations (think text search in folders, it's "faster" than any physical archive), that tickle another part of your brain but not all of it, also, I think that our brain doesn't actually like too much of these because it evolved to abstract flows into new concepts. And these concepts are either a bit hard or simply not exposed to the users (think relational queries). There's a detrimental mismatch. [1] I booted a PIII desktop last year, to extract files from a TRAVAN backup tape. I cannot describe the pleasure I had watching that HP Colorado tape wake up and move. No matter how "slow" it was compared to anything today. It was so cool. Even the slick sound of tape moving ..

ThomPete 10y ago
Yeah you can say that technology is great for finding the artifacts in a complex world with lots of variations. But it's not as good for experiencing these artifacts unless they are obviously only possible in the digital space itself (gifs, animation, interaction etc.)
jessedhillon 10y ago
I was trying to explain this to someone ~10 years younger than me the other day. I was telling them about how, when I was in high school (late 90s) I had a portable minidisc player/recorder. In so many ways, listening to music on that device was better than listening to it on Spotfiy + smartphone, even despite the obvious advantages. Something about holding music in your hands, feeling a drive seek the next track, pressing physical buttons to control playback -- it all feels terrific, and I didn't realize until this conversation that there's a whole generation who hasn't experienced that. BTW those minidisc players still go for $200-400 on ebay!
- agumonkey 10y ago
  MD were such a beautiful thing. I still wonder what would have been if Sony decided to drop it as an open storage medium. Considering it was released in 1992 ... could you imagine. There's something I recently felt deep and weird about. The society is a double rotating system. We live, we want to solve problems, the solutions become a new ground replacing the past, not solving it. When I look at old tech (big hifi tuner, vu meters, etc), I still deeply love it. The electro mechanical beauty is still there. Same for video games, or old software (I love win3.1 and 95 to bits, if I could patch the flawed core without changing the UX of that period I'd do it...). Without the commercial need to appeal money that fueled future versions like XP or Vista. I saw things like the pico8 project, which gives a somehow modern hardware but with 8bit mindset: low res, 256 colors. People made damn beautiful games out of it. Really cool animations, gameplay, design. No need for a PS4 pro. My new pleasure is tweaking old platforms to give them "modern" day usage. Like retrofitting BT in a car radio. Or modding an old HP calc (longer battery, usb).
  - 10y ago

rhizome 10y ago

I think the "digital folder" part is the loser here. It sounds like the difference between grabbing a collection based on the client and project (or date, or...) with the RedBooks, vs. reading a book via its index (digital folder). That is, the UI for a RedBook vs the UI for accessing a digital folder are fundamentally different, and the digital folder hierarchy is/was demonstrably worse. Sounds like a banal conclusion I'm sure, but the organization of these kinds of assets can actually be done wrong.

ThomPete 10y ago
I think you are right but I am also not sure how to change that. We have Behance, Dribble, Pinterest, Instragram etc. all streams of great work which is kind of a different approach. But I think there is value to the tangibility and history of creating these folders and having them there. It's just a what humans find valuable kind of thing.
- dustinblake 10y ago
  It comes down to the curation. Those books were the result of one or a few people consciously deciding what was important to include. They made value-based decisions to decide what would make the cut. Constraint forces choices which lead to a more valuable experience. In addition to the physicality of the book, browsing them meant the viewer didn't need to sort through the cruft (someone had already done that work for them), allowing them to use their own energy/thoughts to build upon that work resulting in new ideas and creativity.

Certhas 10y ago

> the amount of information become so waste That is a wonderful typo.

ThomPete 10y ago
Hah sorry vaste of course :)