The Art of Hypermedia

This talk is about how I personally think about using hypermedia when creating apps or media type designs

The metaphor in my head is that I design rooms with items in the room. The room has no meaning — but it does have lots of possibilities.

My designs invite people/client-apps to explore the space and discover possibilities instead of just doing what I tell them to do.

"[James W. Gibson] defined affordances as all ‘action possibilities’ latent in the environment, objectively measurable and independent of the individual’s ability to recognize them, but always in relation to agents and therefore dependent on their capabilities." — Wikipedia

Darrel Miller wrote a great blog post using the dance metaphor to talk about hypermedia

"The client simply follows the lead of the server and trusts the server to provide it the necessary guidance." — Darrel Miller

Hypermedia can elevate the client-server partnership to a collaboration

In another life I was a jazz musician and wrote compositions for people to play. Each night the music was slightly different.

Jazz compositions provide a shared understanding for cooperative self-expression

One of my goals in my hypermedia designs (Cj, UBER, ALPS) is to foster cooperative self-expression

"When I say hypertext, I mean the simultaneous presentation of information and controls such that the information becomes the affordance through which the user (or automaton) obtains choices and selects actions." — Roy Fielding

I design systems that allow people to be creative and "do their own thing", not just systems that force client applications to do exactly what I want them to do.

"The value of a well-designed object is when it has such a rich set of affordances that the people who use it can do things with it that the designer never imagined." — Donald Norman