Frank Chimero provided an inspiring talk on our relationship with the trail of digital artefacts we have personally collected over years of internet use. How can we make these collections more personal? How can we make them tell a story and reflect their owners in the way a diary or commonplace book would in the 19th Century? (Spoiler: he doesn’t know. But that’s what makes this an exciting challenge)

Delightful design

Left a trail of stuff I have tagged, starred, etc.

Analog vs digital

Visible – invisible Remember – forget find – search own – access

Analog = or Digital = and

Digital Extends into the services we use. Analogue is The Palpable stack

Digital is a phantom pile. Still a presence to it that burns cycles to my brain There is a latent potential in this collection of stars.

It’s valuable to have stuff. In one place. They can co-mingle.

Commonplace books used by gentlemen of past. The book becomes stamped with your personality.

“Curation is authorship.” – Paul saffo Produce and consume in the same act.

Missing one key thing with digital. The architecture of serendipity. Have to find the content in a book. A YouTube hole does this.

Architecture of arrangement.

Curation. Find and collect. On the web we are missing arrangement. Need to take a second pass to make a narrative experience.

Tools are optimising for getting things in.

Stars can be constellations. Connecting separate things, creating a shape and imbuing it with a meaning.

Som big design decisions – reassess how we sort stuff.

Searching vs finding for old or new stuff

How do we arrange things spatially? Linear blocky layout is limiting.

The properties of digital. Infinitely mutable.

how we move through time

Content can timeshift. Eg. Instapaper. Postpones. It’s aspirational. Instapaper is a time machine. It goes both ways. Future and past.

There are enough footprints that we can bubble it up and bring it to the present.

See. Photojojo.

media supported.

We need to be multi media See the NY Library Biblion iPad app.

Why not Biblion my own collection too?

Ancient Greeks used the flattened surface of the sky to tell and overlay stories. Can we do the same with our collections of stars?