Obsessed with comics? Me, too. My obsession, however, is creeping into my work. I’m finding more and more references to the genre in my documentation. For example, I have been using thought balloons to represent user needs:
Here’s a quick and easy way to make them.
Find the “2-D Word Balloon” shape
This shape is in File –> Shapes –> Visio Extras –> Callouts
Once the stencil opens, scroll down until you see the 2-D Word Balloon shape. Drag it do your drawing. This shape will serve as the basis for the thought balloon. We’ll change it by creating a bubbly line pattern. A line pattern is the format for the line: dotted, dashed, double, etc. Visio allows you to create custom line patterns.
Before creating the pattern, however, you should change the corner rounding option for the shape. The corner rounding tool may be in your tool bar. It looks like this:
Select any one of the options. You can play with this later to get the look you want.
Create a bubbly line pattern
If it’s not already showing, display the Drawing Explorer palette. You can do this from the View menu.
The Drawing Explorer contains a list of folders. Right-click on the Line Patterns folder and choose “New Pattern…” In the New Pattern dialog enter the name for the pattern (eg: “thought bubble”) and click OK. The default settings are what we want.
The new pattern now appears in the Line Patterns folder. Right-click the pattern name and choose “Edit Pattern Shape”. This will bring up a new window. It may be a little confusing because it looks like visio has opened a new drawing, but it hasn’t.
Now comes the tricky part. Drawing with the grid turned on may help. Draw four straight lines: one a quarter of an inch, one half an inch, one three quarters of an inch, and one a full inch long. Using the pencil tool, drag the curve control of each line up to form a semi-circle:
Once you have these, assemble them in some random order. Be sure to keep the baseline the same:
Now, select all the semi-circles and join them together. The join command is in Shapes –> Operations. Be sure to choose “Join” and not any of the other commands.
Once you’ve joined the semi-circles together, close this window. Visio will want to know if it should update the pattern and all shapes using the pattern. Click “Yes”.
Apply the line pattern to the word balloon
Select the word balloon shape and choose “Line” from the “Format” menu. In the Format Line dialog box, open the pattern drop-down menu. Scroll to the bottom to find the “thought balloon” pattern and select it. You should also change the line weight to the thickest setting (more on this below).
When you click OK, your shape will have the bubbly line pattern, looking like a thought balloon from a comic book:
The balloon will behave just like the original shape from the stencil, so you can move the “tail” piece around to point in just about any direction.
Details about line patterns
The thickness of a line using a custom pattern is determined by the setting of the “Scaled” checkbox in the pattern dialog:
If this box is checked, the line pattern will be rendered exactly as drawn. This means that the actual size of the line pattern will be preserved. This can lead to some unexpected results:
On the other hand, this approach is useful if you want precise control over the line pattern. If so, you’ll probably need to draw them small.
If Scaled is NOT checked, then the size of the line is determined by the Line Weight property, per usual. Keep in mind that this controls the overall thickness of the line pattern, not the thickness of the lines IN the pattern. This illustration shows how different line weight settings affect the shape using the same line pattern:
brownorama’s bookmarks, posted 2005-06-29
Mai-lan has a great tip on importing Visio drawings into Word and other MS Office applications. I’ve got a little trick I’ve been using to quickly export my drawings into a more common format.
I discovered this trick quite by accident, and it’s so stupid it barely justifies having its own paragraph. If you hit F12, you can save your drawing as another file type. (My favorite these days is PNG.) This will only save out the current page. Since I usually use Visio to draw small illustrations, I don’t want to export the whole page and then crop it in Photoshop. What you can do instead is simply select the shapes you want to export and hit F12. The Save As… function will only save the selected shapes to the new file.
Visio’s Save As… feature has gotten better over the years. When I started using Visio it was in version 4 (pre-Microsoft) and it could only export to PostScript and Illustrator files. Yuck.
DonnaM has been playing with Visio a lot these days. Check out some of her tips and tricks.
Central to Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory is the notion that thought is embodied. The source of metaphor is physical experience. From wikipedia:
The core idea looks to find the biological substrate not as a vessel, but as the being itself. The mind and spirit are not a sublimation of the biology, but are a method of its workings. Thus body and mind are fused into a single being - the only distinction between matter and person being the way of observing the being.
Descartes’ notion that he can ignore the body to explore the nature of reason, therefore, is incorrect. Reason is tied to the body and is governed by the fact we have a physical presence. Things we talk about in the abstract appear to have physical properties because we talk about them as if they were physical. To say that an argument rests on a premise, for example, shows we recognize the connection between an argument and a premise as two physical things where one supports the other.
I’m not sure whether I buy the notion of embodiment, but it can help explain something I’ve been thinking about: process abstraction. Among people who think about processes, the hope is that a process can be divorced from context — the situation, the actors, the inputs. Actually, if you give the same set of steps to two different groups of people, you’ll see differences in the executions, even if the outcomes are the same.
Consider modern Western medicine, which sees procedures and treatments abstracted from the participants, the patients and the doctors. This view does not take into account nuances that particular patients and doctors bring to the table. Patients bring not only unique medical histories, but also differentiating decision-making processes, moral concerns, personal medical experience, financial limitations, among other things. Doctors bring differentiating styles of relating to their patients, past experiences, personal histories with the particular patients.
This sets up medical procedures as a graded category, where ideal or “textbook” cases are central because they can be followed exactly as written. The central case boils medical treatments down to inputs (symptoms) and outputs (treatments). But the central case is a prototype, abstract and perhaps unrealistic. A process is necessarily embodied, unique to the participants and their baggage. Compared to any other doctor off the street, my GP would evaluate my symptoms differently because he has particular knowledge of me.
(Aside: Gladwell suggests that in making diagnoses, less information is better. How does my argument fit with his conclusion?)
The danger of disembodied medical procedures is simply that they conceal nuances that may have a substantial impact on a particular case. If a situation is close enough to the textbook case, it may hide circumstances that would suggest a slightly different treatment. In other words, seeing a process as abstract from the participants allows those same participants to ignore what makes their case unique.
Like workflows in content management, a treatment process may include exceptions — rules on how to handle cases that don’t fit the ideal. But exception handling is a poor way to deal with these nuances because the variables can add up to so many different possibilities. They set up beacons in the graded category that call attention away from all the particulars of a case and highlight the elements that make the case match the prototype or one of its “sanctioned” variations.
I have two rare chronic conditions, which makes me a bit of a reluctant expert. If you think this is the rant of a bitter old patient, it is. One of the negative prototype effects, however, is that otherwise “normal” cases may have a distinction or two that is hidden by its proximity to the central case. In medicine, when you select a particular treatment over another, you’re not merely trying one kind of treatment, you are changing the situation. The effects of that treatment on you, on your relationship with your doctor, and on your knowledge of your condition dramatically affects the situation.
The same is true for a business process. Imagine a brand new process, and a group of people going through it. Over time, that process will evolve — perhaps in only subtle ways — to fit the group of people participating. When certain participants leave, even temporarily, the situation changes, and the process becomes distinct from the abstract procedure documented on paper. I’m suggesting that these distinctions go further, that a process is unique when the distinctions from the central case are not as pronounced. If one participant has a meeting at the time when he normally performs his duties in the process, it might have a dramatic effect on the outcome. I’m not trying to get all “chaos theory” on you, because the opposite may be true: by adequately accounting for the nuances of a particular situation, its outcome may be predictable. Being blinded by the prototype, however, can cause participants to assume one outcome when another better reflects reality.
Processes are disembodied out of necessity: you can’t document every variable that affects a process, every possible path for a process to take. It’s important, however, for businesses (and doctors for that matter) to recognize that they can’t take any variable for granted, that the process will look different every time it’s executed.
brownorama’s bookmarks, posted 2005-06-24
Applying cognitive linguistics techniques to content management illuminates the constant and inevitable sources of implementation problems. These tools give us a new way of looking at content management and in turn offer us an explanation of what makes implementing CM systems so difficult.
In the course of this analysis, I’ve looked at different categories of content management: the content, workflow, and roles. Because these concepts are the building blocks of any CMS, the underlying cognitive models exert crucial influence over the systems themselves.
In general, the models are inadequate for modeling reality. But this is to be expected: they are idealized cogntive models (ICM), a set of background assumptions on how the world might work. ICMs help us account for the fact that categories aren’t perfect buckets. (Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things provides a description of this in Chapter 4.)
These models, the ones we use for content, roles, and workflow, have something in common: an underlying model for business. In a world where content is considered product or commodity, roles are defined as discrete sets of responsibilities, and workflows are perfect processes with specific inputs and outputs, the underlying model is business is a factory.
What post to greenonions.com would be complete without a visualization? I’ve represented this notion in a picture, showing how our conception of content production is a blend between a factory (orderly) and the typical business process for producing content (messy). Click the teddy bear for more. (By the way, I was so proud of the teddy bear, I added a couple products to greenonions gear.)
Remember that we use blends automatically to help us make sense of complicated ideas. Reality suggests that business processes are NOT like factories at all, but we project our messy reality into an orderly structure to help define it and translate it into terms computers will understand. When necessary, we will frame business processes in other ways to help us make sense of it from a different perspective. This is something humans can do nearly unconsciously with no effort, but computers can not: they have only one frame for making sense of business processes. I believe humans reframe business processes all the time, that the factory model serves as an ICM but we recognize when it cannot hold and make decisions based on current situations and scenarios, creating yet another blend that offers a solution to whatever obstacle the process faces.
Although we have many cognitive models for business, the factory model seems to pervade all thinking with respect to content management, especially for the purpose of generating system requirements — computers like the binary structures inherent in idealized factory floors. Because the factory model is so entrenched with respect to content management, we can not leverage other models for building a CMS. Even so, I’m not convinced there’s a better cognitive model out there that would permit the level of flexibility required. In other words, there is no best cognitive model of business for deriving requirements.
Instead, CM systems need to recognize that an important part of management (decision-making) is blending: making decisions requires cognitive processes currently unavailable to machines. Current implementations of CM systems have evidence of pseudo-blending, artifacts that attempt to mimic this cognitive process. For workflows, it’s exception planning; for content, it’s the content template. Sometimes we attempt to solve this problem by simplifying: creating two-step workflows or highly generic content templates. While this reduces the blending burden on machines, it also renders the CMS no more useful than non-automated publishing systems.
What I recommend instead is moving the blending to where it belongs, to the humans. Content management systems can save time, but only if they are employed to do tasks that do not require blending. This is easier said than done: humans take blending for granted. We do it automatically and it may be difficult to see where blending is happening and where we’ve attempted to shift it to the machine.
My thinking on this subject started with the desire to build a better CMS. It was during that process that I was coincidentally reading Lakoff and realized that his analysis of language could be applied to content management. We now return to where we started: building a better CMS. To do so would require time and money I don’t have. Instead, I will continue to develop the framework theoretically with the hope that one day it can be tested.
Also, there is clearly a lot of work to be done in the analysis of content management ICMs and categories. I will continue to post items that deconstruct content management’s underlying concepts.
Finally, conceptual blending analysis can be applied to more than just content management. Perhaps there’s room to explore how conceptual blending impacts other areas of design.
Ask your parents about their movie-going experience and you might find they struggle to recall what movies were like before multiplexes. My father, on the other hand, loves to reminisce about going to the Loew’s in Flushing, Queens in the 1950s. He says that in those days, movies ran continuously all day. You’d show up and they might be in the middle of the feature, or just starting the shorts, or at the end of the second feature. They played two movies in those days, bookended by newsreels and cartoons. (He also talks about Dish Night, where the theater would give away plates, or some such, but that’s not important right now.)
Because there were no set starting times, and because you got there whenever you wanted, you’d inevitably find yourself in the position of having to figure the story out. Imagine coming in 45 minutes into the Matrix. That was how people watched movies all the time in the 1950s. What can I say, they also thought bacon and eggs were good for you back then. (We knew better in the 90s and know now better again in the 21st century.) Predictably, you’d get through the second feature and the newsreels and cartoons and then the movie you were watching when you came in would start from the beginning. Slowly, as the first 45 minutes unfold, everything would make sense. (”Ohhh! Neo took the red pill.”) Then, you’d hit that point that seemed very familiar, and you’d say something to your friend sitting next to you.
When dad tells the story, he stops and looks around at his audience. He asks, “Can anyone remember what you would say?” The people in the crowd (typically middle-aged New Yorkers) say “no” and he stage-whispers, “This is where we came in.” Cue groans of recognition and nostalgia from the group.
It is a phrase, Dad laments, that has become lost from the vernacular. The message would pass up the row of friends, with the inevitable reply, “I just want to see till the end of this scene.” With movie schedules, we no longer have the cognitive epiphany of a story falling into place and a singular moment where it all comes together. It turns out, however, we have a 21st century equivelant.
Sarah and I have a guilty pleasure, a television show that will remain nameless. We started watching it this season, its second season, and didn’t catch it last year at all. It didn’t take long for us to pick up the storyline and become involved with the characters, despite missing its inception. Although the characters will mention events that happened in the first season and we don’t know what they’re talking about, it doesn’t hamper our understanding or enjoyment of the show.
In this day and age of “Everything Bad is Good for You,” though, the first season is available on DVD. Since we’re in the summer hiatus, Sarah and I are now watching the first season on DVD. As the season unfolds, we learn more about how these characters came together. We learn about the events mentioned in second season. Not only does it provide useful background, it provides details not mentioned in the second season, creating an even deeper understanding of the characters. The romantic involvement between two characters in the second season is enhanced because of the history and circumstances we learn about in the first season. The precarious position of another character in the second season is clearer because of his actions in the first season. Although his first season behavior is alluded to in the second season, we don’t have access to the details, the richness that adds dimension to the character.
This is where we came in: not just with one story, but with multiple story lines. As we watch additional episodes of the first season, more and more storylines become complete and the universe of the show becomes a more tightly woven network. I don’t know about the movie-goers in the 1950s, but I actually like this show more now that I’m watching it in reverse chronological order. (Perhaps George Lucas’ only mistake was that he waited 2 decades, not two months, between “seasons” of Star Wars. Well, that and Jar-Jar Binks.) It makes me wonder whether I would have liked it as much if I just watched it from the beginning.
SPECIMEN Custom Guitars - Pac Man Electric Guitar [via MAKE: Blog]
Missed opportunity: a Pac-Mandolin.
I’m writing this post from my brand spankin’ new 14″ iBook. I couldn’t be happier.
From “Blending Basics“:
blending analyses typically begin with the introductino of an example hypothesized to involve blending, and proceed with a description of conceptual structure in each of the spaces in the integration network.
Same essay, a page before:
the conceptual integration network [is] an array of mental spaces in which the processes of conceptual blending unfold.
There are three kinds of spaces in an integration network:
- input spaces: providing the fodder for the blend
- generic space: a general pattern of thought, like movement
- blended space: “contains selected aspects of structure from each input space”
It is the blended space we see in our minds eye, even if fantastic or fanciful. The blended space, the newly constructed relations between objects from the input spaces, is what allows meaning and understanding.
The existing work on conceptual blending typically has some strange examples. This essay, “Blending Basics,” uses the bumper sticker “My karma ran over my dogma.” Funny, to be sure, and perhaps a great example of a blend, but one that isn’t immediately useful to content management.
I’m proposing that a content type is a physical representation of a conceptual blend, between content and the way we use content. I may be wrong, but I’m going to employ the methodology suggested by Coulson and Oakley, identifying the elements of the integration network. I’ll draw linguistic evidence from Boiko*, to ensure I’m not biasing the study by merely making up examples.
On page 518 of the Content Management Bible, Boiko indicates that a “good” publication does three things:
- Meets particular needs by clearly defining its purpose and stating it up front.
- Serves a particular audience by indicating who the publication was written for.
- Is easily navigated, meaning it’s easy to find the publication among others.
Of course, these three factors define good within a limited context. Because we’re framing content as a publication in a content management system, these factors surface. A good publication can be so many things: interesting, useful, enjoyable, entertaining, a source of conversation, inspiring, well organized, inductive, deductive, narrative.
You might argue that the factors I just mentioned are subservient to Boiko’s three success factors, that content is enjoyable, for example, if it meets particular needs or that content is inspiring because it serves a particular audience. But content can be enjoyable or interesting even if the author hasn’t sought to meet a particular need or serve a particular audience. Indeed, some of the best content is hard to find on purpose. These three factors were escalated because they appear the most important in the context of a content management system.
Here we have more evidence that content is framed as a structured publication. A template is a realization of these success factors. More Boiko:
- A template save you from the manual labor of continually laying content into a particular structure and form. (519)
- By using a template, you decide once how you want to layou out and format content and then let the computer do the tedious task of building publication pages or sections. (519)
- A template keeps one foot, so to speak, in the CMS and the other in the publication format and structure. (519)
But here is the richest example:
Content in the CMS repository is neutral. It offers a lot of possibility but has no reality. Content in a publication is anything but neutral. It’s fully immersed in the conventions and context of the publication. In betweeen these two states of the content stands the template. To make the transition, the template must “understand” both the world of the publication and that of the CMS. (520)
Wow. If that’s not blending, I don’t know what is. Boiko practically spells out my argument. Ultimately, in order for content (one input space) to be useful, you must combine it with the structure of the publication (the other input space). By blending these spaces, we see the content in a structured way (the blended space) and create a template to allow us to make use of the blend. This extension of the blend into action is called “elaboration,” where the blend is somehow simulated. When elaboration results in some kind of physical simulation, it is called a “coupled elaboration,” because the mental activity (imagining a structured piece of content) is coupled with a physical activity (using a template to enter content).
From Boiko’s language, I would guess that the generic space (the organizing princples for how to relate one space to another) is EVOLUTION, moving from one nascent stage to a more advanced stage. Perhaps it’s FORCED TRANSITION, some kind of agent exerting force on one thing to turn it into another thing. This is pretty important, because the generic space is what allows us to generalize the template acro