Imagine walking into a movie theater and, after years of seeing a piano player or orchestra at the front, seeing nothing there. You settle in your seat, the lights dim, and music emerges from the screen. We take this experience for granted today, but for the people who were raised on silent pictures, it must have been a magical experience. You have to wonder if they found it disconcerting and distracting, or even more immersive than before.

This Friday, our generation will get on a new ride at the very beginning. Steven Soderbergh’s new movie Bubble will be released simultaneously in theaters, on cable, and on DVD. Instead of going to our local Landmark Theater, Sarah and I will enjoy the movie from the comfort of our home theater.

Needless to say, most theater owners are worried. Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, who own Landmark Theaters, are not. In fact, they’re executive producers on Soderbergh’s picture. These guys made their millions as dot-com-ers and are now hoping to redefine entertainment with this so-called “closing the window” or simultaneous release, among other strategies. Cuban defended the practice on his blog in a post responding to comments from the president of the National Association of Theater Owners (the other NATO). For example, as the owner of the pro basketball team the Mavericks, Cuban can cite stats on how broadcasting the games in a local market actually increases attendance to the games in person.

For our part, we’ll give the movie a try on Friday night, something we might not have done otherwise.

Update: BusinessWeek has a story on the release of Bubble. Some salient quotes:

Hollywood is built on the notion of parceling out people’s opportunity for pleasure: Create buzz for a hot new movie — and then create it again a few months later when it’s available on DVD. And get people excited yet again when it shows up on cable down the road.

The movie industry had better realize that, thanks to the rush of new technologies that put everything at people’s fingertips, folks are going to want movies when they want them — not when a bunch of Armani-clad guys say can have them.

When I’m not thinking about information architecture, content management, or user experience, I’m usually thinking about the mandolin, an instrument I picked up for the first time in 2004. I’ve written about it occasionally on greenonions.com.

Wednesday night, my wife and I went to Wolftrap and got to experience mandolin duo Mike Marshall (who used to play with David Grisman, Jerry Garcia’s best friend) and Chris Thile (better known these days as a member of Nickel Creek). Marshall and Thile are easily among the top five mandolinists in the world, so to see them onstage for this burgeoning mandolin player was a real treat. You can get a taste of their duet work on their album Into the Cauldron, which well illustrates the diversity of styles. They can move from straight bluegrass and eastern European folk to Brazilian Choro and Bach, which for me was the highlight. They did a couple of Bach tunes, the Goldberg Variations from Into the Cauldron and a Dm Gigue that’s on their soon-to-be-released live album. (For these pieces, Mike played the mandocello, the mandolin equivelant of a cello.) For the encore, Mike and Chris stood up from their microphones and did a couple bluegrass songs with vocals. Unamplified, and in the small Barns at Wolftrap, it really felt like we were getting a show in someone’s living room. The last song they played was the Salty Dog Blues, whose refrain goes:

Honey, let me be your salty dog

Let me be your salty dog

Or I won’t be your man at all

Honey, let me be your salty dog

The Washington Post wrote a nice review of the show.

On January 6, DCIA held an event to recap MAYA’s IA of Physical Spaces workshop from last month, which is basically a case study of their work for the Carnegie Library System in Pittsburgh. MAYA was tasked with redesigning the library’s user experience and to accomplish this feat produced no small amount of documentation. One of the documents they produced was a two-by-two table, frequently used by management consultants to array comparable items along two dimensions. Plotted along these dimensions, the items fall into four groups:

In this mock-up, the two dimensions are TRIANGLE and DIAMOND. The circles represent different items, falling into different areas of the scale of each. Usually, the two dimensions are importance and cost and the quadrants dictate actions to take on each of the items. Items that are, for example, very important and very costly are considered “long term actions” while those that are important but not costly are prioritized as “near term actions.” The two-by-two is a useful tool for strategic categorization, but is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of uses.

In putting their two-by-two together, MAYA categorized various projects and it looked much like the mock-up above. MAYA then took the additional step and linked related projects–those that they could do in tandem. Though our recap last night didn’t go into detail on what method they used to link the projects, I imagine they realized that because some projects required overlapping resources or tasks, they could be done together. Regardless, the resulting two-by-two looked something like this:

Just like in this mock-up, MAYA’s revised two-by-two included linked items that crossed into other quadrants. Many items were therefore grouped twice: once as a member of a group of projects and once in a quadrant representing a strategic plan. Those projects that weren’t linked to any others represented the lowest kind of project, regardless of what quadrant it fell into–one that could not take advantage of economies of scale. MAYA took things a step further and showed how the related projects connected to a model of the overall user experience, therefore telling a complete story: By grouping projects together the team could be more effective and cover every aspect of the user experience.

Layering is a central notion in my book on design documentation (to be published this Spring by New Riders). Every type of document (from site maps to wireframes to personas) can be boiled down to essentials (the first layer)–the elements of the document that make it what it is. But it’s possible to add further detail by layering additional information on top of the first layer. For example, with personas you might start with the basics–name, goals, scenarios–and then add details like personal background or technical experience. Obviously, the contents of the layers are strongly biased by what you think the purpose of the document is. That is, the elements of the first layer could vary from person to person if, for example, you think personal background is essential to the purpose of a persona.

The power of layers is that they allow you to tell more complex–and perhaps more interesting–stories. By including another layer of information in a document, you have added depth to meaning of the document’s contents. Although simple, one-dimensional documents are nice and easy to understand, they don’t necessarily say a lot about an idea. If MAYA had left off the project groupings, they would still have had a good story to tell. (Namely, which projects to do first.) But by grouping them into related piles, they showed that the projects were meaningful in a different way, too.