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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
kaplanb

Winograd and Flores base their "new foundation for design" on the proposition that advanced information systems will always be susceptible to such awkward transitions - much in the same way that hypermedia texts must inevitably carry heavier cognitive overhead than print or video. Given this limitation, designers might be better off abandoning a hopeless struggle; or in other words, since we can't get rid of the bug, why not call it a feature? We can accomplish this conversion, Winograd and Flores suggest, by embracing a new concept of "ontological" design. "New design can be created and implemented," theyh note, "only in the space that emerges in the recurrent structure of breakdown. A design constitutes an interpretation of breakdown and a committed attempt to anticipate future breakdowns" (p 78). It is this latter element, committed anticipation, which most often seems missing from software design - even in the field of interactive media, where it might arguably be prominent. Much attention has been given to minimizing complexity and cognitive demands in hypermedia (see especially Charney [6]). These critiques envision better forms of architectonic space, whether in the form of clearer graphical representations or more coherent rhetorics of arrival and departure. Such efforts are undeniably important - architectonic space is the only kind of space we can directly manipulate, after all - but from the perspective of ontological design, they are at least potentially misguided. Any hypermedia document is extended simultaneously in both architectonic and semantic space. It occupies both a domain of function (the reliable, connective operation of the link) and one of breakdown (the susceptibility of the link to "detour" or ambiguity). Accordingly, we might turn our efforts toward designing structures that integrate or mediate between these two varieties of space. (Kaplan, p. 208.)

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Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by
Journal of Digital Information