It seems clear that we are in a nascent cute-and-stupid-baby-stage of user experience that will be forced to revisit some of the foundation of our understanding about how the web works. Unfortunately it seems we have been babies for hundreds of years. Chronological illiteracy seems to be an evolutionary feature, not a bug. Our social delusion of a permanent 3D existence is great fun, evolutionarily speaking. The hive mind wants to know everything but learn nothing.

So I wonder how we will adjust? And if the web is an extension of our brain, who is the architect? How will we actually change the way we build the web? Will the web help us understand some things about the world? You suggest that it will be “80%” of an understanding. Who decides which 20% gets cut from my memex?

Most of the decisions are being made by some blundering corporate fiat. Startup culture is a horrible cradle for these baby ideas. We have huge opportunities to craft these experiences almost as an extension of the humanities. Probably the process will be a protracted and painful point of experience for many years to come.

The urbanization experience has likewise begun to unravel over time and technological pressure. Killing 400 geese at Prospect Park, for example. Riots, famine, drought, food islands, poverty belts, are painful architectural groans, all the things we forgot to design for. But at least urbanization has that crazy discipline called “urban planning” — and on the web, we barely have a concept of time at all.

Time is a missing piece in so much work on the web. Our hive-mind mental-model has yet appreciate the importance of time because we have barely experienced it on the web. Web design is incredibly temporary, to the point of being vapid. It's difficult to imagine how this kind of slow-grind UX problem could have been avoided — IxD and UX design barely have 10 years of history. Urban planners actually have schools they can go to.

It astonishes me how much more work there is to do in this regard, and how few people there are to think about it. There are entirely missing fields of design. The lack of regard for “Drift” could eventually result in experiences, like so many killed geese, but on a deeper level of systemic failure, a truly horrible place to live. Tiny design assumptions have huge impact culturally.

But the reluctance to “see time” is, I think very deeply rooted in a fear of mortality — we actually don't want to see the processes of drift that you are talking about. I mean, is it any surprise that Silicon Valley doesn't want to look back a few hundred years? The transformation of this coastine has been a very violent process. Looking forward 300 years also scares people for some reason (hint: they're dead). So, yes I'll skip the 4D retrofit please, I'll take a delusional sense of permanence any day!

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You know I agree that place is a story we tell ourselves. The borders of the place both in space and time depend on how you want to tell the story. What's the point of view? Who's the narrator? What's the driving conflict?

I diverge from you (maybe) in that I don't think it is that interesting to try to tell every story in every way about every place.

Then again, maybe that is not what you are really getting at. In the end, it is a data visualization problem. What kinds of data do you want to use, what sources do you trust, and how do you combine it all to make it readable? Is it possible to build a framework that turns everyone's combined stories into one cogent story? Is it desirable? In some cases yes, in some cases probably not.

On a practical level, I disagree that people who work in the geo space build their tools as if place is permanent. I think the shifting nature of place is well understood, but the balance between keeping up with the change and making sure that if you do make a change to your data it is absolutely sure, is probably a little bit too far on the side of surety.

Oooh! Yes! That's a brilliant way of describing it!
On a micro scale, I think the signal reflects off large buildings and that tiny, tiny extra fraction of time shifts the calculated position.
On a macro scale… Wow! It's a fascinating idea!

The extruded lines on the image from Google Earth were just given arbitrary heights. I've not tried working with altitude data in mscape (what I'm using to log the positions), but I assume it exists. I'll have to give it a go and see what happens!

The overhead positions of the GPS satellites changes with time, so it's natural for signals to change. Also, my experience with GPS devices is that they're kind of jittery on a much shorter timescale too: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/3300090...

I like the 3D walkthrough idea. The closest I've come so far is this sort of thing in Google Earth: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikki_pugh/3919609...

From: Invigilator:Malvern Conneally & Pugh 2009

Reading up on these ideas you present Tracy, I’d pitch the tent of this article closer to the linguistic relativism line, where the language and the culture are intertwined, feeding and looping around one another in a kinetic knot of cause and effect. But I think in general this is post is also just using language as a jumping off point to compare various ways to create and describe ‘opposite’ ideas, whether they are described or conceptualized as being built with the same stuff or with completely different stuff, and how this evolution either does or doesn’t leave room for future terminology in the middle.

One amazing looking item from your links is this book about a ‘man without language’, it’s even hard to imagine what thought would be like without language, definitely on my list to read.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/man-without-words/oclc/31969007

Haven’t read this article yet, but the skimming says it’s got some good stuff in it. It’s a critique of the idea of linguistic determinism.

The existence of the word frienemy is proof that it’s a concept spectrum, not two distinct nodes. And this is such a sweet spot in the spectrum that it sprouted a neologism.

Friend is a Germanic-root word and enemy is a Latin-root word. We get this in English because of the Normans, who had stopped being Vikings and had turned into French people by the time they invaded England. The peasants in England spoke a Germanic langauge. The feudal lords spoke French and Latin. The French and Latin in our language comes mostly from them. This is why an animal has a Germanic name when it is alive and a French one when it is dead. The Germanic-speaking peasants raise the cow, but when it gets slaughtered the meat goes to the castle to be eaten by people who call it boeuf. English poetry is heavy in Germanic-root words. English scientific papers are heavy in Latin-root words.

These Norman feudal dudes certainly understood the true meaning of enemy and they had plenty of them. They also understood the diplomatic cloak of friendship barely concealing the dagger that is true frienmity.

This is word for something that you normally in history would not say aloud. It would simply be known, If you acknowledge this relationship explicitly, you transform the relationship into plain old enemy. What is new may be that our friend/ennemy relationships have become so mundane and watered down that there is no real danger or risk in acknowledging the thing with a word.

About the general concept behind the article–does language change the way we think–I tend to really argue against it. If lingistic relativity (or linguistic determinism or the Sapir-Whorf Principal) exists, it is damn subtle. Not only is it subtle, but it is only one of a myriad of influences that make people think differently one from another. And all of these influences are constantly influencing each other, to boot.

This idea in its present form originates from Whorf’s work with native American languages (especially Hopi) and from what I have read, that work is pretty shaky. It’s also got at least one root in a repulsive nationalism. Just one more bit of evidence that the “other” is so different from us that we couldn’t possibly communicate with them. Basically, I think the idea is mostly bullshit.

Anecdotal evidence has shown me personally that it is just as easy to find two native English speakers whose world views are so different that they basically can’t really understand a word the other one says as it is to find a native English speaker and a native Chinese speaker who feel like they really get each other. Not until I landed in Europe and started hanging out with my motley crew of expats (Russian, Iranian, Isreali, German, Dutch-but-grew-up-in-Kenya, Morrocan, American, British, Irish, and so one all mixed together) did I suddenly felt that I had found my people at last.

Wierdly, this conversation has come up a few times lately. The idea is really appealing to people somehow. I’m a big fan of Steven Pinker on the subject of linguistics. Here are some videos of him giving talks:
http://www.google.de/search?q=pinker&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=gmT&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=3-zbS9b1C9KhONvVjNYB&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4&ved=0CDAQqwQwAw

If you haven’t already, you should definitely read The Language Instinct.
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tli/index.html

Many non-profits are locally viable because they draw support from, and deal with issues centered in, a real physical location, a city, a neighborhood, a region. These kinds of entities do require a more integrated relationship with current and future supporters. They could end up suffering, as you suggest, a form of social elitism, by entering adding several layers of glass and concrete, plazas, and social pretense, between them and the people they are meant to work with.

There are though other kinds of organizations that have centralized offices, or that do not share the localized integration issue mentioned above, who could enjoy continual benefit from the campus like insulation of such a location.

I guess it turns on the needs of the organization, the long term needs. Sometimes, the short term wants can feel like long term needs, and the creation of such a venue would certainly be a shiny distraction and promising temptation to many an outfit.

The proposal was not what I’d call totally serious, but was rather a small gesture to perhaps inspire a higher bar of expectations for Portland.