Twenty-five years ago I spent hours inside a CD-ROM. It was called DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe, and the home screen was a small Victorian observatory: an armillary sphere rotating in the middle, brass instruments around the edges, drawers and books and globes you could click to enter. Almost nothing on the screen was a menu. Everything was an object.
I still remember where things were inside it. Which drawer held the fossils, which screen had the rotating planet, which corner of the desk took you to the section on telescopes. The encyclopedia was a place, in a way most software since has not been.
This video is about why….
Not the nostalgia, but the structural question underneath it: what makes software feel like somewhere you can return to, instead of just something you can use? Why does this property survive in video games and almost nowhere else? Where does it still exist in contemporary software, and what conditions would have to hold for it to come back?
The video walks through a framework drawn partly from a 1996 paper by Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish, partly from looking at present-day examples that still get this right, and partly from sitting with old encyclopedias on the Internet Archive for longer than was strictly necessary.
Harrison, S. and Dourish, P. (1996). "Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems." CSCW '96.
Victor, Bret (2011). "Explorable Explanations"
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