Blank (Media) Slate

I turned up an interesting video clip while researching the behavior of spiders the other day. I was pleasantly surprised by it, depsite the fact it wasn’t precisely the type of content I was hunting.

This got me thinking about pleasure and surprise. It seems that the two concepts are joined in that pleasure is often derived from surprise. Good jokes, for example, seem to be based on the fact that the punch line is unexpected. On the other end of pleasure, horror movies (primarily of the twitch-flick) also capitalize on pleasing the surprised audience. Then there’s the increased enjoyment of a book or movie about which you had no prior expectations (as opposed to one that’s hyped to the gills and fails to hit the mark… but you would have enjoyed had you found it yourself).

Many marketing campaigns also seem to use the surprise/pleasure combo to grab the interest of customers. A number of TV ads draw the viewer into a story, while the advertised product is only revealed at the end. This balance must be carefully managed, though, to hit the right mode without spoiling the feeling of it’s customers discovering the product themselves (feeling like they’re in on the joke). Since active discovery seems to run counter to genuine surprise, the marketer needs to carefully seed their message with all the pieces while encouraging the consumer to (easily) complete the puzzle. The trick is setting the expectations to preserve the pleasure of surprise, while not making it so difficult as to confuse the audience (like so many ads that leave the viewer wondering what product was on offer).

If this post was a fable, perhaps the moral would be: “Never underestimate the pleasure of surprise… but beware its cousin: confusion.” Then again, perhaps the surprise of this post is that it’s totally devoid of any deeper meaning beyond my random thoughts. Let the audience be the judge.

I stumbled onto (as opposed to actively searched for) a site describing a prototype for an updated desktop metaphor. The project is called the BumpTop and appears to be an outspring from a masters thesis by Anand Agarawala (an interesting fellow based on his personal site). The basic concept is to add a layer of physics modeling to objects displayed on the desktop along with unique file handling techniques.

Looking through his documentation (and watching the video demo) it’s easy to see a comparison with the Looking Glass Project from Sun. There’s a lot to think about from a human factors angle (good and bad), but what intrigues me is how content might be placed within a space like this.

What’s got me thinking is a way to “drop” content onto this type of desktop that wasn’t necessarily placed there by the user. We’ve been exploring various concepts for how we could effectively inform users about relevant content, and the BumpTop model provides an nifty opportunity. I can imagine identifying a corner of my BumpTop to receive recommended content I might otherwise not have requested. This, in my mind, would be similar to my kitchen table on which I drop magazines and catalogs retrieved from the mail for later consumption (see my earlier post about this).

… Maybe I can get a couple minutes of Anand’s time to chat about the idea.