Physical spaces, digital spaces & Emotional Design

The congruencies between physical spaces & web spaces have intrigued me for a while now. And I don't mean in the sense of way-finding and signage which is what much of the current literature is focused on.

I am more interested in creating atmospheres & moods in digital spaces, something humans have been doing for years in the physical world. I believe this is a crucial component of evoking affect (as Don Norman would put it) & emotional response in the user.

However, there are no easy copy-and-paste solutions here, transfering blindly from the one to the other. It will take a keen eye, mellow judgement, & a good deal of experimentation.

Some thoughts I am throwing out here, I would love to know of any work/examples in these areas:

1. Scale:
In the physical world, this affects us enormously whether we realize it or not: big can be awe-inspiring & grand such as the interior of the Notre Dame, or it can be discomforting or downright unnerving, such as abnormally large rooms in a home. I remember a house we had got designed by a very good architect: during the design phase we had insisted on having a very high ceiling for the living room (We had probably seen it in a public place, & in our naivete believed it would work in this context too). In our further enthusiasm, we had wanted the two opposite walls of this large room to be glass windows: inviting in the open outdoors, we had thought.
Luckily for us, the costs were getting out of hand, & we got only one wall of windows, & a solid wall for the other.

Long story short, the living room never got used. No matter how we rearranged the furniture in that space, or how we covered the walls with nice pictures or the tables with lovely artifacts, it was like being on the open seas on a raft!

Point here being how can we use scale appropriately to achieve our objectives in digital space: to induce the user to stay in the space awhile & move about & putter around in it, or equally well, intentionally create dissonance so that they move on.

2. Texture:
My favorite activity these days is guess what, right, walking aimlessly through the streets of New York. So that's what I did today: it was a gorgeous sunny day, nice & warm. The streets were full of people & a riot of colors (nice to see this after seeing black on white for 6 months: I mean black coats & white snow!. Whilst moving through different streets, I realized how wonderful it was to come across a brick-paved town square in the midst of asphalted roads; or a stretch of cobbled street. I admit to being very partial to warm brick pavings (or facades for that matter), or to the gleaming patterned marble floors we have back at home in India: the joy of walking barefoot on the cool smooth stone after it has been freshly swept & mopped is indescribable, trust me.

Now the worst thing to do would be to thrust these same textures as page backgrounds into our web spaces: we have all known & reacted with a shudder to these awful endeavors. What's really needed is to get the essence of what is going on really in the above, & translate that appropriately to get an equivalent experience.

3.Spatial organization:
As every architect and designer and visual artist knows, placing one thing next to another alters the character of the whole. In a home, placing the bedroom next to the kitchen or the living room may not be such a great idea; in an office space, the higher-ups are placed deeper into the space: in both these contexts, it is about privacy & controlled accessibility among other things. Or take another example: a chair & a side table placed next to each other induce a different set of feelings in the sitter, as against a chair in splendid isolation, unanchored as it were!
(On a side note, it occurs to me that the latter is seen a lot in interviews on TV: the distance between the interviewer & interviewee is uncomfortably ( for me at least) great, & both sit on armless & unanchored chairs: teetering on the brink almost. Is there a method & strategy to this?)

So how does this affect the organization of information in the web world: which room goes well beside which one for a certain domain (deciding factors would of course be inter-relationships & such, but remember we are doing this exercise for the emotional aspect of things), where do the doors & windows go, how many; how are things organized within each room in order to provide a rich experience. The challenge of planning for physical distance/s in the real world is replaced by the equally pressing issues of mouse-miles & eye-miles travelled, among others.

Just some food for thought!