Ben Holliday

Dan Hon, Storytelling Play and Code

These are my notes from Dan’s talk at dConstruct 2011… the talk slides are also available.

The full stack(s) of entertainment:

Storytelling

Play

Heello – “Heello is Twitter for Pretending” (and play). This made it different to Twitter. Services like heello have great potential for play, whereas others are inherently too serious (eg.Quora).

Code

“To make art with technology, one does not use it as a tool; one must understand it as a material. Technology is not always a tool, an engineering substrate; it can be something to mould, to shape, to sculpt with” – Tom Armitage

We lack Authoring tools.

Different content looks the same (eg. OS file systems/media players). “It’s all 1′s and 0′s and file systems”.

You see a physical record and you know what’s on it (eg. video cassette tapes). We’ve lost these associations when it comes to digital products. Books now look like a thumbnail, 255px wide, and a video looks like a 640 x 480px wide box.

The way we present and group things isn’t a metadata problem, it’s a design, content, and code problem.

Developers and designers need to work together…look at the working culture created at Pixar by Steve Jobs.

This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 18 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky, less frequently now on X (formally Twitter), and on LinkedIn.