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I do my best to write once a week and six issues in, I’ve realized that sometimes that happens Sunday and sometimes, Monday. I would hate to force myself to publish an issue I’m not proud of so if you’ve noticed some irregularity here, this is why.
This week, we're talking about spatial affordances of whiteboarding in the virtual world. There is perhaps no better time than now to talk about this topic given that for the past two years, we've all been trapped inside the confines of a 2x4 square as the pandemic has forced us into this virtual existence.
In John Palmer's 2019 essay, Spatial Interfaces, he writes:
Humans are spatial creatures. We experience most of life in relation to space.
For as long as I have known, there has always existed a pursuit for the perfect digital whiteboard. To talk about the digital whiteboard in this particular context, or as some call it, the interactive whiteboard, is to talk about it as a creative medium and not, as some have written extensively about already, as a teaching tool.
In the real world, a whiteboard serves as the ultimate creative tool — an open blank canvas where groups of people can gather around to ideate on. I personally know more than one person who refuses to work in physical spaces without whiteboards and I can certainly understand why.
Andy Matuschak mused in an early 2020 tweet:
The thread follows — and I agree — that having a whiteboard around can absolutely change the way one interacts with the physical space, and by extension, the way in which we create and collaborate within that space.
The virtual vs. physical whiteboard
The virtual whiteboard has been around for quite some time now and off the top of my head, I can think of some companies you and I both know who do this really well — Miro, Mural, and recently, FigJam — to name just a few.
How much of the physical whiteboard experiences do these digital tools attempt to re-create? It turns out that when you drill into the details, the intrinsic experiences between using the whiteboard as a physical vs. virtual medium differs quite a lot.
1 — The "Infinite" Canvas
Almost all virtual whiteboarding spaces allows for an infinite canvas. As a matter of fact, it's how most of them market themselves.
In contrast, physical whiteboards are the very opposite of infinite. One could argue that the physical characteristics of a whiteboard, and by extension, the whiteboard marker, could be perceived as infinite given the "erasable" nature of the marker vs. board relationship. The truth is, you just can't stretch a physical whiteboard to fill up more space in the real world. Your canvas is constrained to the size at which it is available to you. To move from one canvas to the next, you have to physically erase what's on the board before moving to the next "stretch of canvas".
This affordance is an important one given that the eventual disappearance (or erasability) of one's ideas and thoughts can steer the direction of one's creative commitments - if you will - on a digital space vs. a physical one.
2 — Saved work
Virtual whiteboarding tools allow for the saving of work / ideas in a way that's useable again. Again, a marketable feature for most virtual whiteboards is that you can save and export your canvases to be easily shared and revisited at any point in the future. Most virtual whiteboards are auto-saved unless manually deleted.
Again, this can potentially away from the transient nature of ideas when using a physical whiteboard. Physical whiteboards physically encourages revision. Cross things out, erase them.
3 — Collaboration caps
A physical whiteboard is limited in size and physically limits the amount of people that can gather around to ideate on it. There is an implicit understanding that if a physical whiteboard is a particular size, it can only cater to a limited set of participants in the collaborative work at hand. A 2005 paper by Greiffenhagen & Sharrock, Gestures in the blackboard work of mathematics instructions, notes that of cognitive scientists and mathematician working at whiteboards and blackboards, such a simple thing as stepping back from a board can be significant; when developers did so, it would often accompany a turn in conversation away from a particular detail towards a more broader issue.
4 — "Let me sketch it out"
Most virtual whiteboard tools look like this:
Most can agree that ideating in this way is a far cry from picking up a whiteboard marker and jotting down messy and half-baked ideas. A lot of what happens in tools like Miro & FigJam starts with design thinking and assumes that a bunch of the messy work is done somewhere else, more often or not, individually on pen and paper before arriving at the virtual tool.
It’s certainly the case that we are still limited by the interactions between humans and computers today, which is why I've recently been super excited about the iPad (and by extension, the Apple Pencil) as a tool for creativity. If you've been following along some of my past newsletters, you know that I've been a huge fan of using the Muse App for a lot of that spatial thinking, brainstorming and creating that I think the computer still lacks. I’m hoping to share more about that in a future issue.
This all came about as I was recently struck by a passing comment where someone I was catching up with mentioned that for all the ways we're trying to replicate the whiteboard in the virtual world, what if it's simply not the right tool to be replicating in the first place? The physical whiteboard is great for a whole host of things including many of which I've detailed above but it can also lack many of things that make collaborating virtually so great.
For all the comparisons made between virtual and physical whiteboards, I personally don't favor one over the other, my case here is really that they're different and should be treated as such. One thing that I'm particularly excited about when it comes to virtual whiteboarding software is that these spaces are portable, can be carried around, and added to whenever the idea lightning strikes. Unlike a physical whiteboard, where ideation is often confined within a specific time and space, the virtual whiteboard collapses these notions and allows the users to collaborate in meaningful ways that weren’t available before.
When it comes to creative collaboration in virtual spaces, there's still a wealth of material to sift through. First of all, we haven't even broached the subject of video conferencing. Second, to talk about spatial affordances in virtual spaces is to also talk about collaboration beyond just two-dimensional spaces — we’ve yet to even dabble in the third-dimension, more on that in a future issue.
With that in mind, I'll leave you here with a small delightful preview of what’s to come →
Until next time, keep exploring →
Gifts for creators by David Hoang (read & potentially buy): ‘Tis the holiday season and ‘tis the season of gifting. I am huge fan of curated gift lists and David’s latest issue of Proof of Concept does not disappoint. I’m thinking I might borrow this idea for the next issue but for now, head on over to his curation of various creator tools.
Virgil Abloh’s Lecture at Harvard’s Graduate school of Design (watch): "I can just put work out, and if it's good it works and if it's bad no one notices then I can just get better at it." — even if one didn’t follow Virgil’s work closely, it is clear that the world lost a massive creative force. Rest in Peace, Virgil.
How we Create by Linus (read): I first started following Linus’ work after hearing his episode on the Metamuse podcast Self-made tools and it’s clear from his latest newsletter that he’s exploring some similar themes — excited to see what Linus’ explorations unearth and following this space closely!
Jimmy Wales on Systems and Incentives (listen): Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales explains how the online encyclopedia will maintain objectivity in polarizing times.
- Nikki
(p.s. if you noticed, the easter eggs in this issue are the four screenshots from one of my favorite tv shows of all time, Halt & Catch Fire. If you haven’t seen it and need a show to binge watch through December, this is it.)