Movement
Image source: Grab of a sequence including Ripley’s power lifter in Aliens. This is a movie clip in the live presentation.
The idea of websites as tools or applications enabled a new way of seeing what we designed.
Whereas architecture doesn’t have a purpose – it’s a place to be – tools have functions. We inherit the language of computer applications—which, coming out of the Cold War and business, are all about productivity: ease of use, interfaces and interactions.
The application, or tool, is force multiplier. It is task oriented, and operates on material or data.
Web apps are all buttons and forms and wizards. We talk about handles, and affordances. Tools extend our bodies, and so we have “outboard brains.”
Web apps are the waldos we climb into to operate in cyberspace.
This brings me to why these metaphors – this idea scaffolding – is important.
Metaphors are used for communicating between different groups of creators. If you’re creating software, you’ve really got to share a metaphor with the people who write the software frameworks you’re using, otherwise you’re developing against the grain of the material the whole time.
Unfortunately, until the modern Web frameworks came along recently – of which Ruby on Rails is the lead – the framework developers really bought into the idea of web apps.
So while people making websites were following the architectural model, operating with addresses and space, the people creating the enabling frameworks were building for a web app model of, basically, desktop software applications that happened to work in a web browser.
This wasn’t a very productive clash.