There is no interface quite like a whiteboard. Leave your computer, put down your iPad, keep your Android phone in your pocket. When you want to have a real intellectual discussion with a colleague, the best thing to do is pick up a dry erase marker and start scribbling.<\/p>\n
There is something wonderfully primal and simple about interacting with a whiteboard. As a medium of communication, it possesses a delightful transparency. The way you can draw something without needing to think about it, the expressiveness of your gestures and body language as you explain your drawing, the way the other person can jump in and add to or amend what you’ve written, these are properties not shared with any known computer interface.<\/p>\n
But there is a problem with the whiteboard. When you are done, you can’t take it with you. If you want to have another conversation, you must erase what you’ve already drawn and start anew.<\/p>\n
Sure you can take a photo before erasing, but that’s just a photo. It doesn’t have the liveness, the easy edibility, the visceral quality of the physical act of drawing, that makes a whiteboard sketch so powerful.<\/p>\n
But that may change. Once we are having these conversations in shared virtual reality, any surface can be a whiteboard. And a whiteboard can be many whiteboards. You will be able to wind back the history of a whiteboard to any previous state, and even add missing details or corrections to that history.<\/p>\n
The same surface will be able to serve as the shared location of multiple whiteboard-enhanced ongoing discussions. The same wall will shift to accommodate my conversation with you about politics in the morning, and my conversation with someone else about physics in the afternoon.<\/p>\n
We won’t even need to be in the same room or city to scribble on a whiteboard together. This most old fashioned of modern tools may very well turn out to be the glue that connects us across distance, that helps us turn cyberspace into meaningful personal space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is no interface quite like a whiteboard. Leave your computer, put down your iPad, keep your Android phone in your pocket. When you want to have a real intellectual discussion with a colleague, the best thing to do is pick up a dry erase marker and start scribbling. There is something wonderfully primal and … Continue reading “The whiteboard problem”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15765"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15765"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15781,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15765\/revisions\/15781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}